The Los Angeles Unified School District announced plans Sunday for a broad program that will test hundreds of thousands of students and faculty for COVID-19 as the school year formally begins this week.
The program will begin on Monday and will be overseen in the coming months by the school district, which is testing roughly 600,000 students and 75,000 staff amid preparations for the possible return to personal instruction, district superintendent Austin Beutner said in a statement. .
“Extraordinary circumstances call for extraordinary action, and although this test and contact detection effort is unusual, it is necessary and appropriate,” Beutner said. “This program will also provide important educational benefits for students by getting them back to school earlier and safer and keeping them there.”
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A health care worker gives a girl a throat swab test at a coronavirus drive-in test center (COVID-19) at MTO Shahmaghsoudi School of Islamic Sufism on August 11, 2020 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Mario Tama / Getty Images)
Last month in Los Angeles Unified had announced plans to start the new school year online due to an increase in number of cases and will have to wait for permission from public health authorities before it can restore instruction to individuals, which was suspended in March.
Beutner said the spread of COVID-19 in the Los Angeles area is still far from California’s guidelines and that any decision regarding the return of students to schools is still “some time away.”
“The level of new cases in Los Angeles is still 2 times the state guidelines, and although the proportion of positive tests is below state thresholds, it is still higher than the standards of the World Health Organization and those.” t are in place for New York, “Beutner told the Los Angeles Times.
Under the program, tests will first be delivered to staff already working at schools and their children, according to the statement. Tests will then be delivered to all staff and students over time, with the aim of the first phase to establish a baseline.
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The program is expected to cost roughly $ 300 per student over the course of the year, bringing the Times total to an estimated $ 150 million.
How it will be funded is unclear, but the district has already received hundreds of millions of state and federal dollars to fund its efforts for coronavirus, according to the paper. A partnership was formed with scientists from UCLA, Stanford University, Johns Hopkins, and former Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, who will oversee a task force alongside Beutner.
The program was shut down because the number and number of COVID-19 cases among children increased “slowly” between March and July, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Friday. New York’s larger school system has yet to clarify how it will manage testing and traces of contact.
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“Since schools were closed, science has been our guide and science creates the basis for this effort,” Beutner added. “This collaboration is the result of months of round the clock work by many, and I am grateful for their efforts to get us to this point.”
