Coronavirus: Your school has a COVID case ... what comes next?

Fifty-seven schools across NSW have had to close since the COVID-19 outbreak began.

Graham Leddie, principal of Waverley College in Sydney’s east, with Year 11 students Patrick Hoggett, Charles Harris, Byron Scott and Peter Stamatelatos. Picture: Britta Campion

It was 5.30am on Monday when Angela Hay received the news — one of her students was confirmed to have contracted COVID-19, and school was off.

Over the weekend, Hay had heard that a student at St Patrick’s Marist College Dundas — where she is the principal — had tested positive. Then another student had put the news on social media.

“And so that sort of set the cat amongst the pigeons, as you would imagine,” Hay recalls.

That was March. St Patrick’s was one of the first schools to close as the pandemic ripped through suburban Sydney. So far, 57 schools across NSW have had to close since the outbreak began, most recently prestigious Kincoppal-Rose Bay and Lidcombe Public on the other side of town.

“I think there’s an assumption that it’s not going to happen to your school,” Chrishani Cogger, whose two children attend St Patrick’s, says. That Monday, she had received a call from another parent at the school. The virus had been detected. She stopped her kids at the door.

Hay says things that morning were “a little chaotic”. “There were lots of questions around ‘is my child really a close contact’ or ‘are they not a close contact’ and ‘my son’s dad is a close contact, does that mean my daughter has to stay home’,” Hay says.

“I have to say they were very calm on the most part and very ­respectful and very flexible.”

In the end, and with so much uncertainty, the school identified 196 of its 1000 students and 30 per cent of the staff as potential cases.

Months later, things proceeded more smoothly. In June, dozens of students self-quarantined after COVID-19 was found at Sydney’s prestigious Waverley and Moriah colleges in the city’s eastern suburbs.

At Waverley, principal Graham Leddie oversaw the evacuation of students in the first two hours of class. And while communication with the parents was well-planned, there were unexpected issues. Social media had to be monitored to “see if there were any misconceptions that should be corrected”, Leddie says.

A scrum of journalists had ­appeared outside the Waverley College campus gates. The school even brought in external public relations consultants.

In the end, there was one final twist. The test was a false positive. The student never had the virus.

St Patrick’s Marist College principal Angela Hay. Picture: Britta Campion

Other schools weren’t so lucky. The Tangara School for Girls in Cherrybrook was closed for two weeks with at least a dozen senior students testing positive.

The number of infections at the school increased dramatically following a student retreat co-­ordinated by an Opus Dei study centre in Bargo. Tangara declined to comment for this story.

There have been other unexpected developments after some schools returned. St Vincent’s College at Potts Point shut down for several weeks after a schoolgirl tested positive, although Year 12 boarders remained.

The schoolgirl was the focus of intense online bullying, prompting senior students to circulate a note among the St Vincent’s ­community demanding that the ­bullying behaviour cease.

The Catholic Education Diocese of Parramatta, which runs St Patrick’s and dozens of other schools in Sydney’s west, is preparing for the virus to be part of its planning for a long time yet. It has already held “trial runs” at its schools to test how prepared they are for a positive test.

St Patrick’s has changed too. After the students left, the school was deep-cleaned — including every musical instrument. The cutlery was removed from the lunch room. There are new parent liaison officers. And teachers have learnt video conferencing.

There remain, however, problems with learning from home. “For a whole range of reasons, I think there’s heightened anxiety,” Hay says.