WARRENTON, Va. — UPDATE:
As of 8/19, FCPS updated its numbers to 370 students in quarantine and 72 active cases across the county.
Original story:
It's only been a week since school started in Fauquier County, and already hundreds of students have been forced to quarantine because of COVID exposures.
Fauquier schools said it's quarantining 244 children after possible COVID exposures. As of Thursday morning, 28 students have tested positive, along with five staffers, according to the schools' COVID dashboard.
"It's frightening, really frightening," Anna Hoover, a mother of three children in Fauquier County schools, said.
Her oldest already had COVID. She said he had a high fever for eight days, and at one point his lips turned blue as he struggled to get oxygen.
"One of the scariest things about it though is that he was my healthy kid," Hoover said.
Hoover said her youngest child gets viral induced asthma.
"He has had a cold and it's knocked him out for weeks," she said.
Superintendent David Jeck is pleading with parents to ask their children to wear masks in class and on buses in hopes of keeping schools open.
"Wherever possible, please have your child wear a mask. Please!" Jeck said in a video for parents Tuesday night.
The day before school opened, the school board decided to make masks optional.
"We were not created to have a fabric on our faces!" said one speaker.
"Young children need to see their teacher's facial expressions," school board chair Donna Grove added. "They need to see the teacher forming words. They need to see smiles."
When Virginia Governor Ralph Northam ordered schools to mandate masks, Fauquier relented. But it has allowed 15.3% of parents to opt their children out of the mask mandate online with a couple of clicks and no documentation of a medical or religious explanation.
"It's hard to fathom that Fauquier could capitulate to these really vocal parents that are so anti-mask, anti-safety, and anti-good-health," Hoover said.
A spokeswoman for the school district insists that Fauquier is following the governor's mandate.