County Executive Pat Ryan, center, flanked by (left) Ulster BOCES Superintendent Dr. Charles Khoury and (right) county Health Commissioner Dr. Carol Smith, speaks Friday, March 13 in Kingston. (Photo provided)
Starting Monday, March 16 all Ulster County schools will shut down for 14 days in response to the spread of the coronavirus. The shutdown, announced Friday, March 13, comes as county officials reported a fifth confirmed case of the virus, this one in a Port Ewen resident with family connections to the Kingston City School District. In live-streamed press conference, County Executive Pat Ryan called the school closures critical to containing the spread of the virus.
“I understand and know the impact that families in our community will feel and I understand the sacrifices and tradeoffs this will entail,” said Ryan who spoke via a Facebook video feed flanked by county Health Commissioner Dr. Carol Smith and Ulster BOCES Superintendent Charles Khoury. “But I am fully confident that we are making the right decision for our public health and safety.”
Ryan said he made the decision to shut down schools in consultation with Smith and members of a newly created county public health and safety task force. The Wallkill and Kingston districts had already announced plans to shut down through the weekend for cleaning and disinfection after people with connections to the district tested positive for the virus. As recently as Wednesday, Ryan told reporters that the decision to close schools was a difficult balancing act because of the impact on working parents and children who rely on schools for meals and vital services.
On Friday, officials said school districts were working on plans to deliver meals and critical services to students during the shutdown. Ryan said that those efforts would be led by district officials at the local level and would likely vary based on each district’s individual needs. Ryan said he planned to convene a meeting of stakeholders over the weekend or on Monday to coordinate efforts to deliver food and services to the county’s most needy students.
“I’ll be clear, this is a work in progress. We do not have a fully formulated plan on this,” said Ryan. “We do have a commitment to make it work from all of the leaders at every level of our education system as well as from Ulster County.”
Plans are in place to institute remote learning for the duration of the shutdown. Khoury said BOCES officials and district-level staff had already been preparing students to work from home. Khoury said concerns about equity — ensuring that students without electronic devices or Internet access could participate in the program — had prompted school officials to rely on both online learning modules and old-fashioned worksheets.
Ulster County recorded its first “presumptive positive” case of COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, on Sunday, March 8. The patient was described as a Town of Rochester man who is believed to have contracted the illness while traveling in France. Since then, health officials have identified additional cases in the Town of Shawangunk and Port Ewen. Smith said the Port Ewen case was not related to the ones in Shawangunk. The total number of cases in the county is now five.
An unknown number of family members and others who had close contact with the patients have been placed in mandatory home quarantine. Others, including people who have recently returned from areas with a high incidence of the virus have been asked to voluntarily quarantine themselves in their homes for 14 days. Ryan said it’s virtually certain that other county residents have been exposed to the virus, calling for a broader public health approach to the situation.
“We need to move from this situation of trying to go too deep into details of individual cases and do more thinking about broader decisions that will protect our community and especially the most vulnerable members of our community,” the county executive said.
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Do students have to make up that work???
Thank you
I for one would rather have had Mike Hein running Ulster County right now, instead of a bunch of entirely new people, with nearly zero actual experience doing this job. We had the number of confirmed cases quintuple in five days. Do the math, see where this is going. How many isolation rooms at Kingston Hospital, two? How many ventilator machines? What, are we going to send everyone up to Albany Med? How many rooms and machines do THEY have?
Precisely what had this got to do with the current administration?
Everybody needs to understand we need to capture and kill this virus or most of our seniors will get hit hard. So stay home. Eliminate all face to face contact and sentence Covid 19 to extinction. Walmart and Target will be providing infrastructure to both do surveillance testing by drive through and ensure safe delivery of groceries. If we give it no escape to jump to one more person and simply wait two weeks this this thing dies. We’re Americans, we don’t just accept being attacked we eliminate the threat.