Parents of one elementary student knew their child tested positive for the virus but continued to send them to school for seven days, Dr. Brett Goodman, superintendent of Larkspur-Corte Madera School District in Marin County, told CNN. The student attends Neil Cummins Elementary School in Corte Madera, about 30 minutes north of San Francisco. Dr Brett Goodman says school officials only found out about the positive case after getting a call from marin public health asking why the students infection hadn’t been uploaded to the school database. “We learned that that student was never reported to us and the student had been attending school for the last seven days.”
Following the discovery, Goodman says the school took immediate action. “Parents received a text message the night of the 18 to them bring their child to the gym so we could conduct testing before anyone entered a classroom. Overall, eight students tested positive with all cases being reported by the following night.” Goodman says the school district has been very clear about COVID procedures since the start of the pandemic.
Those students and those exposed were immediately sent into modified quarantine, which lasts 10 days. “What this means is students could still attend school but can’t attend any extracurriculars,” Goodman told CNN,” including family gatherings or travel.” That quarantine period occurred before the Thanksgiving week. Parents were shocked to hear what the parents had done. But one parent, Jilly Martay, told the station she was happy with how the superintendent handled the situation. “We’ve been highly successful of having kids here every single day for over a year now and 99%+ of our families follow the rules and understand the rules,” Goodman told CNN. “This is an opportunity to look at this as a call to action and ask every single person to act with integrity. We all depend on one another.”
Our enforcement team is evaluating the circumstances and will respond accordingly,” Marin County Public Health said in a statement. “Thankfully, this is the only known occurrence of a household knowingly sending a COVID-19 positive student to school.” No staff members tested positive. Schools have an indoor mask mandate. “Had those children been unmasked, we would have seen a lot more transmission,” Willis said. “We depend on one another to prevent spread and this is kind of a stark and unfortunate lesson in what happens when we don’t follow the protocols.
