JAMESVILLE-DEWITT SCHOOL DISTRICT – Having been approved as a limited service laboratory, the Jamesville-DeWitt School District is now a step closer to tracking the spread of COVID-19 through a test-to-stay pilot program.
Onondaga County’s green light allows the district to check whether unvaccinated students were infected upon establishing “close contact” with anyone experiencing a confirmed case of the virus.
If an unvaccinated student comes within six feet of someone with COVID either in school or out for a cumulative total of 15 minutes over the course of 24 hours, that student is expected to undergo a BinaxNOW antigen test administered before school hours with the consent of a parent or caregiver, Superintendent Peter Smith said.
In order to acceptably stay in school and attend in-person classes once the program is introduced, an unvaccinated student exposed to COVID would need to produce negative rapid test results for seven consecutive school days while remaining symptom-free. Through that stretch of time, the student would be kept from participating in school-sponsored sports, clubs, performance arts, or any other on-campus activities outside of regular instructional practices.
The district administrators are presently not able to determine vaccination statuses among the student body on their own, but they can rely on a system used by the school nurses to track such information.
On top of being an authorized limited service laboratory, the district is working on submitting a protocol to the Onondaga County Health Department detailing testing locations, testing times, supervising personnel and courses of action related to its program.
While he vocally expressed appreciation for the test-to-stay program as a strategy that works against student exclusion, Smith said at the Dec. 20 J-D school board meeting that he viewed the initiative’s omission of surveillance testing for teachers and staff as a limitation.
As it stands, positive cases of COVID among the faculty will be met with direction to stay home for 10 days. The teachers and staff members are also each granted a certain amount of quarantines before their absences begin to cut into their allotted sick day counts.
According to Smith, the district has go-to but “never ideal” provisions that permit other teachers and teaching assistants to take over in the event of both an instructor’s quarantine-related absence and a shortage of substitutes.
He said overall cases could potentially rise with the emerging Omicron variant but that there is not yet a defined, automatic “tipping point” that would either cause the county to rescind the test-to-stay option or impel the district to transfer to virtual learning.