Charters sue city
Say excluded from COVID-19 school testing
A group of New York City charter schools is suing the city for excluding them from the mandatory weekly COVID-19 testing program currently operating in city public schools — arguing they’re entitled to the same health services under state law.
In a lawsuit filed Monday in Manhattan Supreme Court, five city charter schools and 10 families argue that their publicly funded but privately run schools need the same robust testing as public schools to safely open in-person classes — and can’t offer it without the financial and logistical support of the city government.
“The entire city is in a public health crisis,” said James Merriman, CEO of the New York City Charter School Center.
“In response, and to their credit, New York City has created a vast testing and tracing system for public school students. But unfortunately, they have refused to make that same system available to charter school students, creating an unnecessary hurdle and neglecting public safety.”
The city public school system’s massive testing apparatus has been a major piece of its halting efforts to restart in-person learning.
New York City health officials have conducted more than 200,000 onsite COVID-19 tests of students and staff since city public schools reopened for in-person classes in September, finding an overall positivity rate of 0.4%.
Officials ramped up the frequency and scale of that testing this month, when a portion of the city school system reopened amid rising COVID-19 community rates after a brief systemwide closure.
At least 20% of students and staff at each Education Department school are now supposed to be tested onsite each week in order to gather robust data on the spread of the virus in schools and catch any possible outbreaks before they grow. Schools with two or more positive tests reported within a week to the city’s “Situation Room” are closed temporarily for investigation and contact tracing, and shuttered for two weeks if disease detectives can’t determine a link between the cases.
Charter school leaders say they’ve asked from the beginning of the school year to be included in the city’s school-specific testing and contact tracing operations, but got nowhere.
“We were told that charters would not be allowed to take part in random testing,” said Janelle Bradshaw, the CEO of Public Prep, a network of four charter schools in the Bronx and the Lower East Side.
Bradshaw said her network has scrambled for months to find other ways to ensure adequate testing of kids and staff, but hasn’t found an answer.
Requiring students and teachers to get regularly tested outside of school brought a host of new challenges, she said.
“We learned the difficulty families would have in accessing testing,” she said. “We had families waiting anywhere between three days and a week and a half to get their results.”
Charter school staffers don’t get access to the same expedited testing results as Education Department staff at nearly two dozen public testing sites, further complicating the schools’ efforts to ensure timely testing, Bradshaw said.
The network looked into paying for its own onsite COVID-19 testing, but discovered that the PCR tests used in city schools range between $87 and $120 a test. “Just multiply that by number of students and staff per week,” and it becomes a financial impossibility, Bradshaw said.
Without an adequate testing plan in place and community spread growing, Bradshaw decided she couldn’t keep her schools open for in-person classes, and switched to remote-only learning until March.
Charter leaders and families say their exclusion from the city’s school testing programs violates state law requiring officials to provide students at nonpublic schools “any or all of the health and welfare services ... to or for children attending the public schools of the district.”
The law specifically lists “administration of health screening tests” as one example of the type of service districts are obligated to offer students of nonpublic schools if they provide the tests in public ones.
Education Department spokeswoman Danielle Filson said, “There is no legal requirement for the [Education Department] to conduct our random sample testing program in charter schools; however, all charter school staff and students can get tested for free at any of the [NYC Health + Hospitals] testing sites.”
She added that state officials provide free testing kits for schools that fall into state-designated hotspot zones and are required to perform weekly testing to remain open.
The city’s school testing operation is already facing huge logistical challenges.
Officials haven’t yet reopened middle and high schools for in-person classes, partly because they need more time to build up testing capacity.
“The amount of testing is a crucial piece of the equation,” Mayor de Blasio said in late November.
“Since we’re moving to weekly testing, that’s going to take a lot of capacity. We wanted to make sure we can do that consistently and well, and that’s why it’s important to go by phases.”
Expanding the program to charter schools would add even more strain to an already taxed public health system.
But charter school leaders say the law is clear, and including them in the testing program is a matter of fairness.
“In the midst of a public health crisis that is impacting all of us, the notion of excluding charter school families in the Bronx and Lower East Side who are already dealing with food insecurity, unemployment and the devastating impact of COVID-19, is unjust,” said Bradshaw.