Phil Roeder via Creative Commons
A Minneapolis Public Schools teacher sits at their desk.
Tiffany Doherty is a middle school math teacher in Minneapolis and the parent of a Minneapolis Public Schools student. On January 3, the day school resumed in the city after a two-week holiday break, Doherty’s son tested positive for COVID-19. That means he has to quarantine at home for ten days, per school district policy.
It also means that Doherty will have to stay home with him while her students miss out on consistent, in-person math instruction from her. But there aren’t enough substitute teachers available to cover the nearly 300 Minneapolis Public Schools teachers who regularly cannot make it to work, primarily due to COVID-19 restrictions.
In the absence of a unified approach to mitigating COVID-19, we have been left too often to our own devices.
Doherty shared her story on January 4, during a press conference held by the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers. Like their counterparts in school districts across the country, teachers and support staff in Minneapolis are struggling to balance their own safety with that of their families and students amid an Omicron-driven surge in COVID-19 cases.
More than one million Americans tested positive for COVID-19 on January 3, and the average daily positivity rate is now reportedly inching toward 500,000—an astoundingly high number that reveals just how transmissible the Omicron variant is.
This is a public health crisis, to be sure. Omicron may cause less severe illnesses, especially among vaccinated and boosted populations, but the sheer volume of cases it is likely to cause means that hospitals and health care workers will continue to face a traumatizing onslaught of patients who require intensive treatment.
In the past several weeks, I have spent more than twenty-four hours in two different hospital emergency rooms in Minneapolis. On two separate occasions, I accompanied a family member experiencing physical pain that related directly to a mental health crisis; there was nowhere else to turn for help. The first time we went to the emergency room, we waited more than seven hours for a bed to become available.
The hospital was full, the ER staff told us. That meant there was no place to put anybody who walked in needing emergency care.
The second time I accompanied this same family member to the ER, we waited more than eight hours before finally giving up and leaving without seeing a doctor or nurse. In a little waiting room alcove near us, several elderly people were slumped over in their chairs, and one had even taken to lying on the floor.
“We’ve been here for nine hours without anything to eat,” one woman told the admitting nurse. The nurse shrugged her shoulders in defeat; there was nothing she could do for them. Soon, a man sitting with another elderly woman who was in a wheelchair beside him, bolted up and asked for a recommendation on where to take his mother.
“She needs medical care, and we’ve been here for seven hours,” he said in exasperation. He wanted a list of other emergency rooms but was told there was simply nowhere for him to go; every hospital in the metropolitan area had long waiting lists.
In frustration, he wheeled his mother over to the admitting desk, grabbed the paperwork that related to her case, and left, shouting over his shoulder that if something happened to her, it would be the ER staff’s fault.
Recently, I took my own mother to the emergency room after she woke up with symptoms that indicated she might be having a stroke. We waited more than five hours for test results but counted ourselves among the lucky ones after a nurse told us that nearby Regions Hospital in St. Paul had a twenty-four hour wait time for those seeking emergency care.
For most of us, these frustrations and health-related scares are deeply personal. In the absence of a unified approach to mitigating COVID-19, we have been left too often to our own devices. Some choose to follow the prescribed rules (masking, social distancing, avoidance of large gatherings), while others proclaim their personal right to do whatever they want.
This includes the unvaccinated among us, who, when they do come down with a bad case of COVID-19, rush off to the hospital for advanced, science-based care, and sometimes decide then that it would have been a great idea to get vaccinated.
For Minneapolis teachers like Doherty, though, this is personal—as a parent and a professional. The rapid spread of COVID-19 due to the Omicron variant is more than an inconvenience for school-based staff; instead, it presents an aggravating disruption to their mission of providing an equitable education to all students.
Doherty and her colleagues contend that the Minneapolis Public Schools has no comprehensive, clearly articulated plan for how to serve students. The district does have a COVID-19 Response Plan posted online but it does not seem to include current information.
Substitute teachers are in short supply in Minneapolis and across the country. When a substitute can’t be found, Minneapolis Federation of Teachers President Greta Callahan noted during the January 4 press conference. students are often subjected to ever-changing adult supervision, not instruction.
Not only is this a questionable practice from an education standpoint, Callahan argued, but having six or seven different adults taking turns managing an absent teacher’s classroom increases the risk of COVID-19 exposure for everyone involved.
Right now, the only remote learning option that exists in the Minneapolis Public Schools requires parents to give up their spot in a neighborhood school and get onto a waiting list for the district’s sole online option.
For Doherty, this is a frustrating situation. “I could be teaching from home if there was a distance learning plan in place,” she said during the press conference.
Instead, as she waits for her son’s ten-day quarantine period to end, Doherty will use up her sick days and keep a close eye on the Omnicron surge, knowing that her middle school students are missing out on the essential math instruction they need.