COVID-19 Testing In Schools: "It's The Cost of Doing Business"
How one Chicagoland school district went all in with COVID-19 testing as parents question conservative approach to in-person learning
(Photo Credit: Chicago Tribune)
Not long after playing a boys basketball game in late February, the Libertyville Wildcats remain inside their home gym.
Due to public health protocols, the locker room is off-limits. So Wildcat players get dressed just a few feet from the court. As they trickle out, maintenance workers arrive. But they are doing more than just cleaning the facility.
Tables are set up. Plexiglass is attached. A massive partition rolls out, dividing the gymnasium in half.
Within minutes, the room is transformed from athletic event host to viral testing site.
Each school day, beginning early in the morning until late in the day, Libertyville High School athletes submit nasal swabs to nurses set up behind the plexiglass tables. If the samples comes back negative for COVID-19, all is clear for them to participate in basketball or any other active sport.
“I like the (COVID-19) test. It lets me know we are all safe and we are doing our part,” Wildcats junior boys basketball player Chase Bonder said. “It assures us that our program is doing the right thing and we can keep moving forward with our season.”
As a result of the coronavirus pandemic, the past 12 months have splintered Americans across the United States, regardless of race, religion or industry. No pocket of the population has seen more strain than the education field, serving as a flashpoint in the oftentimes bitter debate over #ReturnToLearn.
According to the Illinois State Board of Education, as of this month, almost all public schools offer some form of in-person learning.
Illinois Community District 128, encompassing Libertyville and Vernon Hills High Schools, is one of the state districts that offer a combination of in-person and remote learning, or ‘hybrid’ learning model. It took until January of this year for D128 leaders to get that far.
For the first semester of the 2020-21 school year, students in D128, with a combined enrollment of of approximately 3,500, were at home receiving classes via computer.
The district’s board of education repeatedly voted against any form of physical attendance throughout the late summer and fall of 2020. The decision was not received well by a large portion of residents in the district, and like in so many communities around Chicagoland, a rally was held in hopes of swaying the board to re-consider and open school doors to students.
With so much controversy swirling around the community, a member of the D128 Board of Education was deep in research on a solution.
For almost 30 years, Pat Groody worked in the diagnostics division at Abbott Labs. A manager, possessing problem solving skills was a daily necessity in order for business to be conducted.
D128 school board president since 2009, Groody faced his biggest problem as board leader over the summer of 2020—in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, how does the district open schools safely?
“Through June and July, our full intent was to open schools, either in a regular basis or hybrid format. We had every intention of opening,” Groody said.
By August, intentions did not convert into actions. The school board voted for a remote learning option to start the year.
“There were a lot of uncertainties about the pandemic and there wasn’t a lot of data about schools and if they were super spreaders,” Groody said. “We don’t know what’s going to happen and we don’t want to take the risk to open and have to close and have to open. Our initial decision was a fairly conservative one.”
Due to his background at Abbott, Groody had familiarity with medical diagnostics. He had been following developments in COVID-19 testing since the outset of the coronavirus pandemic in March of 2020.
Early that fall, Groody discussed with the board his intentions to look more deeply into testing for faculty and students. Could it be something right for D128? Groody didn’t know the answer then but received positive early feedback from board members and district administrators.
From a diagnostic standpoint, medical experts consider the PCR (Polymerase Chain Reaction) test the gold standard. But at over $100 a test, that was a non-starter for Groody, who knew the majority of costs absorbed from any testing procedure would have to be paid through D128 reserve funds (Groody said the district did receive some funds from the federal government via the CARES Act).
Groody eventually honed in on recurrent viral surveillance or rapid antigen tests. He researched two testing programs—Shield Illinois, developed by researchers at the University of Illinois and BinaxNow, created by scientists at Abbott. Both fit the matrix of what Groody was looking for—testing early, often and with rapid results.
“I more I learned about it the more I believed that screening for asymptomatic cases or pre-symptomatic cases was an important thing to do to try and mitigate the spread of the virus,” Groody said. “When you have to wait three to seven days (before a result), that’s not really helpful.”
“The value of recurrent testing is you find someone early and isolate them. It reduces contract tracing,” Passport Health Chicago Medical Director Dr. Scott Morcott said. Passport Health is a health care provider that administers COVID-19 tests for school districts. “If you find someone has COVID-19 in a classroom it is very disruptive. The goal is can we lessen that occurrence and can we do it so much that we don’t have outbreaks at school and not cause (IDPH) to say we’re done?”
Delays in authorization of the Shield Illinois test focused Groody on the Abbott option. BinaxNOW could process tests in large volumes and the cost—$5 a test—made it that much more appealing. A health provider would have to be contracted to handle the mechanics of conducting the tests, but the relatively small expense of each test “was a really different type of paradigm. All of a sudden the economics sounded like something in the realm of possibility. So that was a turning point,” Groody said.
