The chairwoman of the St. Paul school board is back on the job, having recovered from a case of COVID-19 that briefly had her hospitalized.
Jeannie Foster, 48, checked into a hospital on Oct. 22 and later was sent home to recover.
She missed three weeks of board meetings before returning Monday for a special meeting on the proposed school consolidation plan.
During another meeting Tuesday night, Foster said through coughing spells that she’s no longer contagious.
Foster, who has asthma, said from the dais that she’s “not a big vaccination person,” and she believes in people’s right to decide for themselves whether to be vaccinated or not. But she said she was fully vaccinated against the coronavirus before falling ill with a breakthrough case.
“I believe it saved my life,” she said Tuesday. “I thought I was going to die, and I believe vaccinations saved my life.”
Foster has chaired the school board since board member Marny Xiong died last year from COVID-19 at age 31, before vaccines were available to the public.
Mary Langworthy, the school district’s health and wellness director, said Tuesday that 68 percent of district employees have said they are fully vaccinated against the virus.
By order of the school board, unvaccinated employees are supposed to take weekly tests, and Langworthy said some are finding they were infected but had no symptoms.
Langworthy said the high number of new coronavirus cases — cases, hospitalizations and deaths statewide are as high as they’ve been since vaccines became available — has her thinking about changing protocols in the district.
St. Paul, she said, is one of the few districts in the metro that continues to work to identify the close contacts of students and staff who spend time in schools while infected. She’s unsure how long her staff can keep doing that contract-tracing work.
Contract tracing also has forced a growing number of students to quarantine at home for 10 days. And some schools in the district, she said, have resorted to sending entire classes of students home.
The likelihood that those quarantining students are infected is “pretty low,” she acknowledged, “but we’re trying to reduce spread.”
Now that vaccines are widely available to children as young as 5, Langworthy said she’ll likely stop contact tracing in January.
Meanwhile, the school board on Tuesday agreed to continue requiring face masks in schools for the foreseeable future, continuing a policy that’s been in place since the start of the year. Superintendent Joe Gothard said that while some districts elsewhere in the country are pulling back on precautions, “it hasn’t even entered my mind.”