District starts mass testing
Around 8 a.m., before students started their first class, Principal Justin Saunders was in the Somerset High School gymwednesday arranging neat lines of traffic cones 6 feet apart.
Itwas the first day of a newroutine at Somerset Independent School District: a mass testing for the coronavirus developed by Community Labs, a San Antonio-based nonprofit that promises the ability to process thousands of tests a day, with results available within 24 hours.
The Southwest Bexar County school district agreed to demonstrate the systemin hopes the pilot programwould speed the return to classroom learning at its seven schools.
“We’re excited about the opportunity,” Superintendent Saul Hinojosa said as students began to trickle into the gym to be tested during first period. “Next to a vaccine, we believe that mass testing is the best way to suppress the virus. … The goal is to bring kids back into school and to keep our schools safe.”
If the trial run is successful, Community Labs
hopes to use tests on other asymptomatic “micropopulations,” like other schools and businesses, to prevent people who do not know they have COVID-19 from spreading it to others.
The polymerase chain reaction, or PCR, test is “the gold standard” for fighting the spread of COVID-19, yielding fast and accurate results to facilitate a safe rebound from the effects of the pandemic, Community Labs founders said in announcing the program last week.
The nonprofit was created by San Antonio investors Graham Weston, J. Bruce Bugg Jr. and J. Tullos Wells, working with BioBridge Global, a major medical nonprofit also based here, and with UT Health San Antonio.
The tests cost $35 each, which might drop as Community Labs reaches economies of scale, its spokeswoman Mary Ullmann Japhet said. Somerset ISD is receiving the testing service for free, Hinojosa said.
Some 214 people at the high school were tested Wednesday morning. The plan is to rapidly make testing available to everyone who wants it among the district's more than 4,000 students and 650 employees, Hinojosa said.
“I'm hoping that within two weeks we'll be able to go full scale at all our campuses — every employee, every student,” he said. “As soon as possible, as soon aswe can get this testing to scale, we want to welcome back all our students.”
This week, it will be just the high school staff, nurses, police officers and high school students
back on campuswho are involved in extracurricular activities and whose parents had signed consent forms. Students do not have to be tested to take classes in person, but they must if they want to participate in sports or other extracurricular activities, Hinojosa said.
Most area school districts have allowed limited groups of students to return to classrooms and plan to gradually increase their numbers if parents agree. About 40 percent of Somerset ISD'S students have returned to school for face-to-face learning since the option became available to them Sept. 8, Hinojosa said.
Testing students on a weekly basis and teachers twice a week
will allow greater numbers at Somerset ISD to return safely. It was unclear Wednesday morning what percentage of students and staff had opted to be tested, but it seemed like a majority, Hinojosa said. Testing data received later in the week will provide a clearer picture, he said.
“It feels a little reassuring, quite honestly, that there's stuff in the process to gather data, which will help us, hopefully, to get things back to normal,” said Jennifer Meers, a theater teacher at Somerset High School.
The PCR tests offered by Community Labs are less invasive and more comfortable than many other available tests. Students and staff were able to swab their own
lower nostrils with a short Q-tiplike swab for five seconds before dropping it into a tube.
A number of parents were still wary of having their children tested at school. In a virtual town hall meeting Monday, some asked questions about the nature of the test itself, or about what would happen with the test results and how they would be used. At least one parent incorrectly suggested the pandemicwas a hoax, Hinojosa said.
Political reasons for objecting to the test haven't been encountered in significant numbers, Hinojosa said, adding, “We put that aside.”
“We want to be proactive,” he added. “Everybody's subject to their own opinion, and I respect whatever opinion they have, but we have to do what's best for our students.”
Somerset ISD officialswere able to ease most concerns by providing more details about the district's contact tracing plans, he said. When a student or staff member tests positive, the district will recommend a diagnostic test from a medical professional and ask for self-isolation for10days unless the medical professional says otherwise, following CDC guidelines, Hinojosa said.
School nurses will handle the contact tracing for now, calling and sending emails and letters to the parents of students who test positive and to parents of other students who may have had contact with them. For any positive test result, the parents of all students at that campus are notified via a letter, Hinojosa said.
State Sen. Pete Flores, R-pleasanton, and Rep. Leo Pacheco, Dsan Antonio, whose districts include Somerset, were at the high school Wednesday morning to show support for the new model and to lead by example, they said.
“We have a lot of people out there (saying), ‘We don't want to take the test; this is something new, it's fake, or it's this or that,' ” Pacheco said. “We're asking people to do this, so it's important for us to step up to the plate also and do it.”
“Getting a test is not an intrusion of your privacy, but rather a responsibility, just to make sure you're safe among the people,” Flores added. “This is voluntary. ... If it's here and it's not intrusive, it's a good idea.”