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Communities know just how much we have come to depend on our schools in recent years for taking on responsibilities that might ordinarily be assigned to parents. But school staff are also taking on a greater workload with contact tracing.
COVID-19 has made familiar a term to which many of us had never been exposed before spring 2020, as it became essential to keep track of those to whom the virus might have been spread. The task was being handled by health departments and other state and county officials. Then state officials made the decision to return to in-person learning for most students. Just like that, another responsibility fell on school employees. Today, as Axios Columbus put it, school nurses are working endlessly to keep up with contact tracing.
"Even just one case means a couple of hours of work," Kelly Wagner, president of the Ohio Association of School Nurses, said, according to Axios. "One day I had five cases. That took me nine hours."
By the end of last week, Ohio schools had seen 78,670 COVID-19 cases this school year. If five cases take 9 hours of contact tracing work, that's more than 141,606 hours of work for school staff charged with the task.
We're already asking these folks to feed, clothe, give medical and dental care to, provide safe spaces for and, oh yeah, teach our children. The pandemic has taxed them in ways we cannot imagine.
We owe it to them to quit pretending this public health crisis is about politics and instead do all we can to keep ourselves and our kids from becoming the source of another few hours of contact tracing work.