A Brooklyn High School was forced to quarantine a third of its staff on the eve of the first day of classes after exposure to a COVID-19-positive colleague at a pair of work events held less than 72 hours earlier.
The episode happened at the Spring Creek school building in East New York, which houses staff and students for three separate schools. Spring Creek Community School (K422) and Academy for Young Writers (K404) are home to 6th through 12th graders, while P.S. K053 runs a District 75 program for K-12 special education at the location. Employees met on September 9th and September 10th for professional development days.
The Spring Creek Community School had budgeted for a 66-person workforce this year. Of its staff at the meetings, 59 were exposed and labeled as close contacts of the COVID-19 case—and 21 were placed into quarantine.
The Department of Education revealed this information Thursday after a WNYC/Gothamist investigation into the incident, following tips from members of the school community who were concerned about the lack of transparency. The names of parents, staff and other sources are being withheld for those who’ve requested it, including those within DOE and the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DOHMH), given the sensitivity of the subject and the potential for retribution. Emails and other documents support their narratives.
Communication Gaps
The situation speaks to a perfect storm of gaps in the city’s pandemic policy and how officials communicate to staff and parents about COVID-19 cases in New York City schools.
Multiple parents at Spring Creek said they were unaware of the scope of what happened at the school, and that they had not been told how many staff had been exposed and quarantined just as the school year was getting underway.
Staff in the sister schools that share the same building had also not been directly informed about how many people had been affected. The New York State Department of Health said it had no record of the COVID case in question because “schools were not required to report prior to Monday, September 13th.”
“The Situation Room notified the other school leaders in the building of the positive case – co-located schools may notify their community of a positive case in another school, but it is not necessary,” a DOE spokesperson said. The DOE COVID-19 Response Situation Room sent a routine email to staff and parents around sundown on September 12th, mentioning a community member had tested positive. Spring Creek Community School Principal Christina Koza followed suit the same evening before classes began.
“Please note that this case was identified and isolated well prior to students returning to the building, and no student has been exposed,” read an email sent to parents by Principal Koza via Paulette Holland, the parent coordinator for the school.
“This does mean that, for the next 10 days, some of our staff must quarantine, as per DOE policy, and substitute teachers will be covering their classes until they return,” the email continued. Some students returning to in-person school for the first time in months were given laptops for web-based instruction in the classroom from teachers quarantining at home.
One parent William Perez said he’d missed the principal’s correspondence altogether and found out from one of his children. He has sons in sixth grade and ninth grade at the school.
“No, my son told me himself. If there was an email, I wasn’t tracking it,” Perez said. “and my wife and I are usually very good about checking emails here.”
Behind the scenes, senior DOE officials scheduled a meeting with Principal Koza during the first day of classes, where they said the school would not be closed under any circumstances, according to one source with knowledge of the gathering.
Internal DOE records show six members of Brooklyn North High Schools Superintendent Janice Ross’s team were rerouted to Spring Creek the morning of September 13th, the first day of public school in New York City. At the same time, a team from the Brooklyn North BCO (Borough Citywide Offices) was instructed not to visit the building as had been originally planned.
“The purpose of the BCO visit was to have eyes on the schools and buildings and to make sure the schools had everything they needed to start the school year, and to report any problems,” said a source inside the DOE. “The Executive Superintendent [Karen Watts] would have approved this last-minute rerouting of BCO staff away from the Spring Creek campus.”
“Due to the large number of staff members involved, the Superintendent’s office provided support during the first day of school to ensure that students had a great start to the school year,” a DOE spokesperson said. “District staff are often in schools supporting programming and Superintendents often check in with principals in their district – this is not unusual.”
Unmasked
Some sources said educational staff had removed their masks while congregating indoors at the professional development meetings. A teacher, who asked to not be named, said this practice was common in the school last year. Citywide mask mandates were lifted this spring as the city’s second surge cooled off. But DOE and city health officials kept face-covering requirements in place inside schools for everyone older than 2, regardless of vaccination status, except while actively eating or drinking.
“We do take our masks off indoors when we're in the classroom. But we are not allowed to do that in front of students,” the teacher said. Despite public calls from elected officials, including the health committee chair of the New York City Council, the de Blasio administration declined to renew indoor mask mandates this summer even after the delta variant began to surge.
A separate campus – The Horan School in East Harlem – closed after just one week of classes due to a staff outbreak.
