North Scott School District superintendent Joe Stutting has tested positive for the coronavirus, and in an unrelated exposure, 12 high school students and the entire Lancer sophomore football team will be quarantined for two weeks.
In a phone call Saturday afternoon, Stutting said he tested positive after he was one of several hundred people who attended Princeton’s summer fest event at Woomert Park on Saturday, Aug. 22.
Stutting said he began feeling ill on Thursday, and was tested on Friday. He is confident that no other North Scott administrator or Central office employee has been exposed through him since they all wear masks and are six feet apart.
“I’ve personally been told the names of four or five other individuals who were at the same event, that have tested positive,” said Stutting. “When I told the Scott County Health Department where I had been, they were well aware of the spread at that event.
“It was an outdoor event, and I let my guard down. I made a mistake. I don’t know if there’s a superintendent in Scott Country, or this part of the state, who has tested positive. I’m probably the first.”
Stutting said that his body aches, his head hurts and he has a cough.
“I’m symptomatic, and hopefully it won’t get any worse,” he said.
Stutting said that he would be informing school district parents and staff members with a video message either Saturday night or Sunday.
“I want them to know I tested positive,” he said, “ but what I’m really asking everybody, is that in order for school to stay in session, and keep activities going, we need everybody doing their part, both inside and outside of school.
“We need to minimize the number of cases that we have.”
Stutting said he will be quarantining with his wife, Jamie, for two weeks.
“Hopefully I’ll be feeling better by Monday,” he said. “At least I can do a lot of what I do from home.”
It was bound to happen at some point in the season, but no one expected it to be barely seven minutes into the season opener.
North Scott’s sophomore team was leading Muscatine 7-0 with 3:18 left in the first quarter at Lancer Stadium Friday night, when word came down that a Lancer player had tested positive for COVID-19.
Teams were immediately pulled off the field and the game was canceled.
The student was in class on Tuesday, the first day of school, and attended football practice that night. He was asymptomatic, and got tested because he had been exposed to someone who tested positive.
He had not had any contact with the school since Tuesday.
Saturday afternoon, Stutting said that contact tracing had been completed with the Scott County Health Department, and it was determined that the entire sophomore football team, as well as 12 students who had interaction with the student in the classroom, would be quarantined for 14 days.
“The student was in school all day on Tuesday,” said Stutting, “and the procedures we had in place limited his exposure. To only have a dozen people at risk speaks well for the procedures we put into place.
“You hope people understand that any one of us can get this virus, and never know we have it, and spread it. This isn’t a time to blame people or point fingers. We can’t let this challenge define who we are. We have to move forward.”
Stutting said that everybody impacted by Saturday’s tracing would get a personal call from the school district, as well as a call from the Scott County health department.
He also said that school officials aren’t necessarily surprised to have a student test positive.
“When we went back to school, we knew that we were creating an environment to hopefully minimize the exposure,” he said, “but we knew we couldn’t make it impossible to bring the virus in. There wasn’t much we could’ve done differently that would have caught this.”
Stutting said that even though he let his guard down, students have done their part.
“The student who was positive just didn’t know he had it,” said Stutting. “He didn’t do anything wrong. It’s not a perfect science.
“This isn’t anything that we didn’t expect. Everybody was well aware that coming back to school was an exposure, and this probably won’t be the last time that we have to do social tracing within the school setting.
“However, every time we have an exposure or interaction, we will learn from it and update our procedures.”