One day.

That's how long Vaughn Neff's son, Gabe Neff-Taylor, was at Ross Sheppard High School this week before a single confirmed case of COVID-19 sent him back home again.

Three classes of Grade 10 students and their teachers — close to 100 people — are now in quarantine at home for 14 days after someone in the group tested positive for COVID-19.

It's just one of 16 confirmed cases of COVID-19 at schools across Alberta in the initial days of school re-opening.

The family got the news about the potential exposure on Tuesday, as they were getting ready to head out the door.

The school vice-principal was on the phone, telling them to stay home.

"It was a little bit unnerving and a little bit frantic, trying to put a bunch of things into place," Neff told CBC's Edmonton AM.

"It wasn't the best day."

Rather than going out the door, the family booked COVID-19 swabs. They got the tests the next day and Neff said they were told it could be up to seven days for results, since the lab has a backlog of cases.

Even if Gabe Neff-Taylor tests negative, he will still be required to stay home for 14 days, but he will continue to do schoolwork from home.

Both Neff and her husband are working from home, as a precaution. Her younger son was allowed to remain in class at his junior high.

Neff said her son doesn't know who in his class tested positive.

"We have no way of knowing if it was a five-second contact, or if he sat beside this person," she said.

They were told the contact could have occurred during a shared gym class, which is why three classes are being told to isolate at home.

All other parents at Ross Sheppard received a letter Tuesday telling them about the positive case. The letter said the school was deep-cleaned before students returned to class.

Neff said the early positive test does make her second-guess the decision to send her son back to school in person. It also makes her question the government's school re-entry strategy.

"I definitely think there could have been more funding given to the schools," she said.

"I think our school and our school board has done the best with what limited resources they had. But if the class sizes had been, say 15 kids, instead of 30 kids, all of a sudden you only have 30 kids absent, or 45, as opposed to 96. And for every one of those kids absent, their family has to deal with it."

Paul McLoughlin, political columnist for Edmonton AM and publisher of the newsletter Alberta Scan, said the government was expecting to have a certain number of cases of COVID-19 in schools.

However, he said the timing, on Day 1 of class, is certainly not helping parents feel better about the government's back-to-school plan.

"I think the speed was one of the things that added to the anxiety of parents," McLoughlin told Edmonton AM.

School re-entry plans were designed to be flexible, moving between scenarios including in-person classes, a mix of in-person and online classes and entirely online classes, said McLoughlin.

Now, it's up to the government to decide what to do if cases continue to pop up in schools.

"It's early days," he said. The major issue at this point is, "How bad does it have to get, before the provincial government will actually say 'Whoa, we have to re-evaluate what scenario we are actually in,'" he added.

McLoughlin pointed out that Premier Jason Kenney is currently putting the responsibility on individuals to take health precautions, rather than making changes to the way schools or businesses operate.

"We have to be focused not just on the imperative of saving lives, but also saving livelihoods," Kenney told reporters Wednesday.

Also Wednesday, the province launched a map to track COVID-19 outbreaks in schools. The province classifies a school outbreak as two or more cases in which the disease could have been acquired or transmitted in the school.

In Edmonton, the province has identified positive COVID-19 cases at Archbishop MacDonald High School, Louis St. Laurent, École Sainte-Jeanne-d'Arc and at Ross Sheppard.

In a normal year, there are around 750,000 students and 90,000 staff in the province's 2,400 schools.