TACOMA SPECIALISTS
Safety Quality Equity
ONE JOB ONE EDUCATOR
Specialists, with caseloads of hundreds of students moving, exerting themselves, and sharing equipment, have a much higher risk of exposure than a homeroom teacher with a caseload of 25 students, mainly seated at desks and with individual materials. This is simple fact and part of the nature of our jobs. Add to this the mixed messages being received from admin, that we should follow safety guidelines "To The Extent Possible" in rooms too small, with inadequate ventilation, and the risk climbs even higher. With the the numbers of students we see and the nature of our instruction, we are more likely to come in contact with the virus, and because vaccination does not mean that we cannot spread the virus, we are more likely to unknowingly pass it on. This risk increases greatly when staff serving more than one school interact with students in contact with other staff members serving multiple schools. The chain of itinerant teachers who serve large portions of a student body or entire schools, effectively means that everyone in all the linked schools is in contact with everyone else, as well as their families and friends. Last year we published the "Diagram of Doom". This showed how the poorly thought out deployment of specialists between schools resulted in the populations of at least 36 schools being in contact with each other, creating the possibility of widespread contagion among students, staff, and families of the entire district, with specialists at the highest risk of contamination. This year improvements in deployments have made contact circles smaller, but still less than safe. We have seven schools not sharing specialists and then four groups of schools that are connected (three smaller, one big group of 16+ schools). Here is an example of the largest group. Every school on this chart shares possible contact with every other school on the chart through shared specialists. Click here to see all the exposure groups.
While this is an improvement over last year, specialists are still at a greater risk than most staff.
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