881 Students, Teachers In NJ School District On COVID Quarantine

TOMS RIVER, NJ — The Toms River Regional School District has nearly 900 students and staff members quarantined from school due to exposure to COVID-19 infections, three weeks into the school year, according to tallies posted on the school website.

The district started the first two weeks of the 2021-22 school year with masks optional in many of its schools under the hot temperatures exemption in Gov. Phil Murphy's Executive Order 251, which requires mask-wearing in schools by students and staff.

The district has about 14,600 students in 18 schools and more than 2,200 staff members. None of its classrooms or schools have been transitioned to virtual learning, district spokesman Michael Kenny said.

Quarantine applies to people who have been exposed to someone who is positive for COVID-19; those who are infected with COVID-19 are isolated to prevent the spread of the virus.

He said the number of students and staff in quarantine is 881, which includes students who have tested positive for the coronavirus. The district is posting the numbers on its TR Safe Return webpage and the dashboard is updated each morning after classes begin.

"Information published today by external sources about our school district and its number of
quarantined students demands clarification," Kenny said. "It was falsely reported that more than 1,100 district students were in quarantine as of yesterday, but that figure combined the number of students who have reported testing positive, a cumulative figure (217) that is largely inclusive in the number of quarantined students."

"Much of the recent discussion surrounding Toms River Regional Schools’ number of COVID cases and quarantined students and staff aims to connect these figures with our district 'beginning the school year mask optional,' which is misleading and unfounded," Kenny said.

"For eight school days to begin the year, TRRS exercised the 'excessive heat' exemption in Executive Order 251, but masks were only optional in buildings and spaces which did not have air conditioning. Since Sept. 20, the wearing of masks in all spaces has been required throughout the district, as per EO 251," he said.

"The number of students in quarantine represents 6 percent of our student population, and our staff quarantine is 1 percent," Kenny said. Generally speaking, our numbers are consistent with a community at high risk of transmission, as Ocean County currently is."

Kenny said the Toms River school district "has made sincere efforts to remain transparent throughout this pandemic, best evidenced by the Covid counter published on our website, which is updated daily, as well as resources including a parent handbook, a strategic restart and recovery plan, and a website dedicated to responding to symptoms and cases. It’s both curious and frustrating that this transparency has somehow resulted in misleading and inaccurate reporting."

Under the 2021-22 quarantine rules, when a student tests positive, students in the immediate vicinity of that student — within 6 feet — who are not wearing masks must be quarantined for 14 days because Ocean County is in an area of high COVID-19 transmission, according to the state Department of Health. The percent of tests that are positive for COVID-19 in the Central East area, which includes Ocean County, was 6.19 percent through Sept. 18 data, the health department said.

The state's Road Forward health and safety guidance also includes an exception for students wearing masks in defining close contacts of students who test positive for the virus: "In the K–12 indoor classroom setting, the close contact definition excludes students who were within 3 to 6 feet of an infected student (laboratory-confirmed or a clinically compatible illness) where both the infected student and the exposed student(s) correctly and consistently wore well-fitting masks the entire time. This exception does not apply to teachers, staff, or other adults in the indoor classroom setting.

Students who are not defined as close contacts are not subject to quarantine, under the state's rules.

Contact tracing is what determines whether a student has to quarantine after exposure to some who is positive for the virus. But that contact tracing is complex, a school official said.

"Was it more than 15 minutes without a masks? How close were they sitting? Were their masks up, were they down? It's as much an art as it is a science," the official said

Contact tracing also is complicated by an unwillingness by some to tell authorities where or what activities people have participated in. Last November, a significant outbreak that led to Brick Township High School moving to virtual instruction right before the Thanksgiving break was rumored to be tied to a Sweet Sixteen party but district officials were stymied in their contact tracing efforts.

Ocean County has had no cases of in-school transmission and no outbreaks in the 2021-22 school year, according to the state's COVID-19 dashboard.

There have been 758 new cases of the coronavirus identified in Toms River since Sept. 3, according to information published on the Ocean County Health Department's COVID-19 website. The county's website does not break down by town how many of those cases are in which age groups, but in Ocean County as a whole, there has been an uptick in the number of cases among children, with 945 new cases among those ages 0-18 from Sept. 9 through Sept. 28, averaging 49 new children's positive cases per day.

However, both the number of township cases and the number of countywide children's cases have slowed in the last week; Toms River has 113 new cases over the last six days, and the county has 229 new cases among children from Sept. 23 through Sept 28, an average of 45.8 per day.

There was no breakdown available on how many of those exposed and forced to quarantine from school have been vaccinated. Children under age 12 are not eligible to be vaccinated against COVID-19.

The Toms River schools have been the center of heated debates over Murphy's mask mandate since last spring. In May, a small group of parents demanded the board ignore Murphy's rules. Then-interim Superintendent Thomas Gialanella said the district had to follow the mandate, which only angered the parents more.

At the school board meetings in June and July, parents accused the district of child abuse for following the mask mandates, and the anger continued to escalate. In August, audience members screamed at interim Superintendent Stephen Genco as he discussed the mask mandate, which Murphy had reinstated with Executive Order 251, to the point Board President Joseph Nardini called for a recess to attempt to restore civility.

It was at the August meeting that gubernatorial candidate Jack Ciattarelli urged the Toms River school board to ignore Executive Order 251 and reject Murphy's mask mandate.

"We are asking this board to do everything in its power to represent these people who are here tonight, exercising their democratic right to speak up that they want the choice and not be forced to put a mask on their children. It's that simple," Ciattarelli said at that meeting. "Board, please, I know these are not easy times but you have an obligation to represent the people who elected you, that's how a democracy works, and I think tonight you've heard their voice."

Ciattarelli's spokeswoman, Stami Williams, did not answer questions on how Ciattarelli would respond if someone told people to ignore an executive order he puts in place as governor.

School district superintendents can face felony charges if they ignore the state's mandates, however. Brick Superintendent Thomas Farrell told parents in Brick on Monday night that the potential for felony charges is included in the mandates that have come from the state on COVID-19 issues.

In Brick, where masks were optional for students due to hot classrooms at the start of the year, less than 3 percent of the district's students and staff are quarantined due to COVID-19 exposures, the district said.

This article has been updated with a formal statement from the Toms River Regional Schools.

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