When students at Lafayette Middle School in Mississippi returned to campus this week, teacher Nacoma James didn’t join them. The 42-year-old educator, who had been coaching the high school football team at summer workouts, was self-quarantining after developing COVID-19 symptoms. On Thursday, school officials got word that James had died, and they are now trying to figure out which students had contact with him. “Does all this have me worried? Absolutely. I want to keep all of our students as safe as I possibly can. This all worries me a great deal,” school Superintendent Adam Pugh said, adding that he was crushed by the teacher’s death. “I’ve known [James] since he was 13 years old because he was a student of mine in one of my very first classes. He was such a loving person and a brilliant young man. We’re devastated by this. This has been a really rough day.”
