How effective are Wellness Checks?
Story and video by Victoria Locke
In March of 2020, all schools across the country and in the world entered into a quarantine thought to only last two weeks. Little did anyone know that the virus, Covid-19, would still be around today. Since that week, life for students, teachers, parents, and faculty at Judge Memorial has drastically changed.
At the beginning of the new school year, a whole new schedule was introduced at school. Some students go to school on Mondays and Tuesdays, while others go on Thursdays and Fridays.
No matter when students attended though, during the first month of school everyone was required to complete a wellness check before entering the building. Wellness checks include checking symptoms and temperatures. For those who forgot to submit the check on Skyward, they were called down to the front of the school during the first period to get their temperature checked.
The program on Skyward is very simple. Check two boxes, then submit. However, the process of taking your temperature before school and actually being conscious of your well-being is more work than most would think.
Many people weren’t doing the wellness checks, which led to a lot of students being pulled from class in the morning. After pulling students from classes every morning became a routine, the faculty spoke with the health department to find a better solution.
“I called the health department and asked them what they thought,” Dean Carr said, “and they mentioned that it was something so far above and beyond what any other school was doing and what their expectations were... So we decided that in the best interest of everybody we would not be as aggressive with it.”
This meant, no longer making the wellness check required. They are still highly encouraged, but no longer required.
“If cases go up, then we will again [require the wellness checks].”
Along with interviewing Dean Carr, who is responsible for anything to do with Covid-19 at Judge, I also interviewed Ms. Keller, the health teacher at Judge, and sent surveys to the student body about their opinions on the wellness checks.
Ms. Keller, was unaware of any changes to the requirements of the wellness checks, saying, “ I have been logging in every morning as a teacher and I’m still doing those checks… I didn’t know we stopped requiring the safety checks. I still do them every morning, I assume the faculty are still checking and doing those checks.”
With Ms. Keller’s statement, it was safe to assume that the faculty was still continuing the wellness checks, but based on the student surveys I sent out, 54.9% of the 173 students who completed the survey, still submit a wellness check every morning. Even further, only 40.5% of the students were actually taking their temperature every morning.
In addition to students answering honestly to whether or not they truthfully completed the wellness checks, some also offered solutions to making the wellness checks more reliable.
The most common suggestion was to do temperature checks at the door before entering school or requiring the teachers to take each of their students’ temperatures before entering first period.
An anonymous student wrote, “I know it would take a lot longer, but daily temperature checks would be better. I know asymptomatic people don’t have high temperatures, but it better than nothing.”
While interviewing students, Oliver Liston, a senior, stated, “I think in terms of the wellness check, [Judge] could have a better system so that if a kid forgets to do their wellness check that they could enforce that immediately maybe with a system of checking at the door.”
Another senior, Dominic Burns commented, “I can see that the students may be lying [on the wellness checks] in certain situations but overall I think with how serious the pandemic is, that students aren’t going to be lying, and they’re going to take them pretty seriously.”
Whether the administration at Judge will choose to change their methods, one thing was clear after hearing from not only the administrators, but also teachers, and students, Judge has done a very good job at preventing the spread of Covid-19 among the student body so far.
Dean Carr made it clear that the admin was spending a lot of time and money on making the building as sanitary as possible. “We actually ended up spending about $400,000, putting in protective equipment ordering masks for students. putting up plexiglass and doing those sorts of things.”
Last but not least, Ms. Keller gave a “big shout out to our custodial crew who are working really hard to make this school clean, as we have seen them walking through the building, all day long spraying and wiping and cleaning so they’ve done a really great job!”
