By Cam Lucadou-Wells
All of Dandenong North Primary School’s students and staff have been ordered into Covid testing before being allowed back at school.
The besieged school was closed on Friday 26 November after several earlier shutdowns and further confirmed Covid cases the previous Monday.
Under Department of Health directions, about 600 students and 100 staff needed to show a negative Covid test to come back to school on Monday 29 November.
The department had decided there was a need for a “clean start” after Covid infections had been “bubbling along” at the school this term, principal Kevin McKay said.
School administrators and volunteers worked late into the night, collating and processing the 700-odd Covid test results being either phoned in or being physically brought into the school.
There was no help from the health department’s contact-tracing team, which left the school’s limited staff resources “stretched above and beyond”.
The rich diversity of students and families is often the school’s “greatest gift”, Mr McKay says.
But in this instance, it presented a communication “challenge”, due to language barriers as well as a lack of interpreters.
“Our staff were fantastic. I couldn’t have done it all myself.”
The school has been shut down several times in the past two months, with 24 separate occasions in which there’s been a positive case.
On each occasion, it was up to the school to contact trace.
Effectively, each infected students’ classmates and families needed to be informed and tested as “positive contacts”.
“Each time we devote two staff for half a day on the paperwork and contact tracing.
“It’s been very difficult. No one else can do it for us.”
Mr McKay said students were also unsettled by the upheaval.
Most parents had been “just fantastic” in understanding the situation. Some refused to have their children tested, meaning they were required to stay from school for 14 days.
Encouragingly, Tuesday 30 November was the first day of no reported new cases at the school for some time, Mr McKay said.
He has no criticism for the school’s re-opening in term 4, despite the region’s lagging vaccination rates.
“It had to happen at some stage.”
He hoped that primary school children would be vaccinated for 2022. He doubted that it would be made compulsory.
Last year, the school and the nearby Emerson School minted student medals to mark a difficult 2020.
“Perhaps we should have waited this you,” Mr McKay said – with a rueful laugh.
