BUFFALO, N.Y. — School districts across the state continue to sort through details on what will be expected of them this fall in terms of testing students for the coronavirus.
This comes after Governor Andrew Cuomo appeared to indicate widespread testing of students, which turns out not to be the case. And some districts may need to find their own way to get students tested.
On Wednesday, during a press briefing, Erie County Health Commissioner Dr. Gale Burstein said Erie County could not serve as the testing agency for every school district in the county. This will put the responsibility to do testing when necessary on schools, through perhaps an outside company or another public agency.
Guidance from the New York State Department of Education, citing CDC recommendations, says that schools should not conduct COVID-19 testing or require testing or antibody testing of students or staff members.
Erie County officials say if there is an outbreak in a school, protocols would be followed to do whatever testing is necessary and contact tracing.
2 On Your Side's Dave McKinley asked whether Erie County could do testing county-wide.
"We don’t have the capacity to do all that testing; however, if there is an outbreak in a particular school we would work with that school and partner with the state health department to ensure pop-up testing was done," Burstein said.
Erie County Executive Mark Poloncarz says the county has tens of thousands of swab kits on hand.
"We have enough resources to do the testing to administer the test as we talked about recently, we have thousands and thousands of test swab kits - tens of thousands actually, we have sufficient testing supplies," Poloncarz said.
The whole issue of testing got a bit confusing earlier this week, when Governor Cuomo seemed to indicate testing on a wide-scale. The governor’s office clarified, saying schools need to have a plan to either do testing in school or through a local health department.
The New York State Council of School Superintendents says it believes Cuomo's comments created some confusion, but that reopening plans that districts have submitted still comply with the state guidance.
"I don’t think it works in upstate and downstate suburban school districts so we’re not anticipating that there would be widespread testing within schools," said Bob Lowry, the deputy director of the council.
If schools want to do testing, according to state education guidance they would have to apply to get approval to do so.
Some districts, such as Salamanca Schools, are considering whether to do use an outside vendor to do testing.
Governor Cuomo says an announcement will be made this week on whether schools will be reopened and that would be dependent on COVID data.