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Suffolk — School administrators are investigating whether a teacher had tasked a fifth-grader who died of coronavirus complications last week to walk sick students to the nurse.
Anthonette Ward, a Suffolk Public Schools spokeswoman, said the student’s school has a rule for how to handle children with COVID-19 symptoms, and only adults are supposed to accompany them.
It’s unclear how and where Teresa Sperry was exposed to the virus. The Suffolk school division has been working with the Virginia Department of Health to do contact tracing.
Contact tracers are public health employees who work as disease detectives. Their role is to interview people who have recently tested positive for an illness and determine with whom they’ve recently come in contact. Then, they provide advice to those people on how to avoid spreading the virus to others.
As of Monday, only about 31% of confirmed COVID-19 cases have been interviewed over the past week, according to the health department.
The health department contacted the family Wednesday, after Teresa had died, regarding her positive test results.
Teresa, a 10-year-old who attended Hillpoint Elementary School, died last Monday at Children’s Hospital of The King’s Daughters. Her symptoms began with a headache but escalated quickly; five days later, she stopped breathing and couldn’t be revived, her parents Nicole and Jeff Sperry said.
On social media and in news interviews, the Sperrys said their daughter told them the week before she died that a teacher had given her the responsibility of walking students to the nurse.
“That was her classroom job,” her father told The Virginian-Pilot on Wednesday.
Her mother added: “And she said that if the kids were sick and needed to go home, she had to go get their book bag and take it back.”
The school division learned of the parents’ comments last week and is looking into it, Ward said.
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“The protocol at Hillpoint Elementary School is for the classroom teacher or any adult to contact the main office with a Code ‘C.’ When this occurs, one of the administrators or school nurse will come to the classroom to pick up the student,” she said in an email. “We are still investigating to ensure that this process was followed with fidelity.”
Both parents said they are vaccinated, though Jeff Sperry has a break-through case of COVID-19 following his daughter’s illness.
Teresa was one of two children the health department reported as having died of COVID-19 last week. The other, under the age of 10, also lived in Eastern Virginia, though officials are not releasing the child’s identity for health privacy reasons.
Thirteen children have died from COVID-19 throughout the state, according to the agency.
The more contagious delta variant drove rapid transmission of the virus in August and September. Children are making up an increasing share of new cases, in part because vaccines are not yet allowed for anyone under age 12. But health authorities have said the Pfizer vaccine will be expanded to ages 5-11 soon.
More children were admitted with COVID-19 in September to CHKD, the only freestanding pediatric hospital in Virginia, than any other month. The staff’s second-highest coronavirus patient volume was in August.
Elisha Sauers, 757-839-4754, elisha.sauers@pilotonline.com