Cathy Goldman’s dinner arrives in a bucket now, loaded by her mom and raised by a pulley system over the staircase to the second floor.
Goldman, caught in a COVID-19 outbreak in Elliott Elementary’s early childhood program last month, tested positive, recovered from the illness and is back at work, but she’s worried about the prevalence of the virus in schools, so she’s kept up the additional precautions to protect her mom and stepdad, who are both in their 80s.
“In the evenings, I'll sit at the top (of the stairs) and she sits at the bottom and we catch up,†she said. “But that’s no way to live.â€
Goldman was careful before she was exposed, she said, coming in the back door after work, taking off her clothes and showering before greeting her mom and stepdad — and she’s among those who think schools should be fully remote while cases in Lancaster County are surging — at least through the holiday season.
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“It is not OK we don’t feel safe walking into our own school buildings.â€
Goldman is among 282 staff members and 491 students who have tested positive in school buildings or student programs since school began in August through Nov. 19.
The number of positive cases reported daily has increased steadily — more dramatically in recent weeks, along with the surge of cases in the county — but LPS officials say the majority of those cases can still be traced to outside sources.
While Goldman remains skeptical of the contact-tracing process, LPS officials say what happened last month at Elliott is an anomaly: Eight of the 14 employees who work in the school’s two early childhood classrooms on the south end of the building tested positive for COVID-19 within a week’s time.
“I thought, holy buckets, what’s going on there,†said Kim Miller, LPS director of risk management who oversees the tracking of staff cases. “It was something we had not seen, and we have not seen since.â€
Ultimately they traced two cases to outside sources; the others they suspect spread within the school.
How the virus spread — and how contact tracers tracked it, based on interviews with Miller, who amassed a stack of documents during the process — offers a view into how contact tracers work to keep tabs on an invisible stalker.
“It’s a twisted little web,†Miller said. “It literally took weeks to track all this down.â€
There are four early childhood classes at Elliott, two in the morning, two in the afternoon, staffed by four classroom teachers, two special education teachers, a speech pathologist and seven paraeducators. The teachers and speech pathologist (seven of the 14) share a planning area with desks spaced out along walls, including tall cubicle walls that separate the area from one of the classes.
On Oct. 22 — a Thursday — the first employee tested positive, three days after she’d begun showing symptoms and began quarantining; two days after she got tested. They believe she was exposed by a person outside of school.
A day later, two more employees started showing symptoms and tested positive. Two other employees began showing symptoms that week, as well.
That Saturday — on Oct. 24 — LPS decided to temporarily close the early childhood education classes.
On Monday, the two employees who'd begun showing symptoms the previous week tested positive, including the second case traced to an outside source. Two more staff members began showing symptoms on Sunday and tested positive that week.
During the two-week time period, seven more early childhood employees tested negative. One of the employees who tested negative initially tested positive five days later.
Two other Elliott staff members who don’t work in early childhood also tested positive, their cases unrelated to what was happening in the early childhood classrooms, Miller said. One of those cases came from outside exposure, the other was likely exposed at school.
At a news conference Oct. 26, the Monday following the first positive test at Elliott, LPS said they’d documented the first cases of school spread — including three much more isolated cases in addition to what was still unfolding at Elliott.
At the time of the news conference, LPS officials believed the five positive cases at Elliott came from the staff members eating lunch at their desks in the early childhood planning area — a conclusion Goldman took issue with when she spoke to the Lincoln Board of Education on Nov. 10.
It was a conclusion Miller later questioned, too, as more information came to light.
LPS had based the initial conclusion on statements from the first employee who tested positive, who said she’d eaten lunch with her coworkers in the planning area, which means their masks would have been removed. They all were quarantined.
As tracers did more interviews, they learned one of the employees who tested positive had not been eating with her coworkers — a precaution she'd taken to reduce the risk.
Another oddity, Miller said: Two of the employees who were eating at their desks in the planning area that day tested negative.
The changing information isn't unusual and illustrates one of the challenges of contact tracing, Miller said. Employees might remember another detail, or realize something had unfolded differently than they initially remembered. Or, the accounts of others interviewed differ.
That’s not because people are trying to be unhelpful, Miller said, but because it’s often hard to remember who you were with and what you did 48 hours earlier — especially when you’re anxious because you just found out you tested positive.
