To the Editor:

I’m writing in response to your recent article, “Norway elementary school gathering leads to COVID-19 outbreak,” published Thursday, May 12. I’m curious what research and investigating was done that led your report to, not only link but, flat out blame, our ‘Donuts’ family event to the Covid outbreak and school shutdown?

From reading the article, I don’t see any evidence cited from medical professionals or school personnel indicating anything of the sort. Cited in the article was the rise in numbers from Friday to Monday, but I believe Covid is still measured on a 4-day incubation period, is it not? So those Monday numbers likely didn’t occur from Friday contact.

Additionally, it was already determined that our school would be shut down by 8 a.m. Tuesday morning – before any further numbers could be reported. It seems this article is no more than speculation and quite frankly, I expect more from the news.

Perhaps I’m also extremely disappointed because your reporter was invited to this event to help our school celebrate, after what has been agreed upon by many as the hardest school year yet in this pandemic. After the challenges our district has faced this year (pandemic aside), our community needed something to celebrate and your reporter turned our joy into yet another scandal.

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised since the majority of questions asked in the interview were Covid & mask-mandate related and less about the planning, the community support, or the hope we provided in holding this event.

Even the adjacent article, “Rowe draws a big crowd for family breakfast and book fair” was wildly misquoted (we served about 468 individuals – nowhere near over 1,000). I expected more community support from a neighbor.

Holly Hill

Norway

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