More than 700 students at SC school forced to quarantine after COVID outbreak
Students and teachers at South Carolina’s Horse Creek Academy were forced to quarantine after a series of COVID-19 infections just two weeks into the new school year.
More than 700 students from pre-k to 10th grade and approximately 30 staff members were required to quarantine after the initial outbreak at the Aiken charter school.
School was in session at the academy for two weeks before an outbreak of COVID-19 forced its 1,100 students and 129 teachers to go virtual, Ann Marie Taylor, Chief Vision Officer and Lead Learner at the school, said in an interview Monday.
“Almost immediately, we began getting notices of positive cases, obviously for students that hadn’t even come yet,” Taylor said. “Shortly after we began school, we started getting positive cases in school within the building, and we started quarantining.”
The decision to go virtual came about after the “concerning” numbers of infections and also because the school didn’t have enough staff members who weren’t required to quarantine.
“We didn’t have enough staff to staff the building,” Taylor said. “Particularly, all of our staff that is trained to work with students with disabilities, many of them were out.”
The school had a total of 49 COVID-19 cases last school year, according to Taylor. As of 3:38 p.m. on Monday, the school had 72 positive cases, 11 of which are teacher and staff members.
The outbreak was first reported by the Post and Courier Monday afternoon.
“This variant ... is far more contagious, and it is definitely in our children,” Taylor said, referring to the highly contagious coronavirus delta variant, which now accounts for most COVID-19 infections in South Carolina. “Firsthand, we can see that even without the medical data because it is such a different strand compared to what it was last year.”
Under a provision created by the state Legislature and supported by S.C. Gov. Henry McMaster, schools are not allowed to require face masks to be worn, even though they are a known tool to help stem the spread of COVID-19. But Horse Creek Academy has always encouraged masks, Taylor said.
Additional COVID-19 safety guidelines will be taken to the school’s board of directors in Tuesday’s regularly scheduled board meeting to implement stricter policies to try to limit the spread, Taylor said.
As of Monday, Taylor said, three fathers that were prominent members of the school community died from COVID-19 in the last two weeks.
“It’s been super tough,” Taylor said. “But, you know what, we’re educators and we keep going. We keep figuring out better ways, so it will be okay.”
