Parents and local authorities are angry at a Massachusetts parent who sent off their teenage child to school on the first day of resumption after knowing fully well that the student tested positive for COVID-19. The student tested for coronavirus on September 9 and obtained a positive result on September 11 and yet resumed to Attleboro High School for classes on September 14.
About 30 people who had physical contact with the student have proceeded on two weeks of quarantine to determine if they got infected with the virus.
Mayor Paul Heroux of Attleboro, a city almost 40 miles southwest of Boston, said the parents of the student are fully aware of the teen’s COVID-19 status but sent him off to school anywhere because he was asymptomatic. School principal Bill Runey said the school authorities knew the student was positive from grapevine sources and had to take a step further to verify from the bureau of health.
“I knew that we were going to end up having some cases, but I didn’t expect they would be on the first day,” Runey said. “Long story short, rumors started circulating around town, so someone contacted the bureau of health here in Attleboro and did some checking and found out that it was true, that he had tested positive.”
Further investigations from the bureau of health showed that six students of Attleboro High School actually tested positive for the virus but while five stayed back at home on the first day of the school’s resumption, only the student in question came to school.
“It was a reckless action to send a child — a teenager — to a school who was COVID-positive,” Attleboro Mayor Paul Heroux said. “It was really poor judgment. If you know that your child has coronavirus, is COVID-positive, you should not send your child to school under any circumstances.”
The school superintendent for the school district, David Sawyer, wrote a letter to the parents of the almost 6,000 students in the district and warned them to keep their children at home if they ever test positive for coronavirus and pending the outcomes of any tests. He said that other parents are very angry at what the parents of the particular student had done and warned that no family should carelessly endanger other students or the entire community if their wards test positive to the disease.
Source: nbcnews.com