A growing number of the nation’s school districts are experimenting with a Covid-19 testing regime they hope will get millions of children back into their classroom — if they can keep up with the price tag.
The Biden administration’s $1.9 trillion Covid relief law is steering $10 billion toward developing a national school coronavirus testing strategy as its latest bid to reopen schools. That plan is still in flux but some attention has turned to the practice of “pooled” testing that uses a collection of swabs from a fixed group of kids attending classes together. The process is meant to limit the spread of a potential outbreak while minimizing the costs of the frequent large-scale testing needed to keep the disease in check. Pooled testing can extend testing capacity by testing groups of samples at once rather than each person individually. If a pool sample comes back positive, each individual in the pool is then tested.
Massachusetts is the only state to deploy a broad pooled testing program made available to all of its students and staff — about 1 million K-12 children and educators — to reopen this spring. For the first six weeks, the Bay State expects to spend somewhere between $15 million and $30 million doing pooled testing for about half of its more than 1,800 public schools that have opted in. When the state-funded program ends April 30, school districts will be able to funnel money in from the latest round of federal relief. A Rockefeller Foundation-funded study by Mathematica and RAND Corporation of early pooled-testing results found weekly testing of all students, teachers and staff can reduce in-school infections by an estimated 50 percent.
Similarly, in Maryland, Baltimore City Public Schools has put $5.7 million dollars from the federal stimulus toward launching its own program. Montgomery County Public Schools, the largest district in the state, is spending $5 million to kickstart one. CONTINUE READING: 'Boogers down': Biden’s bid to reopen schools may hinge on ‘pooled’ testing - POLITICO