In the most ambitious plan of its kind, Los Angeles Unified has announced plans to test its roughly 600,000 students and 75,000 staff as the nation’s second-largest school district prepares for the eventual return to instruction.
Los Angeles Unified Superintendent Austin Beutner said in a statement that the program will provide regular Covid testing and contact tracking for school staff, students and families.
“Extraordinary circumstances call for extraordinary action, and although this test and contact detection effort is unusual, it is necessary and appropriate,” Beutner said.
The test program is set to begin Monday, with additional services to roll out as the school year continues. Over time, tests will be available to all children and staff members in the sprawling school district that has more than 600,000 students. The district said services are also being offered to family members of students and staff who test positive for Covid-19.
Los Angeles Unified, which has been closed for personal instruction since March, announced plans last month to begin the new school year online as business numbers grow. The school district must wait for the state to clear plans to reopen schools for instruction in person, although that may not happen in the near future.
Beutner said case numbers in Los Angeles are still far from state guidelines for a safe return to school and said instruction for individuals for all students is “some time away.”
“The level of new cases in Los Angeles is still two and a half times the state guidelines, and although the proportion of positive tests is below the state thresholds, it is still significantly higher than the standards of the World Health Organization and those “They are in place for New York,” Beutner told the Los Angeles Times.
Tests will be prioritized for staff already working at schools, and will include staff members assigned to the childcare centers that have remained open to children of teachers and other staff. Eventually, tests will be opened to all students in the ward. The frequency of testing will be based on health metrics as the pandemic evolves.
Beutner said in an op-ed published over the weekend that the test effort will cost the school district an additional $ 300 per student over the course of a school year. Although he did not include total costs, figures based on just the enrollment of the ward student enrollment increase the price tag to at least $ 1.8 million.
Joining the effort will be scientists from UCLA, Stanford University, Johns Hopkins and former education secretary Arne Duncan, who will oversee a task force alongside Beutner.
Beutner said he hopes the findings are from the effort will inform the efforts of other school districts to monitor and control the disease. To date, New York City remains the only major U.S. school district with plans to open classrooms for part-time, personal instruction at the beginning of the fall semester.
At present, test plans in schools in New York City remain less defined. The city has asked all staff members to test before the instruction resumes on September 10 and said they should be tested regularly throughout the school year – but has not yet made clear how students will be tested, the New York Times reported.
Los Angeles’ sweeping plans to test students and staff come as new data shows an exponential rise in Covid-19 cases among children in the US. States nationwide reported 97,000 cases among children in just the last two weeks of July.
The uproar has left experts worried that school districts could burn an extra spike in cases of numbers if they move too fast to reopen.
Data from the Center on Reinventing Public Education, which has compiled the plan for school districts for instruction, shows that most school districts plan this fall for a return to personal instruction, if only in part, and that most will learn remotely offer for families who choose.
But tensions have flared up between school officials and parents in states like Georgia and Florida, where officials have moved from schools to schools reopening for personal learning amid growing cases of coronavirus.
“Bringing people together – whether it’s children or older adults – is the worst thing you can do in the face of the pandemic,” said John Swartzberg, a clinical professor emeritus of infectious diseases and vaccinology at UC Berkeley’s School of Public Health. .
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