COVID-19 cases are rising in New York City schools, and parents, teachers, advocates and health experts are expressing concerns that the Department of Education (DOE) in-school testing program isn’t screening enough students and staff to catch outbreaks.
Declining staff testing and a small pool of eligible students mean that in-school test results may not give an accurate picture of how much COVID is circulating in the NYC school system. Parents are also reporting their children are being removed from the DOE’s opt-in testing program after only a first dose of vaccine, despite still being vulnerable to COVID-19. In response to feedback from the United Federation of Teachers, the city says it is now in the process of updating its staff testing program.
Comprehensive testing is an important part of keeping schools open, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and it’s cited by the education department as an important information source for school and public health officials.
“Your conclusions are only as good as your data, and your data is only as good as what you did to get it,” said Dr. Barun Mathema, assistant professor of epidemiology at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. “And if you’re shaky on all those fronts, at the end of the day, it’s hard to report on anything with any sort of evidence base.”
Staff testing started strong, peaking in the fall. New York City began the school year with a vaccine-or-test requirement for education staff, and nearly 16,000 tests were administered during the third week of school in late September, according to city data tracked by Parents for Responsive Equitable Safe Schools (PRESS). (The city's Independent Budget Office said the DOE had 161,000 staff members in October.) This policy was replaced when a mandate took effect on October 4th, requiring at least one vaccine dose.
Weekly staff testing declined in the following weeks, stabilizing around 5,000 to 6,000, according to the city data. Because nearly all staff members slowly became vaccinated, they’re technically no longer included in the city’s testing program, though some participated anyway as an extra precaution due to breakthrough infections.
But in mid-November, the testing total dropped again, precipitously. Education staff took more than 5,400 tests the week of November 8th but barely 140 the following week. By the week of November 29th, just 59 staff members took tests at school. Some teachers said they were told they could no longer get tested at school.
“Many teachers are having exposures at school, and the burden should not be on us to go to CityMD after work for testing,” said Emily, a high school teacher who asked that her last name not be shared due to personal privacy around her health.
Under the DOE’s updated testing policy, staff members who want to be tested can only do so after student testing is finished for the day, and no extra time is allocated for them in the school’s weekly testing period, according to details shared with teachers by the United Federation of Teachers.
Teachers may also have to provide consent up to five days before their first test, and no more than 10% of a school’s staff members may be tested on a given day. The policy went into effect on December 6th, and city data already shows a large rebound. About 600 staff members got tested on that day alone.
Skewed Student Samples
Each week, education department contractors also set out to test 10% of unvaccinated students whose parents have returned consent forms — a goal they’re meeting in more than 90% of city schools, according to the DOE. Pre-K and 3K students are not included.
More than 196,000 unvaccinated students are currently participating in this in-school testing program. But this group represents less than a quarter of all K-12 students, according to preliminary enrollment data. And because signing up for testing is voluntary, the opted-in group isn’t representative of the student body as a whole — which can skew the data, noted Mathema.
“If one is sampling such a low capture rate on a self-selected group, then what is it really telling you at the end of the day?” he said. “It’s still useful, but it’s hard to interpret in a robust manner.”
The DOE’s testing program averaged about 44,300 student tests per week since September 27th, when the weekly testing schedule went into effect, according to city data.
All told, the in-school testing program has caught 1,497 student and staff COVID cases since the start of classes, according to the city data. But in the same time period, broader tracking — conducted through a collaboration with the health department — has reported 12,941 total cases across the school system.
Dr. Denis Nash, an epidemiology professor at the City University of New York, says surveillance testing like the DOE’s opt-in program isn’t meant to catch every single case — just to give education and public health officials a glimpse into transmission rates and help them monitor for outbreaks. But without enough people being tested, even that may be out of reach.
It’s always the same students, over and over.
“I’ve struggled to understand how you can have effective surveillance testing when you have an opt-in approach where the consent rates are so low,” Nash said.
Opt-in rates for individual schools aren’t available, but about half a dozen parents and teachers interviewed for this article said that at their schools, the handful of children with signed consent forms get tested week after week, while the rest aren’t able to participate.
“Very few students get tested at my school,” said one teacher, who asked that their name not be shared because they feared retaliation. “It’s always the same students, over and over.”
One parent, who also asked to remain anonymous, ended up removing their high school age son’s consent form because he was being pulled from class to get tested so often.
“He was being removed from an instructional class, math, which he struggled in and had to wait with the other kids to be tested,” the parent said.
With the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine authorized for children between the ages of 5 and 11 in early November, the pool of eligible children will shrink further as elementary school-aged children complete their course of vaccination.
COVID-19 vaccination sign posted at Success Academy Charter School-Washington Heights.
Some partially vaccinated students have even been prematurely excluded from testing, according to at least two parents. Another parent, who asked that their name not be shared because they feared it would affect their relationship with the school, said their two children were removed from the list of students to be tested after just one dose of the vaccine. Neither the children’s teacher nor other school staff were able to say why the children had been declared ineligible before being fully vaccinated. The testing provider, BioReference Laboratories, did not return repeated requests for comment.
“There's widespread confusion on the testing stuff even from the people who are supposed to be administering the tests and selecting students,” the parent said.
Nash emphasized that partially vaccinated people are still vulnerable to COVID-19 and should not be exempt from testing.
“It’s not like magic dust,” he said of the vaccine. “It takes time for that protection to go into effect.” And excluding even fully vaccinated students from surveillance testing can make the results less representative, he added.
Nash, Mathema and the parents and teachers interviewed for this story urged DOE officials to increase the proportion of the school community receiving regular COVID-19 tests and include vaccinated individuals, including teachers and staff. Vaccinated people can still contract and transmit the virus, contributing to spread, Nash said.
“I think only limiting testing to unvaccinated students is turning a blind eye to what’s going on in the whole school population,” he added.
“Parents want COVID-free schools, and baseline testing after breaks, opt-out consent, and including the vaccinated are what we need to get there,” PRESS NYC said in a written statement.
After calls from the United Federation of Teachers, the education department said it would once again offer the tests to staff, with some restrictions.
“We have the country’s largest school surveillance testing program and we provide courtesy testing for staff,” DOE spokesperson Nathaniel Styer said in a statement. “Now that all school staff are fully vaccinated, we are issuing updated, uniform testing guidelines for all staff who wish to participate.”
So far this school year, COVID outbreaks have shuttered five schools — most recently the Kathleen Grimm School for Leadership and Sustainability in Staten Island, which closed its doors December 4th after 22 students and staff tested positive within a seven-day period, according to state data.
