As omicron variant tears through the Bay Area, Berkeley School District shifts strategy to keep doors open, offering twice-weekly testing to every K-12 student, ordering batches of KN95 masks and largely leaving contact tracing behind.
The district plans to roll out 18,000 rapid antigen tests per week and provides, to start with, two KN95 masks to all students and staff. Intended to last two weeks, other KN95s are expected soon.
They are lines of defense against the virus that teachers and students in neighboring districts have called for during work stoppages. The district’s testing sites, which include twice-weekly testing at every school and daily testing at Berkeley Adult School and Berkeley High, are staffed by hundreds of community volunteers with help from the Berkeley Public Schools Fund.
“We have the mitigations that other districts are fighting for,” said Angela Coppola, a teacher at Berkeley High. “Testing twice a week is something you would expect in a well-funded tech company, not in a public school.”
The Berkeley Unified School District recorded 285 positive cases on campus last week and 167 in the first week of January, according to the district’s COVID-19 dashboard. That’s more cases than the district recorded in the entire first half. (These numbers only include cases where students or staff were on campus during their infectious period.)
The district continues to experience high absenteeism among students and staff due to the omicron surge. In the first half of January, 12% of students were absent, more than double the absenteeism rate in the second week of December. And on Tuesday, 105 teachers and staff were out of school, a slight increase from two weeks earlier.
The absences have been difficult for a school district already facing a shortage of substitute teachers, leaving administrators responsible for classrooms and some positions vacant.
Still, Berkeley Unified is doing better than some districts in California, including neighboring West Contra Costa County, where staff absences have forced schools to temporarily close.
“A lot of schools have closed. Luckily, we’re not one of them,” Berkeley Teachers’ Federation President Matt Meyer said at Wednesday’s school board meeting.
But keeping schools running has come at a high cost to school staff, Meyer said. “We do everything we can to make sure there is an adult in every class.”
“It’s hard to convey the level of stress that’s building up because of this ongoing uncertainty that everyone is feeling on a day-to-day basis,” Superintendent Brent Stephens said at a Jan. 19 school reunion.
In response to the omicron variant and changing public health guidelines, the district has adopted new policies intended to mitigate both the spread of COVID-19 and the burden placed on staff by the surge.
The district has now mostly halted contact tracing for students and notified individual close contacts in response to what Superintendent Brent Stephens described as the “now impossible workload” amid soaring case numbers. The new approach, developed with the help of the city of Berkeley during the first week of January, assumes that widespread testing will be more effective in identifying positive cases and will require less administrative effort from the team. contact tracing.
This means far fewer emails about individual students or entire classrooms being exposed to someone who has tested positive for COVID-19, instead emphasizing the responsibility of all individuals to get tested. .
“[I]In most cases, we will be pausing close contact notifications during this peak time and instead directing our families to check BUSD’s COVID Case Dashboard to be notified of new cases at your school,” wrote Stephens in a Jan. 15 letter to the community. (The district will continue to use contact tracing in some cases.)
Other Bay Area districts like Palo Alto and Marin have also stopped reporting close contacts, while San Francisco Unified continues the practice.
“Due to the increased transmissibility of omicron and the increase in the number of cases, methods of controlling COVID-19 in schools have been adapted to provide a faster and broader response,” Lisa Hernandez wrote. , Berkeley health official, in an email, explaining that California’s guidelines can be extended to the school level when transmission rates are high.
According to group research guidelines released Jan. 12, the California Department of Public Health recommends that school districts notify groups such as teams or classrooms when students are exposed to COVID-19.
Stephens and Hernandez said district policies aligned with California public health, but the Palo Alto Unified superintendent, who took a similar approach to BUSD, appeared to have a different interpretation of state guidelines.
“I tried to be nice to it, but I’m done: the California Department of Public Health doesn’t understand how schools work,” Palo Alto Superintendent Don Austin told the San Francisco Chronicle. .
The decision to largely stop notifying close contacts in class was met with concern by a few parents in Berkeley, including those with young children at home who are not eligible for vaccines, while others say they are comfortable with politics.
“For our family, this removes the single most important data point that we need to be able to make day-to-day decisions about whether it’s safe enough for us to send our 1st grader to his class at Rosa Parks Elementary,” two parents wrote in an email to Superintendent Stephens.
The changes come in part because California Public Health’s new K-12 group research guidelines no longer recommend different quarantine times for school exposures based on an individual’s vaccination status. Any student who has been exposed at school, as long as they are asymptomatic, can continue to come to school and participate in extracurricular activities. In this approach, enhanced masks, indoor ventilation and testing are used to fight the virus, not contact tracing.
At the Jan. 19 school board meeting, principal Ana Vasudeo urged the district to try to increase the number of students taking the tests. “Your testing program is only as valuable as the amount of consent you have,” Vasudeo said. In BUSD, 84% of students have opted for school-based testing, according to the district’s COVID-19 dashboard, a higher number than many other districts but still leaving a significant portion of the student body untested. surveillance.
As of Jan. 3, unvaccinated BUSD students are required to participate in weekly testing, while all students at Berkeley High and schools with high transmission rates are encouraged to get tested twice a week.
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