About 40 children on a Portland elementary school bus route were told to quarantine last week after riding with at least one student infected with the coronavirus, marking at least the second busing incident in the metro area to force dozens of kids to miss more than a week of school.
The episode tied to Duniway Elementary School has been exacerbated by Portland Public Schools’ not using assigned seating and its inability to determine where students sat, forcing everyone on the bus to now miss classroom instruction in what a district spokesperson described as “an abundance of caution.”
That’s left some parents indignant and frustrated, and it points to the difficulty Oregon schools face trying to protect students from the coronavirus while offering in-person learning during the pandemic.
About 9% of Duniway’s total enrollment has been quarantined because of the bus incident, although the rate could be even higher because of other exposures.
The Sept. 7 incident again highlights the dramatically different standards used to determine when unvaccinated students inside classrooms and riding school buses must quarantine because of potential exposure to the coronavirus – a big issue for elementary schools because kids 11 and younger are not yet eligible to be inoculated.
Inside classrooms, unvaccinated students who are properly wearing masks do not have to quarantine even if they spend all day at least 3 feet away from an infected student with a properly fitted facial covering. But on a bus, unvaccinated students wearing masks must quarantine if they spend 15 minutes over 24 hours within 6 feet of an infected person.
Indeed, the Duniway students who sat in class with the infected student did not have to quarantine, according to an email to a parent from the Multnomah Education Service District, which The Oregonian/OregonLive obtained. The service district provides health services in school districts in the county.
In an email outlining a litany of concerns about the bus incident, Kayla Gulbranson, the PTA president at Duniway, expressed frustration with the disparate quarantining rules for classrooms and buses. Students were told to quarantine for 10 calendar days or, in this instance, seven school days because of when parents were notified.
“I’m not trying to make this more difficult or require more students to quarantine, but explain to me how this makes sense,” Gulbranson wrote to the school board and Duniway principal, among others.
The bus exposure tied to the K-5 elementary school, located in Southeast Portland’s Eastmoreland neighborhood, comes after a similar but different situation at Hallinan Elementary School in Lake Oswego. In the earlier incident, Lake Oswego officials reviewed video footage from inside the bus to determine who sat within 6 feet of the infected person on four separate trips, ultimately identifying 47 people for quarantine.
But in Portland, school officials couldn’t identify which kids sat within 6 feet of the infected student, prompting everyone on the bus to be quarantined, school district spokesperson Karen Werstein said.
“While it is highly unlikely that all students would have been exposed, we were unable to specifically identify close contacts in this situation,” Werstein said in an email. “We received public health guidance from our local health officials to quarantine all students out of the abundance of caution.”
Dana Hepper, whose third-grade daughter was potentially exposed to COVID-19 and now must quarantine, provided The Oregonian/OregonLive with an email she received from a Multnomah Education Service District staffer about the incident, including the confirmation that students inside the classroom did not have to quarantine.
The service district directed blame to Portland Public Schools.
“They were supposed to have assigned seating” on the bus, the email from the service district employee said. “These protocols were not followed and it seriously hampered our contact tracing efforts. Hopefully, this will not happen again.”
Werstein did not directly answer a question about whether the buses were supposed to already be following seating charts. But she said the school district is still learning students’ names in the first few weeks of school and that transportation routines change because parents often start the year by taking their kids to school.
“Assigned seats are being developed,” Werstein said in a written response to questions.
Further complicating matters, the school district apparently couldn’t figure out where students sat.
The father of a Duniway student now on quarantine said a school administrator told him he reviewed video footage from inside the bus. But the administrator said it was too difficult to identify the children who sat within 6 feet of the infected person, the father recalled, not least in part because the students were “too short.”
Werstein did not directly confirm the kids were “too short” to identify on video but instead said “camera views vary by installation location and camera type.”
“In this case,” she wrote, “the camera did not help us identify students near the positive student.”
The response to the incident appears to have been so disorganized, in fact, that a mother whose children didn’t ride the bus the day of the exposure said she was told her kids had to quarantine. Corianda Leste said she spent time “badgering” the school to get the details necessary to confirm neither of her daughters rode the bus the day of the potential exposures.