“It’s such a sneaky thing,†she said. “It’s an invisible thing you’re trying to trace.â€
At Elliott, tracers drew maps and took photos of the classroom, measured the distance between desks, did scheduling charts to map out who was together during the day.
It was clear the spread didn't just occur from lunch in the planning area, Miller said, but it was impossible to determine exactly how it spread to other employees.
"It is not an exact science," she said. "I wish it was ... you don't want to let anyone down. You want it to be the safest place."
The surge in cases in Lancaster County makes contact tracing harder, though having LPS working on cases helps expedite the process, Miller said.
Often employees report a positive test to the district before LPS officials get that information from the Lincoln-Lancaster County Health Department, which must wait to get results from the testing centers. That can take four or five days, Miller said, so having employees report positive cases to the school district saves precious time.
“I think it’s pretty important because we’re able to get people into quarantine that much quicker,†she said.
Finding the source of the exposure is getting tougher because of increasing community spread outside of schools, Miller said, but she still thinks contact tracing can effectively stop it in schools.
“We can stop it, to the extent we’re getting the information we need,†she said.
That’s important, because the more LPS officials know about how the virus is spreading, the easier it is to identify changes that should be made to better protect employees and students, said Communications Director Mindy Burbach.
Case in point: Since the cluster at Elliott, LPS has changed some of the safety protocols in early childhood education, where staff were expected to eat with students to “model†how it was done and where many of the students have special education needs that allow mask exemptions.
Officials already had modified procedures, requiring preschool students to wear masks shortly after school began, and no longer requiring staff members to do home visits if they feel the situation is unsafe — a rule that drew upset staff to board meetings before LPS changed it.
Now, the requirement to model eating during meals is gone, and LPS will install Plexiglas barriers at the tables, like cafeterias across the district, said Matt Larson, associate superintendent of instruction.
Staff members now move away from the tables while children eat, and those who choose to model eating can do so with a face shield, while temporarily removing their mask, or do so from 6 feet away, he said.
Larson noted that, even without those changes, Elliott is the only cluster identified at LPS so far.
In other cases, including a large number of cases identified at Zeman Elementary in a short period of time, the exposures were traced to outside sources, Miller said. Everett Elementary’s early childhood classes also stopped temporarily, but because so many teachers had to quarantine after a student with a mask exemption tested positive.
“Keep in mind that all told we have 69 early childhood classes in 29 buildings,†Larson said. “There’s only been one instance where we had to temporarily close due to something that originated in the school.â€
There have been more cases of school spread, Miller said, though they’ve been smaller, isolated cases. All the staff cases have happened when one or two people were unmasked, including instances where students had mask exemptions, she said.
Miller and four full-time employees and a part-time employee work solely on contact tracing, notifications and dealing with employee leave, starting at 6 a.m. weekdays and often into the night and on weekends. Student cases are tracked and traced by school nurses, along with the Health Department, and overseen by LPS Health Services Supervisor Wendy Rau. The two groups share information, Miller said.
The district had to create spreadsheets and forms online for staff and families to fill out if they test positive, and to track cases and collect data. And they're still learning, Miller said.Â
“Everyone just got thrown into this,†she said.
Miller said she knows teachers feel terrible when they test positive, that they worry about the hardship quarantining puts on their colleagues. She worries that such concerns will have a chilling effect on what they tell tracers.
"(Tracing) is only as good as the information provided to us," she said.Â
During an interview, Miller stressed, repeatedly, that the contact tracing process — and talking about how it works — isn’t intended to place fault with anyone.Â
But from Goldman's perspective, the district’s contact tracing isn’t as robust as it should be. She got tested after the first person tested positive, because she knew her coworker had tested positive, not because anyone called her.Â
She doesn't use the planning area, except to store her belongings, and doesn't work directly with that first positive case, but she is among the cases considered to be school spread.
The toll it’s taken on the department is great, she said: One coworker tested positive just before she gave birth. Others have sick family members and worry about using all their leave.
“It was terrifying once COVID was moving through our department,†she said. “We were texting back and forth to find out who tested positive ... you’re dropping like flies and nobody is listening to you.â€
SCENES IN LINCOLN DURING THE PANDEMIC