Erie County begins test-to-stay program to keep kids in school

Twenty-two students who had close contact with an infected student were tested. Two were positive. 

The day before, all 22 would have been quarantined, forced to learn remotely. But 20 of them got to return to their school buildings. 

"That’s why it's so important. Otherwise those kids would have been sitting at home," Wright said.

On Monday, the first schools in Erie County will begin the test-to-stay program as part of a pilot in the Grand Island Central School District. The children will be tested every morning before school during their quarantine, and if the test is negative, the child can remain in school.

"We're very excited," Superintendent Brian Graham said. "Our numbers were kind of high in the middle of November."

By midweek, 21 people had tested positive in the district, resulting in 33 in quarantine. Graham is hoping testing next week will show that most of those students can attend school.

"It just makes perfect sense. It just provides another option," Graham said.

Test-to-stay is not recommended by the state Health Department, although it is being used in Massachusetts and Utah. But the state issued guidelines for counties that implement it. 

Erie County Health Commissioner Dr. Gale Burstein said in announcing test-to-stay that the program will require a substantial investment of time and resources from the county, schools and administrators.

"To do it right, we have to find out what works, how we can improve, and what our schools can expect. And with more than two dozen school districts, dozens of private schools and more than 130,000 K-12 students in Erie County, a countywide launch is simply not feasible. A pilot program is the best first step forward,” Burstein said.

Students in Grand Island's five schools who have been identified as close contacts of someone who tested positive will be tested, with parental permission, before school starting Monday. Medical professionals from Buffalo Homecare will be at the middle and high schools at 7 a.m. and at the elementary schools at 8 a.m.

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Parents will bring the children to school before school starts for the test, which takes about 15 minutes to get results. Students who are negative can stay in school. Students who test positive go home with their parents.

Erie County will use federal grant money targeted for school testing and vaccination to provide tests, staff training, contact tracing support and data analysis. 

Grand Island Central is responsible for testing, getting parental consent and collecting data. The district has contracted with Buffalo Homecare Inc. to provide staff for testing and data entry, and will use federal funds, Graham said.

The test-to-stay program is for unvaccinated children, since vaccinated students do not have to quarantine if they come in contact with someone who tests positive, unless they develop symptoms. 

Getting a negative test result every morning gets the student into class, but not extracurricular activities after school. Under state and county guidelines, the student must continue to be in quarantine after the school day and on weekends and holidays.

School districts in Monroe County started instituting the "test-to-stay" program Monday.   

"It's been a game-changer for us because we’ve been advocating for an amendment to the protocol for a long time to try and prevent healthy students from being quarantined," Wright said.

The Rush-Henrietta Central School District has about 5,400 students in nine schools. Testing for all students takes place between 6:30 and 8:30 a.m. at one of the district's centrally located buildings. The company the district contracts with did not have the capacity to deploy personnel into every building, Wright said.

Students are tested and leave the building, and parents are notified within 20 minutes if they are negative. Those testing positive are called by a school nurse and told to stay home.

Monroe County is providing the testing kits. The district pays for the testing services, and is reimbursed by the county, Wright said. 

"My concern, and I think the concern of most school officials, is kids were missing instruction, and missing instruction unnecessarily," he said. "In almost every case, they never became ill."

He said there were some families who had the same child quarantined more than once since the beginning of the school year.

Ontario County bought rapid testing machines for every school in the county and hired an agency nurse for each school to help coordinate testing, according to Public Health Director Mary L. Beer. Schools have been testing close contacts daily for several weeks. She said the Health Department has had a little trouble obtaining the testing materials.

"It’s a heavy lift for the Health Department and working with the schools, but at the same time, we’re so committed to keeping the kids in school, because it was so bad, so rough," Beer said.

Schools in the county also will test children who go to the nurse's office complaining of symptoms. She said the county's pool testing has detected several asymptomatic cases.

"Can we find people before they’ve infected the whole school?" Beer said. "Now that we have testing we're able to not quarantine the whole class."

Grand Island's pilot program was to last until Dec. 23, but Graham said it may be extended to gather more data.

"I hope the data shows that 98% of our kids who end up having to quarantine end up being healthy for that period of time," Graham said. "That in and of itself is important to have test-to-stay be scalable across Erie County."

He suggested expanding the pilot to other districts to show a diversity of population. 

"Let other districts move forward and gather more data, whether it's in a pilot or the next level of scaling this up," he said.