Washington, D.C., school employees were forced to drive to Costco for clean water after the city shut down drinking fountains as part of its stringent COVID-19 policies, according to a local teacher.
D.C. has shut off drinking fountains in public schools during the COVID-19 pandemic as a "health and safety measure," but it has failed to maintain supplies for hundreds of children. Bethany Rosera, a teacher at Stuart-Hobson Middle School, told the Washington Free Beacon her school ran out of the water jugs the district had provided as an alternative on Tuesday, leaving students and educators without drinking water.
"We ran out of water [on Tuesday] and our admin drove twice to Costco to fill up their own car with water in the middle of the day so we could get through the end of the day and have some for [Wednesday] if a delivery didn't occur," Rosera said.
The school "communicated with [D.C. Public Schools] about the situation but the water was still not replaced," Rosera said, so she took to Twitter on Tuesday to bring attention to the situation. After her Twitter thread went viral, a delivery truck arrived at the school first thing Wednesday morning to replace the water. Rosera attributed the city's prompt response to the attention her posts received.
