Community rallies behind Surrey music teacher battling COVID-19 in ICU

A Surrey school community is rallying in support of a popular music teacher battling COVID-19 in an intensive care unit.

Fraser Health declared an outbreak at Cambridge Elementary, where Darlene Lourenco teaches, Saturday night and closed the school for two weeks. Staff and students have all been told to self-isolate.

“Thankfully we found out early this morning that her condition has stabilized,” friend and colleague Carri McMillan told Global News, Sunday.

“Not improving, but stabilizing — and her husband is, as far as I know, still asymptomatic.”

Lourenco has been in hospital for five days, and while she wasn’t put on a ventilator, she had been requiring a steadily increasing supply of oxygen, McMillan said.

News of Lourenco’s hospitalization spread rapidly through the Cambridge community, prompting a GoFundMe campaign that by Sunday had raised nearly $30,000.

“She’s kind of the light of the school. She works so hard, does so many things,” McMillan said.

“The children just love her music program … she puts together such wonderful productions and things that involve the whole school and really is kind of one of those centerpieces of our community.”

This is not the first time the Lourenco family has faced adversity.

4:12 Courage to Come Back: Lindsey Lourenco

The couple lost their daughter Lindsey after a multi-year battle with leukemia in 2014.

“Even throughout their struggle with their daughter and her health crisis, they were always involved in fundraising and advocating for other families and other children through the (B.C. Children’s Miracle Weekend), through the B.C. Children’s Hospital, all kinds of things,” McMillan said.

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“They were just tireless supporters and tireless workers on behalf of everybody who was suffering … I know that’s one of the reasons that the community has pulled so closely behind her to try and support her family.”

Darlene’s husband Tony, while showing no symptoms of COVID, has tested positive and remains quarantined at home and unable to run his business, McMillan said.

She said she’s hopeful Lourenco’s case can help put a face to the daily COVID-19 statistics that have become background noise to many.

“Right now, it’s like, ‘There’s 617 cases today,’ or everybody’s a ‘case.’ … Everybody’s a case, and everybody is a deeply loved and needed person,” she said.

“I think the whole community would be behind me in saying that they just want everybody to matter and everybody to think beyond yourself and your family and your needs and really consider what your actions may be doing in this time.”

4:30 Surrey Teachers’ Association weighs in on school closure

Lourenco’s school was one of three in the Lower Mainland that have shuttered for 14 days, though the only one ordered to close.

Jarvis Elementary School in Delta and Al-Hidayah School in New Westminster have both advised Fraser Health that they will also shut for two weeks after challenges in staffing levels brought on by COVID-19 clusters there.

On Sunday, the BC Teachers’ Federation renewed its call to cap class sizes in the Fraser Health region, where cases are surging, at 15 and to implement a mandatory mask policy in the classroom.