School COVID-19 testing delayed in Charlotte, as health leader urges more precautions
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Charlotte 2021 Back to School
Due to COVID-19, masks are required at CMS and adults are encouraged to get vaccinated. There’s also a push among educators ad parents to catch up students who lost academic progress during the pandemic.
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A plan to test unvaccinated teachers and staff weekly did not come together in time for Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools’ return to classrooms.
Local and state health officials have advised that schools should use rapid COVID-19 testing on site for screening — particularly for any employee who isn’t vaccinated or does not provide proof they are vaccinated.
Unlike a number of major Charlotte employers, CMS is not yet tracking vaccination among staff or teachers.
Districts that opted into on-site school testing via a state health program experienced delays in launch, according to a recent letter from the local health director to CMS’ superintendent. The Department of Health and Human Services is providing the service at no charge for schools.
The delay means thousands of CMS students and teachers began meeting in classrooms without COVID-19 testing in place, which helps prevent cases from becoming outbreaks, particularly among people with no clear symptoms. Classrooms are operating at normal capacity and CMS requires everyone to wear a mask. Screening — the type of testing recommended for schools — refers to testing those in a building or group who aren’t necessarily showing symptoms or have had a known exposure to COVID-19.
Officials said this week they are working aggressively to implement school-based testing for employees and students that will provide end-to-end services, including supplies, receiving parent or guardian consent, administration, interpretation and the communication of results.
A letter shared with The Charlotte Observer and other media outlets this week indicates Mecklenburg County Public Health Director Gibbie Harris urged CMS to figure out who on staff is vaccinated — and ensure any adult who isn’t provides proof of a negative test result weekly.
But neither of those was in place this week as close to 19,000 employees returned to work at CMS across 178 schools, serving more than 140,000 students.
“The approach we’ll be taking at CMS is a phased-in approach,” Christine Pejot, chief human resources officer, said. “So that once we have this in our schools we can make sure we implement it with fidelity.”
CMS officials did not provide a timeframe for when testing would start at schools.
Cases at reopening
As teachers returned to classrooms to prepare for the district’s opening Wednesday, 31 new staff members had tested positive for COVID-19 — a figure that includes only recent positive test results as of Aug. 20. New CMS data is expected Friday.
On the evening of the first day of school, at least two principals notified families of positive cases. Those included one at Community House Middle and one from Myers Park High. Prior to the week of students starting, there were 41 schools or work sites in CMS with at least one known case but no outbreaks.
Public schools across the state are largely following guidance in the North Carolina Strong Schools Toolkit, an expansive guide to COVID-19 safety measures. The toolkit states: “Testing should not be used alone, but in combination with other prevention to reduce risk of transmission in schools.”
Harris has said — and data has shown for weeks — that the Charlotte area is at high-risk, again, for coronavirus infections to spread rapidly. In her letter to Superintendent Earnest Winston last week, she wrote testing of unvaccinated teachers should be in place by “the beginning of the school year.”
CMS is not testing, tracking vaccine
CMS is one of the county’s largest employers. Many large employers in Charlotte are asking workers to submit proof of vaccination before returning for in-person work.
Other than Charlotte’s two hospital systems requiring workers get a COVID-19 vaccine, most employers have not yet mandated the shots.
The city of Charlotte, with around 8,000 employees, has begun tracking who is vaccinated, and leaders say they’ll use that information to make COVID-19 return-to-work decisions. County government workers are required to submit proof of vaccination and those who aren’t vaccinated by Sept. 7 will be required to test for COVID weekly, in hopes of avoiding outbreaks as in-person work resumes.
Several major Charlotte employers have postponed in-person return to work in light of the highly contagious delta variant.
Several companies have said plans for an eventual return hinge on workers’ vaccination rates. For example, Bank of America — which has around 16,000 employees in Charlotte — began allowing vaccinated workers who provided proof of their shot to voluntarily return in July for office work. LendingTree also invited back vaccinated workers in July. Ally has said vaccinated workers in Charlotte were able to resume some in-person work this summer.
But CMS says it hasn’t been asking staff their vaccination status because the district hasn’t required them to be vaccinated.
“The district is not tracking teacher or staff vaccinations,” Eve White, the CMS executive director of communications, said. “We will learn more about vaccination status of staff when we begin the phased COVID testing plan currently under development.
“The plan being considered would require proof of vaccination for staff who want to opt out of weekly COVID testing.”
Part of the delay is CMS first met with the state-approved vendor Aug. 12. District officials couldn’t begin to develop a program without the state’s approval of the vendor.
According to the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services, two medical testing vendors will be available to all of the state’s schools.
As of Aug. 5, 44 school districts, 47 charter schools and 48 independent schools had opted to participate in the school testing program.
“School-based testing for COVID-19 is one of the key strategies to getting our children safely back into the classroom, and NCDHHS will help every North Carolina school get the resources they need to have a strong testing program,” said NCDHHS Chief Deputy Secretary Susan Gale Perry.
School officials met with the vendor and county officials Wednesday. Next steps involve identifying the staff at each school and worksite who will help facilitate, implementing the consent process for students, and also the vaccine status collection of staff.
CMS will test unvaccinated staff weekly. Students will be tested in a “pooled grouping,” meaning that an entire class will self-swab and the tests be pooled together. If any positive comes from the group, then someone will come back out to individually test the students in that class. “Surveillance testing” is important in students because it tests people who don’t necessarily show symptoms, like many children.
It is unclear how often students will be tested.
One school board member says he thinks the district should require in-person workers be vaccinated.
“I have been a consistent advocate for adding mandatory staff COVID vaccinations,” Sean Strain said.
“It is the single biggest action we can take as a system to protect our staff from serious illness/hospitalization and death.”
Strain continued: “Masks don’t prevent transmission, they reduce it … and they certainly do nothing to prevent or reduce the contraction rate and degree of illness once transmission has occurred. If the superintendent had issued a vaccination mandate four weeks ago, along with a mask mandate, our staff would have started the school year with much, much more protection against the disease.”
This story was originally published August 27, 2021 at 1:14 PM.
