LA Schools To Test Students, Staff And Families For Coronavirus

LOS ANGELES, CA — The Los Angeles Unified School District drew national attention Sunday in announcing plans to provide regular COVID-19 virus testing to teachers, staff, students and families, followed by contact tracing for those infected.

The plan is a mammoth undertaking and the most ambitious testing approach to the pandemic school year among school districts nationwide.

LAUSD Superintendent Austin Beutner launched the program this week as more than 700,000 Los Angeles students begin their school year online, with no date set for a return to in-person learning. The program will include research into the impact of reopening, and the findings will be available to the general public, Beutner announced.

The nation’s second-largest school district, LAUSD was among the earliest districts to shut down statewide in March, and schools up and down the state immediately followed suit. If LAUSD’s plan can crack the code for reopening safely, it would serve as a model nationwide.

"Extraordinary circumstances call for extraordinary actions, and while this testing and contact tracing effort is unprecedented, it is necessary and appropriate," Beutner said. "This will provide a public health benefit to the school community as well as the greater Los Angeles area.

"This program will also provide significant education benefits for students by getting them back to school sooner and safer and keeping them there," Beutner said. "We hope this effort also will provide learnings which can benefit other school systems and communities across the nation as we all combat this pandemic."

Beutner did not say when students would return to their classrooms or how much the widespread testing would cost, but the district has hundreds of millions of dollars in emergency aid due to the pandemic. Another unanswered question is how the district would obtain enough tests and achieve timely results when shortages and backlogs are being reported nationwide.

The ambitious plan is intended to instill confidence in staff and families at a time when surveys show most families are leery of returning to school without additional safety measures. There is a sense of urgency to get Los Angeles students back into the classroom after the spring shutdown showed that many students, particularly in low-income districts, fell behind. In the Los Angeles school district, more than 80 percent of the students fall below the poverty line.

Los Angeles Unified begins the program Monday with a focus on fine-tuning systems and operational logistics as the new school year starts. Tests first will be provided to staff already working at schools and their children, using child care the district is offering to staff at schools.
Testing then will be provided to all staff and students over time. The goal in the early phase is to establish a baseline. After that, there will be periodic testing of staff and students. The frequency and schedule for that testing will be set after the initial testing phase based on epidemiological modeling.

The spread of COVID-19 in the Los Angeles area far exceeds guidelines from the state governing the possible return of students to school campuses. Any decision about the return of students to schools is some time away, the statement acknowledged. The launch of the program is designed to be a system that will be built and tested, and provide a base of knowledge to help prepare for an eventual return to school campuses.

Testing also will be provided to household members of students and staff who test positive for the virus and household members who show symptoms. These measures will be implemented to help get students back to school as soon as possible while protecting the health and safety of the entire school community. It is also designed to help keep them there if an isolated outbreak were to occur.

"Since schools were closed, science has been our guide, and science creates the foundation for this effort," Beutner said. "This collaboration is the result of months of around-the-clock work by many, and I'm grateful for their efforts to get us to this point."

The testing and contact tracing program and its corresponding research are a collaboration between LAUSD and scientists from UCLA, Stanford University, Johns Hopkins University, Microsoft and health care companies Anthem Blue Cross and Health Net. They will be part of a task force co-chaired by Beutner and former U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan.

Strategic interpretation of the evidence on testing and epidemiological modeling will be provided by Johns Hopkins, Stanford and UCLA, which are providing their services pro bono.

"UCLA will bring breadth and depth of scientific expertise to study the impact and effects of Los Angeles Unified's reopening plan, and to share the information learned from these research efforts throughout the world," said Dr. Steven M. Dubinett, director of the UCLA Clinical & Translational Science Institute.

City News Service and Patch Staffer Paige Austin contributed to this report.