COVID-19 Pandemic

Type	Disaster
Date	March 13, 2020 to May 11, 2023

The COVID-19 pandemic reached Billerica in March 2020. The town's first case was reported on March 13, 2020, three days after Governor Charlie Baker declared a state of emergency and two days after the World Health Organization declared a pandemic. Over the next three years the town closed and reopened its buildings, moved its elections and town meetings, taught its children at home and then in split shifts, and turned its Health Department into a case-tracing and vaccination service. The Health Department followed up about 3,000 of the 3,675 laboratory-reported cases in the year to June 2021, and counted 9,133 more in the year to June 2022, when the Omicron variant spread.

Preparation began in late February 2020, when the School Department, Board of Health, Police Department and the town's Emergency Management Team met with Town Manager John C. Curran to review cleaning and communication protocols. Students and staff left their schools on the afternoon of Thursday, March 12, 2020 and did not return to the buildings that school year; the Council on Aging closed to the public in mid-March, recreation programs were suspended, public meetings were cancelled, and on Tuesday, March 17 all town buildings, the Billerica Town Hall (1895) and the Billerica Public Library among them, closed to the public. Town employees worked from home while the Town Manager's office stayed in Town Hall and issued daily reports on social media with "active case counts and pertinent information regarding affected demographics." The library offered curbside service, left its wireless network on for patrons in the parking lot and began a twice-weekly "Gratitude Call In" for isolated older residents; it reopened in July 2020.

The Health Department, led by Kristel Bennett, Director of Public Health since November 2019, took on the enforcement of the governor's emergency orders, forty of which had been issued by the end of June 2020. The public health nurse's hours rose from twenty a week to more than forty, the health agents spent their time on COVID-19 complaints, education and enforcement, and the clerk kept a new tracking system for cases. In the year to June 2021 the department investigated 249 complaints, 115 of them about masks; the farmers market was cancelled; and when vaccine became available the public health nurse ran clinics for residents, giving 1,250 doses, including boosters, in the year to June 2022. Volunteers of the Upper Merrimack Valley Medical Reserve Corps staffed the COVID-19 and flu clinics at the Senior Center and Town Hall, and the town's Emergency Management volunteers worked at testing and vaccine sites and helped with the rush at the Food Pantry. In the fiscal year 2022 the department created a Community Services Coordinator to connect residents with local, state and federal help. Reported cases fell to 1,145 in the year to June 2023 and 741 the next year.

The pandemic changed the way the town governed itself. On March 19, 2020 the Board of Selectmen moved the annual town election from April 6 to June 6, 2020. The Annual Spring Town Meeting, usually held in May, met instead on Saturday, June 20, 2020 at Billerica Memorial High School, with each precinct in a separate room, the members socially distanced and the rooms linked by Zoom, in what the town clerk, Shirley E. Schult, called "a marathon session." A Special Town Meeting took the place of the fall annual meeting on Saturday, October 3, 2020, again at the high school, and the spring meeting of May 8, 2021 and the fall meetings of October 5, 2021 met there as well. Town Meeting returned to the Maurice A. Buck Memorial Auditorium in Town Hall in May 2022.

For the schools, Superintendent Timothy Piwowar wrote, "the 2020-2021 school year was unlike any other in the history of the Billerica Public Schools." After a spring of remote learning, with the state MCAS tests cancelled, a Return to School Working Group of teachers, nurses, parents, a student and the director of the Boys and Girls Club drew up a reopening plan with three models: full in-person, hybrid and full remote. Under the hybrid model each class was split into cohorts A and B, which attended in person two days a week and learned from home on the other three; the Hajjar School opened on September 16, 2020. Federal money paid for much of it: the district's Coronavirus Relief Fund allocation of $1,068,525 bought remote learning equipment, protective equipment, cleaning supplies and building improvements, and the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief grants brought $352,744, $796,407 and $1,835,522 more for nurses, substitutes, tutors, summer programs and counseling. In 2021-22 all students returned full time, with masks, spaced desks and one-way halls; the district ran more than 14,000 COVID-19 tests, including pooled testing and a "test and stay" program, and sent 2,800 home testing kits to staff and students every other week in the spring. The state lifted the school mask requirement in late February 2022.

The Council on Aging reopened on July 6, 2020 with guidance from the Town Manager and the Board of Health, and that summer it ran programs under a rented tent paid for by Elder Services of Merrimack Valley. Its staff later wrote of the calls from residents who rang "simply to hear a voice and to share how Covid has entrapped them." The town clerk recorded 385, 395 and 409 deaths in the fiscal years 2020, 2021 and 2022, against 330 in 2019; the reports do not give causes or a count of COVID-19 deaths.

The longest-lasting mark of the pandemic on the town was the federal recovery money of the American Rescue Plan Act. The town's ARPA fund took in $6,581,797 in the fiscal year 2024, when it spent $3,321,641, and spent $3,708,038 more the next year, much of it on parks: new playground equipment and a picnic pavilion at Kohlrausch Park, the Billerica Skate Park at the Peggy Hannon-Rizza Recreation Complex, paid for with ARPA and Community Preservation money, and a park planned on the site of the Old Ditson School on Boston Road, demolished in 2021, where the farmers market now meets. The federal and state public health emergencies ended on May 11, 2023. Billerica had last closed its schools and churches for an epidemic during the 1918 Influenza Epidemic.

People

John C. Curran: Town Manager who led the town's pandemic response, closed Town Hall and issued daily case reports.
Shirley E. Schult: Town clerk who ran the postponed 2020 election and the socially distanced town meetings at the high school.
Timothy Piwowar: Superintendent of schools who led remote learning, the 2020 reopening plan and the return to full in-person school.

COVID-19 Pandemic

COVID-19 Pandemic

People

References