Parents still not allowed back at some Wake schools. They’re ‘non-essential’ visitors.
Some Wake County parents want schools to allow them back in for visits and volunteering.
The Wake County school system still recommends that schools continue to limit non-essential visitors even though that’s no longer recommended in state COVID-19 health guidance. The result is that some Wake parents have not been allowed inside their children’s schools for close to two years.
“Let’s get these kids back to having a normal setting, and having parents help at school is part of that normal setting,” Suzanne Templeton, a Raleigh parent of two students, said in an interview.
The Wake County school board could discuss the visitation policy in January, but with COVID-19 cases rising due to the omicron variant, it’s uncertain when districtwide changes might be made.
COVID changes visitor policies
Parents have historically helped at school events. That changed last school year when the N.C. Department of Health and Human Services’ Strong Schools Toolkit required schools to limit non-essential visitors.
However, DHHS eased the rules on visitors in July as vaccination rates increased. It now says schools should consider “allowing visitors and volunteers to resume normal activities if they follow the same protocols as staff and students.”
At least some Triangle districts have welcomed visitors back.
Parents and guests have been allowed to visit schools this entire school year, according to Caitlin Furr, a Johnston County schools spokeswoman.
The Chapel Hill-Carrboro school system resumed allowing visitors and school volunteers back this fall, according to Andy Jenks, a district spokesman.
“Our general guidance to schools since October has been that visitors and volunteers are allowed for the specific purposes of supporting school programming and/or unfinished learning,” Jenks said.
Wake school visitor rules vary
Wake County’s guidance is schools should continue to limit non-essential visitors, with each school deciding who is essential and non-essential. This leaves it up to each principal to decide whether to allow visitors, according to Lisa Luten, a district spokeswoman.
Parental access can vary by school in Wake County, which is North Carolina’s largest school district.
Heather Tuttle said it made no sense to her that she recently wasn’t allowed inside Oberlin Middle School in Raleigh to drop off food for the boys’ basketball team. Instead, Tuttle said the school had her son lug 18 sandwiches and a large cooler that she handed to him through a door that was barely cracked open.
“You can pretty much be normal in other places in Wake County,” Tuttle said in an interview. “But these schools, it’s like prisons.”
The situation is improving for Randa Bordelon, who has a daughter at Ballentine Elementary School in Fuquay-Varina. The school recently announced that it will let teachers have one classroom volunteer per day and allow parents to eat lunch with their children outdoors on campus
“We are looking forward to having our families join our school community again,” Ballentine said in its winter break update to families.
Bordelon says parents need to be back in all Wake schools to help stressed teachers dealing with staffing shortages and falling test scores.
“Our teachers are overworked and underpaid,” Bordelon said in an interview. “Parental involvement should ease a little bit of their workload in the classroom.”
Giving transparency to parents
Allowing parents back on campus will also increase transparency by letting them see what’s going on in the classrooms, according to Bordelon.
Promoting transparency is also a concern for school board vice chairman Chris Heagarty. He said the current approach where visitor access is being decided school by school is confusing Wake parents.
Heagarty had asked at the December board meeting about scheduling a discussion in January on allowing more parents back as volunteers. The spread of the omicron variant may delay when parents can return, but Heagarty says Wake should still have the talk about “what the runway is going to be for getting parents back into schools on a more regular basis.”
“Anything we can do to get more clarity on the issue, whether it’s the quarantine policy or parent volunteers, I think that’s helpful,” Heagarty said in an interview. “Whether our community health numbers support a change, folks at least need to know what the policy is. They want transparency and clarity.”
The parents interviewed for the story said they’re blaming the district, not individual schools, for the lack of access. Templeton, the Raleigh parent, warns that Wake risks losing support by keeping parents out.
“It harms the kids,” Templeton said. “It harms the teachers having to do all the extra work. Parents are less engaged.”
This story was originally published December 22, 2021 at 8:25 AM with the headline "Parents still not allowed back at some Wake schools. They’re ‘non-essential’ visitors.."
