Beverly Schools 'Doing Really Well' Despite Coronavirus Surge

BEVERLY, MA — Beverly Public Schools experienced double-digit absences among students Monday, but relatively few among teachers, as the district tries to keep classrooms open and activities running with minimal disruption during the post-holiday coronavirus surge.

"Actually, we're doing really well," Beverly Superintendent Sue Charochak told Patch Tuesday morning. "We spent time over the weekend working and really preparing to come back. We were able to distribute test kits and masks to teachers so they were able to have a little more confidence coming back into the classroom."

Charochak said only 7 percent of teachers were absent (60 out of 810 total) on Monday. Student absences were higher with 14 percent of elementary students (260 out of 1,807), 17 percent of middle school students (254 out of 1,434) and 19 percent of high school students (255 out of 1,301) out of school.

She told Patch there are no plans to curtail extracurricular activities such as sports, band or theater as a district as of now.

"We are hoping that we are going to be able to maintain the activities for our students and families that we can safely provide," she said. "It's been a long couple of years. So we hope we can do that for them moving forward."

Charochak said one shift will be going back to some of the stricter protocols that may have relaxed when virus rates were down.

"We had established strong mitigation methods over the past 18 months," she said. "People had probably become more comfortable meeting in person and doing things more the way they had been done in the past. Coming back to school, we're going to be more virtual when we can when it comes to meetings. We will have to be more stringent than maybe we were in October and November.

"We're going to do all we can to minimize spread."

She gave particular credit to the district nursing staff for keeping Beverly's case spread as low as it can be.

"Whoever knew that being a high school nurse was going to entail all this?" she said.

(Scott Souza is a Patch field editor covering Beverly, Danvers, Marblehead, Peabody, Salem and Swampscott. He can be reached at Scott.Souza@Patch.com. Twitter: @Scott_Souza.)