Moorestown School Board Discusses Complex Quarantine Process

MOORESTOWN, NJ — Positive coronavirus cases have been identified at two more schools in the Moorestown Public School District, but there are no current plans to shut any school down, Superintendent of Schools Scott McCartney said Tuesday night.

During his report at the board of education meeting, McCartney reported that additional cases had been identified at the George C. Baker Elementary School and Moorestown High School.

The news came a week after the first five cases were identified in the district. Those cases were identified at the high school, the William Allen Middle School and the Mary Roberts Elementary School. Read more here: First 5 Coronavirus Cases Identified At Moorestown Schools

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“In most cases, there’s a short-term quarantine during contact tracing,” McCartney said. “Once the contact tracing is done, there can be a longer quarantine of two weeks. If an entire school is quarantined, that could be up to 14 days.”

He said the district consults with the Burlington County Department of Health, but there’s nothing definitive that says when a school must be quarantined. He did say the general benchmark is 2 to 3 positive cases in a building, and several Moorestown schools are on the verge of that benchmark as it stands.

Moorestown’s cases are on a lighter scale in terms of health and symptoms, McCartney said. Contact tracing includes anyone who was in direct contact with an infected person for 15 minutes or longer.

The department of health also analyzes seating charts and room configurations to determine who should be quarantined.

Reaction also depends on the type of school. A whole class may need to be quarantined in an elementary school because of the amount of time they spend together, while only a portion of classes may have to quarantine at the high school, where students change classes.

Board of Education President Sandra Alberti said it gets even more complex than that.

“They tell you what to do if we’re at low- or moderate-risk, but they don’t tell us what makes us low- or moderate-risk,” Alberti said, suggesting the district consult some of the physicians it used to prepare for this school year over the summer.

“I get emails from parents who are physicians, and I get differing points of view, even within the medical field,” McCartney said. “I’d like to rely on the governing body within the county that are making decisions based on the CDC. They’re not telling you two people will necessarily trigger an action, but they will talk through it with you.”

He added that he is never closed off to the idea of hearing from a bigger group, though. The decision is ultimately up to the school. If a quarantine is necessary, though, it will happen quickly, and parents may not have a lot of time to plan.

“If we were to find out on a Sunday night, we would contact parents immediately, and the school would be closed on Monday,” McCartney said. “If we were in school and the situation developed quickly, we would move as quick as we can. We might contact parents to come pick students up and be closed the next day.”

It would be similar to the situation districts found themselves in when they went full-remote in the spring.

If the schools were to go full-remote, schedules would remain the same for high school and middle school students, and cohorts would combine for the lower grades, McCartney said.

The cases that are currently being diagnosed in the schools are being traced back to home parties and Halloween for the most part, McCartney said.

“We can’t say there hasn’t been any transmission in schools, but from what we’ve seen, it’s been mostly community transmission,” McCartney said. “That could change in the next minute.”