By Elizabeth Palmieri
Talon Staff
The Omicron variant surge in COVID-19 cases, once again, disrupted lives across the world. And students and staff at Barrington High School were no exception.
“I couldn’t have anticipated being sick,” stated one teacher who tested positive the day after returning to school from the holiday break. Although they had a mild case, they still experienced nasal congestion and fatigue, as well as the need to sleep “probably sixteen hours a day.”
In January alone, 277 BHS students and faculty tested positive for COVID at BHS, according to School Nurse Tammy Lafreniere. This is the most cases a school in the district has seen since the start of the pandemic, and almost five times more than the 56 cases reported at the high school in December 2021.
It is easy to look at the daunting number of recent cases and disassociate that figure from the individuals it actually represents. However, each has their own story to tell regarding their illness and its effects on their lives and their learning and/or teaching.
For one BHS senior, their story started when their coach sent out an email that one of their teammates tested positive. After hearing the news, this student took a rapid test at the nurse’s office and within a minute they tested positive and were sent home.
“I wasn’t too scared because I’m pretty healthy,” the student expressed when asked about their initial thoughts and feelings upon learning that they had tested positive.
Turns out they had a mild case, experiencing a slight cough and a headache; however, despite only having these manageable symptoms, they could not return to in-person learning for ten days due to the district’s strict quarantine protocols.
The majority of this student’s quarantine fell within the first week of January when the whole school switched to distance learning due to the extreme increase in positive cases. They felt “a little less motivated and more tired” learning whilst sick, but they “still got all [their] work done.”
Indeed, the student concluded, having COVID “didn’t disrupt my learning too much,” but it was a different story when in-person learning resumed and they were still quarantining.
“There were two days that I was online while everyone was at school,” the senior explained, “and those days were a little tougher. I would log into Zoom, but my teachers would [only] open [Zoom] at the very end of class. I felt like I was left out of my classes, and if it wasn’t the end of the week, I definitely would’ve fallen behind on my work.”
These disruptions to learning have proven to be a double-edged sword, as BHS teachers who are testing positive have also found teaching at this time less effective and more of a struggle both personally and pedagogically.
One teacher expressed how they’ve “been behind, just playing catch-up in a never-ending battle against time” since their recovery from COVID and return to the classroom. They remarked how “short of recording your expected lessons a week ahead of time all year, there’s no way to prepare for that. With the shortage of subs, it’s not like you can really make up for that time until you get back.”
This teacher also emphasized the importance of not “overburden[ing] yourself by trying to catch up all at once” when “you’re healthy” again.
They suggest that members of the BHS community who fall ill` “make manageable goals” and “chip away at the work you’ve not had the chance to keep up with” to prevent “stressing out your body” and “mak[ing] yourself susceptible to getting the virus all over again.”
To limit the spread of COVID and prevent another significant outbreak, this teacher reminds the school community that “you really have to think hard about which things are needs in your life and which things are wants.”
To date, there have been 378 COVID cases for both students and faculty at BHS since the start of the school year, according to Mrs. Lafreniere. All of the teachers are vaccinated and all but 60 students are vaccinated.