JAMESVILLE-DEWITT SCHOOL DISTRICT – A pair of Jamesville-DeWitt faculty members recently raised concerns about the handling of COVID-related protocol at the district’s high school.

Labeling the hallway environment a “free-for-all” and equating the cafeterias to the “Wild West,” one teacher who wished to go unnamed said he sees a contradiction in the way the school’s social distancing and masking rules have been enforced this winter.

In the classrooms, teachers have been required to keep students spaced three feet apart with everyone’s face masks covering their noses, he said. In the lunchrooms, however, he said that students are often maskless and “packed in like sardines,” even if empty tables are nearby.

“J-D administration’s refusal to follow its own—and CDC—guidelines to socially distance students, especially when they’re most vulnerable with masks off during lunch periods, shows a callous disregard for the safety of students and staff and is deeply dishonest, considering they have been repeatedly telling the entire community that they were distancing students all along,” the teacher said.

He added that some students see their 30 minutes in the cafeterias as a one-time break from restrictions, while some choose to venture off to newly designated lunch spaces like the foyers next to the main gym and the auditorium.

Last school year, individual desks were set up in the cafeterias, with lunch monitors assigned to prevent the students from moving the desks closer if they tried—a practice that has continued at the district’s middle school. Plastic dividers have also been attempted to limit the high schoolers’ exposure to one another, the teacher said.

Though he expects a certain amount of students to eat outdoors as the weather warms up, the teacher views the act of taping off every other seating space in the meantime as a potential solution to the perceived issue.

Another staff member, who also requested to remain anonymous, said he sees “countless” students roaming the halls with their masks either below their noses, down below their mouths or not worn at all until he gives them a brief talking-to.

Calling the conditions in the high school as it pertains to COVID “far from satisfactory,” this staff member said the administrators “do not do nearly enough” to monitor the situation.

He also said the district should be providing free KN95 masks to students on a weekday-to-weekday basis.

“Even if students aren’t willfully disobeying mask protocol, many come to school with masks that don’t fit or receive ill-fitting blue masks when they get to school,” the staff member said.

Earlier this month, Superintendent Peter Smith said the district had been working to keep students apart but that the lunchrooms were the “most challenging” places to maintain this distancing policy.

“Thankfully, after spiking during Omicron, the number of COVID cases has fallen precipitously, and throughout the pandemic we have not seen significant in-school transmission,” Smith said. “Any staff member who has a concern, though, should approach their building principal and express it to them directly.”

While assembling daily reports to send to the New York State Department of Health, the district keeps track of students who have COVID by name along with what classroom visits are on their schedules, the superintendent said.

However, he said there is not always awareness of where students go and who they surround themselves with during their half-hour lunch periods.