Teachers and students knew her as Windsor Elementary’s “songbird” for her beautiful singing voice. Friends called her “Demi.”
She was diagnosed with COVID-19 on Friday, Sept. 4, exactly one week after she spent a day in her Columbia school for teacher professional development. By Monday, she was dead. Bannister was 28 years old.
Bannister is far from the first educator to perish from the ongoing pandemic. According to the American Federation of Teachers, 210 of its members have died since the outbreak began last spring. In New York alone, the State Education Department reported 75 deaths – 31 of them educators – at the close of the last school year.
To be clear, teachers are at higher risk of exposure to the virus – though not as high as health care professionals and first responders – and the recent deaths are counted among the approximately 1,000 people who are dying from the virus daily.
But Bannister’s death, along with at least five other teachers scattered across Missouri, Mississippi, South Carolina, Iowa and Oklahoma who’ve died from COVID-19 since the start of the new school year, reignites fears over how and whether education officials can protect the country’s 3.3 million public school teachers – one-third of whom are over the age of 50 or have some type of medical condition that puts them at risk for a more severe infection should they contract the virus.