Last fall, as Odessa High School brought some students back to campus with hybrid instruction, school officials insisted mask wearing, social distancing and contact tracing would keep students and faculty safe. And at the beginning of the semester, things seemed to be going OK. But then a spike in coronavirus cases hit town, putting the school’s safety plan to the test.
In part three of our four-part series, we follow what happened when multiple positive virus tests and a student quarantine stretched the school’s nurses to capacity, fractured friendships and forced some seniors to miss a critical rite of passage: the last football game of their high school career.
Transcripts of each episode are available by the next workday. You can find them at the top of the page.
Odessa was produced by Annie Brown, Sindhu Gnanasambandan and Soraya Shockley; with help from Mitch Borden and Diana Nguyen; edited by Liz O. Baylen and Lisa Tobin; engineered by Brad Fisher; original compositions by Dan Powell and Marion Lozano; and fact-checking by Ben Phelan. Special thanks to Larissa Anderson, Clifford J. Levy, Dana Goldstein, Kate Taylor, Clifford Krauss, Apoorva Mandavilli, Ken Belson, Jan Hoffman, Benedict Carey, Nora Keller, Lauren Jackson and Laura Kim.
Special thanks to the staff and students of the Ector County Independent School District.
