New MA COVID Guidance May Force Schools Into Tough Testing Call
SALEM, MA — A 10-minute coronavirus update in front of the Salem School Committee Tuesday night came with one big asterisk that has become commonplace over the past two years.
It's all subject to change.
That's what Salem Schools Chief of Opportunity and Response Chelsea Banks noted to the committee based on school protocol revisions put in place amid the omicron surge and ahead of new state Department of Elementary and Secondary Education guidance that recommends districts move away from contact tracing and "stay-and-test" procedures to distributing rapid at-home tests as part of what DESE Commissioner Jeffrey Riley said was a timely "pivot" in responding to a changing virus landscape.
"We do continue to reflect and learn," Banks said after the comprehensive presentation. "We continue to update our guidance — which may be coming sooner than we anticipated before we made this presentation.
"It's always a fun world in this roller coaster of COVID."
Like most other state directives over the past 18 months or so, districts were largely caught off guard with the new state guidelines, which on the surface provide free, much-sought-after at-home tests, but also appear to lay the groundwork for a post-omicron shift where the responsibility of determining whether a student is healthy enough to go to school falls more on families than the district and school nurses.
(More Patch Coverage: MA Shifts Student Coronavirus Test Burden From Schools To Homes)
While that may come as a relief to many health offices that have been overburdened and understaffed for two years — especially on the heels of the omicron surge that proved as taxing as any point since students began to return to the classrooms in September 2020 — it could also raise concerns in many districts that have found a sense of security in having highly aggressive and vigilant testing protocols.
"Before we start commenting on it we need to better understand it," Salem Superintendent Steve Zrike said at Tuesday's meeting. "It is about eliminating test-to-stay and utilizing rapid (tests) through sending rapids home with students and staff. But we need to better understand what that means for us."
School and health officials were scheduled to have a webinar on the new guidance and test options on Wednesday. While Gov. Charlie Baker said the rapid test distribution is optional, it is being recommended to districts.
"The reason we gave schools a choice, and school districts a choice, about whether they wanted to stick with the current test-and-stay program or pursue this alternative approach was because we knew there would be some people who would want to go one way and some people who would want to go the other," Baker said on Wednesday when he unveiled a similar rapid-test initiative for early education and childcare facilities. "That's why we also gave them a week or so to try to figure out which one they thought made the most sense."
According to the written DESE guidance, schools that have pool testing will have the option of accepting the at-home tests from the state starting next week and then distributing them weekly to families to use on what appears to be a voluntary, opt-in basis. By accepting the tests, the schools would then be allowed to discontinue the labor-intensive test-to-stay and contact-tracing practices.
Riley said this will allow school nurses to concentrate their efforts on identifying symptomatic cases within the schools.
"Because parents have been through a lot of changes in guidance over the past few weeks, I promise you we'll need a few days before we switch it up on folks yet again," Zrike said. "We're just trying to keep up with the guidance and I promise you we will make a thoughtful decision based on what we learn and what we think is in the best interest of our students."
Districts would be required to continue pool surveillance testing to find any potential outbreaks.
"There are plenty of school districts that are not doing pool testing," Salem Mayor and School Committee Chair Kim Driscoll said Tuesday night. "They are not undertaking the level of care and work that we are because it is a tremendous amount of work that existing staff is taking on even as we tried to supplement.
"It can sometimes be easier not to know, but we know it's not safer. What we're trying to do is make sure that we're doing everything we can to create an in-person learning environment that is safe for staff, students and families, and that people recognize that we are going to go through those extra efforts."
(Scott Souza is a Patch field editor covering Beverly, Danvers, Marblehead, Peabody, Salem and Swampscott. He can be reached at Scott.Souza@Patch.com. Twitter: @Scott_Souza.)
More Patch Coverage: MA Coronavirus Positive Rate Drops On 'Backside' Of Omicron Surge
This article originally appeared on the Salem Patch
