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One school district in Tampa, Florida has an outstanding 5,599 students and 316 staff members in isolation or quarantine due to COVID-19.
The Hillsborough County Public School District (HCPS) — which is the seventh-largest in the country — announced on Monday that they haverecord-breaking numbers of students andstaff exposed to COVID. They are either isolating or in quarantine, and “isolation refers to individuals who have tested positive for COVID-19 while quarantine refers to those who have had close contact with a positive case,” the district explained.
The school board has called for an emergency meeting on Wednesday to discuss potential safety measures moving forward “including mandatory face coverings for all students and staff.”
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HCPS has nearly 224,000 students across elementary school, middle school, high school and technical colleges, per thewebsite.
“We must continue safety practices community wide as we work to combat this virus,” HCPS Superintendent Addison Davistweeted on Saturday, at the time reporting 4,477 students and 289 staff members were in isolation.
Davis told MSNBC the district is requiring that everyone at the schools wear a maskunless a parent chooses to opt-out. Florida’s Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis issued an executive order on July 30 that gave parents, not school officials, the right to decide if their children wear masks in the classroom. DeSantis hasthreatened to stop paying school board membersand superintendents who defy his ban on mask mandates.
“We’re gonna make sure we still follow every statutory requirement, all the legal ramifications,” Davis said, according toToday. “But at the same time show that sensitivity with COVID in our community and put mitigation strategies in order to be successful.”
The HCPS' announcement follows another school district in Florida’s loss of three teachers who all died from COVID-19within a 24-hour period.
The three teachers — who were not vaccinated — came from two elementary schools in Broward County. Janice Write was a 48-year-old teacher from Pinewood Elementary, while Katina Jones, 49, and Yolonda Hudson-Williams, 49, were teachers at Dillard Elementary,NPR reported.
The school district istrying to encourage the staff to get vaccinatedwith monetary incentives, Broward County School Board Chair Rosalind Osgoodtold CNN, “but there are a lot of people that have still not gotten the vaccination,” she said. “And it is becoming a deadly thing for them not to be vaccinated.”
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source: people.com
