Proactive move
Proactive move follows post-holiday surge in cases
Albany public, private schools begin testing students, teachers, staff for COVID -19./
Public and private schools in the city of Albany began “proactively ” testing students, teachers, and staff for COVID -19 Monday in response to a postholiday surge in coronavirus cases.
Albany City School District has begun randomly testing 10 percent of its on-site population over a two week period, school officials said.
Tests are voluntary; the parents of 902 students and 319 employees signed consent forms agreeing to be in a pool of people who may asked to provide a non-invasive nasal swab. Some 90 tests administered Monday and Tuesday yielded no positives, a school official said.
More than 9,000 students are enrolled in the district, but most students in grades seven through 12 have been learning remotely since the start of the school year.
Students opting for in-person instruction in prekindergarten through grade 6, and in self-contained special education classes at all grade levels, returned to school on Monday following a one-week pause.
The cohort being tested includes employees working in-person at district offices at Academy Park, Harriet Gibbons Student Services Center, Essex Street, and Tony Clement Center for Education.
The Albany Academies tested its entire on-campus population for the virus last week in preparation for a return to the classroom Monday.
The Albany private school, which enrolls roughly 800 in-person and remote students, shut down in early December following a sharp spike in the cases after Thanksgiving break. More than 45 students and employees tested positive for the virus in the first week of December.
“We did a blanket closure, which was the right thing to do at the time with the information that we had. If we had this type of information... we would have known the prevalence of the virus is in the upper school, not the lower school,” Head of School Chris Lauricella said.
Albany Academies plans to continue testing on-site students and staff weekly to supplement its other virus mitigation measures. The school is partnering with a company that offers a convenient take-home test.
“These tests, it’s not a panacea, it’s not going to do anything except give us good data about what we are dealing with,” Lauricella said.
The nasal samples can be self-administered at home and processed in a Maryland lab in batches of 12 to 18. The tests produce results within two days and cost between $15 and $20 per test. The first batch of 607 tests resulted in three positives, school officials said.
So far, there is no explicit mandate for schools to begin testing. Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo in December said that New York schools located in a coronavirus hotspot could keep their doors open if they test a portion of their on-site populations. The state has not designated any part of the region as a hotspot or microcluster.
Albany school leaders say they are using the tests as a supplementary tool to protect employees, students, and staff and better understand the trajectory of the disease. The state Department of Health has provided hundreds of thousands of rapid test kits to schools free of charge.
Most school districts in the Capital Region have sought permission from parents and
trained their nurses to administer rapid tests, while some have contracted with outside organizations to perform the surveillance testing, but officials say they are waiting for the state to declare the area a microcluster before beginning the screenings.