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NYC’s Plan For Testing Unvaccinated Students Allows Parents To Opt Out—With No Consequences
By
Jessica Gould
Published Sep 1, 2021
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By
Jessica Gould
Published Sep 1, 2021
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Some parents and educators are expressing alarm at New York City’s revised COVID-19 testing policy for public schools. Part of a series of protocols announced last week, the plan calls for randomly testing 10% of unvaccinated students and staff twice a month. That’s compared to last winter’s requirement that a random sample of 20% of students and staff had to be tested weekly.
But a loophole exists for parents of unvaccinated children. Unlike last year when students were told they would have to switch back to remote learning if they didn’t consent to testing via the city’s online portal, there will be no consequences for declining in the coming term. Some critics worry that the testing pool will be too limited to detect cases and catch outbreaks as they boil over.
Liz Rosenberg, a member of Parents for Responsive Equitable Safe Schools (PRESS NYC), said the city should be increasing testing, not reducing it. “It’s not responsive to the current risk levels due to community spread … and all the evidence that [the] delta [variant] is different,” she said.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have recommended that unvaccinated students and staff get tested weekly, although the federal guidance affirms local school districts can decide the precise details about how to screen students. “More frequent testing can increase effectiveness, but feasibility of increased testing in schools needs to be considered,” the guidance says.
“We need to be testing as often as possible, especially in schools where the students are too young to be vaccinated,” said middle school math teacher Nina Kulkarni. All staff are required to have at least one dose of the vaccine by September 27th, but so far, there is no mandate for students. And only students over the age of 12 are eligible for the vaccines.
Mayor Bill de Blasio has said the city could scale up testing if necessary. “If we see in any school a need to do more, we can easily send more testing in, literally [on] the same day,” he said. “We always have that option.”
The mayor emphasized that testing is one part of a multi-prong approach to keep schools safe. The strategy includes one of the country’s strictest vaccine mandates for educators, and an ongoing push to inoculate eligible students and their families.
That’s on top of other measures such as ventilation upgrades and social distancing that kept the positivity rate inside schools very low last year. But questions are emerging about the city’s ventilation standards as some don’t fit CDC guidelines, and several hundred classrooms are still under repairs. Some principals are worried they may not be able to keep all students three feet apart. But de Blasio is optimistic: “We're really confident here about the ability to keep kids safe.”
Denis Nash, a professor of epidemiology at the City University of New York, said regular COVID testing in schools could serve two purposes: to more quickly identify cases and limit the amount of time children who are infected are in the classroom; and to gauge whether other mitigation strategies — such as masking, distancing, ventilation — are working to prevent outbreaks.
Nash believes the city’s plan will not adequately prevent students with COVID-19 from entering classrooms, nor will it effectively reduce the exposure time created by infected kids in classrooms. For that, a school system must test everyone more often. It would offer critical data about how well safety measures are working, too.
Michael Appleton/Mayoral Photography Office
“It's going to tell you, okay, our mitigation strategies that we have in place are doing what we hope they would do in terms of limiting the potential of spread within the walls of the school,” he said. “A 10% sample, if the sampling strategy is well designed, could yield very useful information to achieve that goal.”
However, Nash reiterated that testing should happen at least weekly. “Every two weeks is a mistake,” he said. “Delta is too fast to be doing every other week.” He said he hopes officials consider increasing the frequency of testing. In Los Angeles, both unvaccinated and vaccinated students and staff will be tested weekly.
He added that “ideally” students would not be allowed to opt out because that could skew the information gained from testing. He recommends either requiring the testing of all students, or if that is not possible, carefully tracking the numbers of students opting out in any week, including their school, neighborhood and age, to help better understand the trends.
At a New York City Council oversight hearing on Wednesday, New York City Health Commissioner Dr. Dave Chokshi said the city is prepared to expand testing if necessary, either targeting resources at a given school or increasing the frequency of tests more broadly. In addition to the 10% screening, he said there would also be diagnostic tests available to anyone who is symptomatic.
“We should think about [the current testing policy] as a floor rather than a ceiling,” Chokshi said. “This is an area where we will continue to follow the science and the data, and if there are adjustments that need to be made as time goes on, of course, we will make them.”
A spokesperson for the principals’ union, the Council of School Supervisors and Administrators (CSA), said leaders also have logistical concerns, including how to respond to positive tests in their community.
“Though a smaller percentage of students will be tested less frequently, testing will be more complicated because the city must determine who is unvaccinated and who has given consent at every school,” the spokesperson said. “Most importantly, the city must decide what actions to take if testing reveals an uptick in cases within a school community.”
Unlike the testing plan, the city’s quarantine policy is stricter than the CDC recommendations. The federal health agency advises all students in a classroom do not have to be quarantined if they are masked and socially distanced.
City officials announced last week that, when there’s exposure in a classroom, unvaccinated students will have to quarantine, but they did not give a specific threshold for when whole buildings have to shut down, saying decisions will be made on a “case by case basis.”
With less than two weeks until the nation’s largest school system opens its doors, COVID cases among children and teenagers are rising. Data from the city now show teenagers ages 13-17 have a positivity rate of 5.38%, as of the week ending August 21st. Children 5-12, who are too young to be vaccinated, have a positivity rate of 4.78%. The citywide average among all ages is 3.74%. Children 5-17 are also averaging 150 infections per 100,000 kids, a case rate that’s higher than those for everyone older than 45.
Nash said, based on last year’s experience, there’s “good reason to think that solid masking and ventilation plus vaccine coverage among many, many other people might be enough.” But he said the delta variant presents a “question mark.”
Alec Hamilton contributed to reporting.
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Jessica Gould
Jessica is the education reporter for WNYC and Gothamist. During the Covid-19 pandemic, Jessica reported on the shutdown and reopening of the nation’s largest school system, highlighting the unprecedented impacts on learning, health and mental health for students, staff and families. Got a tip? Email [email protected]
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