BY ANDY GARDNER
North Country This Week

MASSENA – A school board member questioned if district personnel would be paid overtime or otherwise compensated for assisting county Public Health with the contact tracing process.

Trustee Kevin Perretta raised the question during a recent special board meeting.

“For the contact tracing that the school is doing for Public Health, I was just wondering if we could find out and get some sort of report as to the labor effort the school district employees are putting toward this end. Are we paying overtime or any sort of additional compensation to employees with regard to this work that they’re doing for St. Lawrence County Public Health?” he said.

Superintendent Pat Brady said he wasn’t aware of any overtime requests connected with contact tracing. He said it’s mostly building principals and the head nurse contacting staff and student families to inform them of a potential exposure, and to advise them to voluntarily quarantine and wait for Public Health.

“She’s the conduit between Public Health and the school. So she’s contacting the administrators involved,” he said.

He said they’ll allow the head nurse to take comp time to make up for overtime.

When the potential contacts happen on a bus, the head nurse works with the director of transportation.

“They’re now pulling out the bus lists, and where the kids were sitting, so they can look at this, which we have to keep anyway,” Brady said.

For classroom contacts, the head nurse works with the building principal to look at seating and attendance charts to figure out who could be at risk.

“We know Public Health is backlogged, so if we say it’s Public Health’s responsibility, then we have people showing up in the building the next day who should not be there. So it benefits us for contacting the students and the staff so they don’t show up, and that’s really why we end up being put in that position. We don’t want them here when it’s potentially not safe for them to be here,” Brady said.