“There was more that the city, that DOE, that DOHMH needs to do to make sure that school leadership is aware of the risks of having these type of gatherings,” Dr. Uché Blackstock, founder and CEO of Advancing Health Equity in New York City and MSNBC medical contributor, said after hearing a description of the incident at Spring Creek.
A separate campus – The Horan School in East Harlem – closed after just one week of classes due to a staff outbreak that city officials attributed to a back-to-school orientation event. That incident was traced back to an unvaccinated adult.
Staff in the Spring Creek building said news stories about outbreaks often lead the public to blame school administrators—when many issues come from incomplete information being delivered from the most senior echelons of municipal government. “The principal and whoever organized the professional development day, they need more guidance,” Blackstock added.
Close Contacts
Under city rules at the time, according to the DOE letter sent to parents, “when the positive case is a staff member who has been in the school but had no contact with children, that individual and all close contacts will be told to quarantine, but no classes will be affected.”
At the start of this school year, the city defined a “close contact” as “someone who has been within 6 feet for 10 or more minutes over a 24-hour period of someone who has COVID-19 during their infectious period, regardless of face mask use or the presence of plexiglass or other barriers.” And all close contacts who were unvaccinated were required to stay at home in isolation for 10 days.
This rule led to a huge swell in classroom closures over the first two weeks of New York City schooling. By the end of the first week of classes, 327 classrooms were shuttered after an occupant received a positive test result. By the middle of the second week, 769 classrooms were completely remote, and hundreds more were partially closed, with unvaccinated or symptomatic children learning from home. Starting Monday, September 27th, many of these quarantines won’t happen, as new rules will only call for isolation if an unvaccinated student or staff member isn’t wearing a mask or avoids social distancing with a COVID-positive person.
Fully vaccinated staff and students can skip at-home isolation if they’re not experiencing symptoms. COVID-19 symptoms take 5-6 days on average to materialize, according to the World Health Organization.
The education department said it didn’t know the vaccination status for the 21 Spring Creek employees in quarantine. Workers have until September 27th to upload their inoculation records before the city’s vaccine mandate for DOE staff takes effect.
School Vaccination Rates
Even if a large portion of the Spring Creek staff was unvaccinated when classes started, the public wouldn’t have known because this information has not been publicly reported in real time. The mayor’s office and Schools Chancellor Meisha Porter have announced vaccination rates for the Department of Education on the whole, saying 78% had received at least one dose as of Monday. The city hasn’t reported numbers for schools.
The Americans with Disabilities Act prohibits employers from sharing medical information for individual employees, which is enforced by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. But legal experts say nothing prevents the city from sharing overall coverage for school staff.
“I don’t see anything in the ADA or EEOC guidance that would prevent the disclosure of aggregate data,” said Alicia Ouellette, the dean and president of the Albany Law School and a health policy expert. “The health privacy laws protect individually identifiable health information. Aggregate data does not identify any individual’s health status.”
Dr. Blackstock said it would be better for parents if all New York City schools reported their vaccination rates.
“As both a healthcare professional and a parent of two children in New York City public schools, I should be able to go online and see what the vaccination rate is for my child's school,” Blackstock said. “That should be publicly disclosed information that anyone can have access to, especially if [vaccine] requirements are not going into effect until a few weeks into the school year.”
This week, a New York Supreme Court judge lifted a temporary restraining order that was placed on the city’s vaccine mandate for educators after a coalition of unions, including the United Federation of Teachers, sued the city.
Information on vaccination rates could be especially valuable for schools like Spring Creek. COVID-19 has long plagued East New York, even claiming the life of a school nurse last year. The school’s surrounding zip code—11208—has seen nearly 13,800 cases since spring 2020, according to city data, amounting to one out of every six residents. And 438 people have died, putting the area’s death rate well above the city average.
Spring Creek Community School serves mainly Black and Latino students, and 23% of students have a known disability, according to data from the 2019-2020 school year. About 29% of the residents of the surrounding community live below the poverty line.
Barely half of residents are fully vaccinated. In the last week, 3.2% of COVID tests taken in the area came back positive, compared to a citywide positivity rate of 2.4%. And approximately 50 people in the neighborhood were hospitalized with COVID-19 between August 12th and September 8th.
“I would like to know what’s going on, so it can be my choice to send my child or not,” said a parent while picking up their sixth-grader outside Spring Creek on Tuesday.
This story was updated to clarify the face-covering requirements inside schools and superintendent titles.