“They would’ve lost a lot of school for no reason had we not pushed for more details,” Leste said.
Leste said seating on the bus was effectively a “free-for-all,” with her kindergartener and third-grader saying they sat next to other children, not each other, and that the bus was “packed,” with two to three kids in every seat.
“It seems like the bus is the whole Achilles’ heel of this plan to keep kids from getting sick,” Leste said.
And even as of Tuesday evening, the full extent of the bus issue at Duniway remained murky. The district released an online dashboard showing 86 Duniway students had been quarantined since the start of the school year because of on-site exposure, which includes school buses. That’s a far larger number than Werstein previously mentioned, and it accounts for more than a quarter of all district students quarantined because of on-site exposure, according to the district dashboard.
Asked about the discrepancy, Werstein said she “understood” there were “two separate incidents at Duniway,” one with 37 students quarantined and the other with 49. Parents, however, told a reporter that the school principal said the online dashboard was double-counting the same incident.
Asked what changes, if any, the district is planning to prevent so many kids from being quarantined in the future, Werstein listed only seating charts.
Meanwhile, Hepper, whose third-grader is quarantined, expressed frustration with the lost instructional time. A Duniway official told parents in a Sept. 9 email that “we still have not received any guidance from the district” about how to continue learning for quarantined students “but will let you know as soon as we do.”
Werstein said Duniway has provided children with “homework packets.” But Hepper said the packet wasn’t available until two school days after her daughter’s quarantine began.
The homework packet includes 10 double-sided pages of math homework and five each for reading and writing, Hepper said. Her daughter spent less than two hours doing one-fifth of the work Monday, she said.
“I just feel that the right systems that we need are not in place yet,” Hepper said, lamenting the fact that the district didn’t provide support beyond the paper packet Duniway teachers put together.
The Duniway and Lake Oswego incidents also raise questions about the actual risk of contracting COVID-19 on a school bus compared to a classroom, where students spend far more time, yet risk quarantine only when within 3 feet of an infected student.
A July study found the risk of contracting COVID-19 on a school bus was minimal, if not non-existent, even when kids rode within 2.5 feet of each other. None of the 462 students the researchers followed contracted the disease from the 37 students who tested positive for COVID-19 in the research time period.
The research was done before the delta variant took over, lead author Dana Ramirez said in a phone interview. But, if future research shows the same transmission rates on school buses, that would indicate it would be safe to let kids sit less than 6 feet apart.
“There were no cases of even asymptomatic transmission linked to school buses, thus, calling into question whether quarantining exposures on buses is necessary so long as masking and ventilation is being enforced,” the Eastern Virginia Medical School researchers wrote.
In fact, Virginia recently changed its policy to align with classroom exposure and not force children who sit more than 3 feet away from an infected student to quarantine. The policy applies only if the school keeps documented bus seating charts and ensures that kids wear masks and stay in their seats, as evidenced either by video recordings or the bus driver’s word.
The Oregon Health Authority defended the 6-foot quarantining distance for buses, noting that the standard is included in federal recommendations from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The state agency deviates from federal guidance only “in exceptional cases where we have strong data or differing local factors,” spokesman Tim Heider said in an email.
Quarantine guidelines are intended to help identify people exposed to the coronavirus and ensure they stay home and do not unknowingly pass the virus to others, as can happen in close settings particularly when masks are not used.
Classrooms are “structured settings” and have a variety of tools to prevent exposure, including ventilation, masking, vaccination, hand hygiene, environmental cleaning, quarantine, isolation and distancing, Heider said.
“Some of these other measures are less feasible or standardized for transportation,” Heider wrote.
Morgan Williams’ fifth-grade daughter is now quarantining at home until Sept. 17 because of the Duniway bus trip, missing seven days of school and the ballet classes she takes multiple times a week.
“She was definitely devastated,” Williams said of her daughter. “That’s kind of like solitary confinement for 10 days.”
As the daughter looks for activities to fill her time, Williams is contemplating how her child will get to and from school for the rest of the year.
“I can’t risk every five-minute ride being 10 days off at school,” she said.
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-- Fedor Zarkhin
503-294-7674; fzarkhin@oregonian.com
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