Although comfortable with a testing mechanism, more research led to more questions for Groody. Statistics from the state were not always clear and short on context. Why was positivity and hospitalization rates being used as a threshold by public health officials? Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker had not used executive powers to close schools in the fall, instead leaving it in the hands of individual schools. But Groody saw viral surveillance testing as a means to galvanize his district around an objective dataset not clouded by politics or opaque metrics.
As the holidays approached, Groody’s investigation led him to the testing supply chain. Could he get his hands on enough tests to start the program?
He found bottlenecks at every turn.
“The Abbott supply was tied up in the tests the government had ordered. I talked to our state representative, our state senator, to the Lake County Health Department,” Groody said. “(LCHD) wasn’t getting allocated that much product from the federal government to begin with. I tried to do everything I could but just couldn’t get it in the quantities we needed.”
The last thing Groody and the school board wanted was to rush the program to the market only to have to stop due to lack of supply. The same philosophy applied to in-person learning—officials wanted to avoid the starts and ‘adaptive pauses’ occurring in surrounding districts often due to indeterminate public health recommendations. As a board, the preference was to foster an environment of consistency for students and faculty, even if that meant classes stayed remote.
By December, things began to flip. Supplies freed up and Groody felt comfortable Abbott could produce enough tests. He also felt confident in the school’s enthusiasm for a weekly testing regimen. Results of a poll of faculty and students stated that of the number of faculty desirous to return to in-person learning, between 70 to 75 percent said they would participate in the testing program. Students opting in for testing was slightly lower, at 65 percent.
With the supply chain intact and enough community support, on Jan. 4 of this year, the D128 board voted to purchase the BinaxNow diagnostic tests from Abbott, partnering with Passport Health.
Testing for D128 staffers began on January 11th, for students on Jan. 19. That day students returned to in-person learning for the first time since March 2020, when the onset of the coronavirus pandemic forced the immediate shutdown of schools.
Students and staff schedule the once-a-week tests by using a NAVICA app on their phones. A self-administered nasal swab is collected, then given to an on-site nurse. Results are available within 15 to 30 minutes and are reported to the NAVICA app, with a green check indicating a passed test, red meaning negative.
In an informational webinar to parents in January, school officials touted the functional ease of the COVID-19 test.
Webinar slides stated how the “NAVICA app will help expedite the check in and testing process” and how following the test “students will return to their normal activity in the building…the whole testing process will take ~5 minutes.”
Not quite two months into the process, students and faculty members say so far, so good.
“We have multiple days to do it. You pick a time and you do it. As a teacher, it’s a piece of cake,” Vernon Hills teacher Paul Brettner said, also the school’s girls basketball coach. “It seems so much a part of our regimen now as a teacher that it’s easy.”
“I get it every week and I like the system and it’s so efficient,” Libertyville senior Lauren Huber said, a starter on the girls basketball team. “Each week it gets quicker.”
(Photo Credit: Community District 128)
Although faculty and students within D128 are easing into a comfortable routine with COVID-19 testing, not everyone has bought in.
Testing is required for all in-season athletes and participants in certain extracurricular and fine arts programs chosen by the school. For everyone else, the testing is optional (legal counsel for D128 advised against mandating testing for faculty and students opting in to the district’s hybrid learning model who aren’t in an active sport or selected extracurricular activity).
Groody hoped 80 percent of faculty and students voting to return would agree to testing and said reaching that number is an important benchmark to achieve.
“We said to the community, ‘in order for this to work we need to test a high percentage of the students and staff in order to make it really effective,’” Groody said. “It’s been close to (65% for students, 70-75% for faculty) so a little disappointing there. We are still trying to get more to enroll.”
The district estimates it is currently administering close to 2,000 tests per week, according to D128 associate superintendent Briant Kelly. The cost for the district per test comes to $20 when factoring in administrative expenses. Additional staffing costs come to $300 per day, making weekly expenses at $41,200, according to Kelly.
Kelly said the district plans to continue testing through the end of the semester with a goal of more participation amongst faculty and students.
“You’d love to have 100 percent participation because then if you get that, people are going once a week at a higher mitigation,” Kelly said. “We are keeping up with the science as more and more adults are vaccinated. As herd immunity goes up, does that then decrease the need for testing? I don’t know the answer to that but we’ll be looking at it and relying on the professionals.”
As of March 2021, a full year after the coronavirus pandemic first forced national lockdowns, the number of public schools offering full-time in-person school is rapidly catching up to schools providing only a hybrid model.
According to the Illinois State Board of Education, 47.2% of districts offer a blended or ‘hybrid’ form of learning, while 43.6% are full-time in-person. A small percentage of districts remain remote only (9.1%).
In a February board of education meeting, D128 said a return to full-time in-person learning “was a goal” beginning with the 2021-22 school year but did not commit to that undertaking.
That position by the board was taken as public health statistics continue to skew downward, further diminishing the health and safety argument for maintaining remote learning.
Tuesday, President Biden said this about the vaccine and access for every American:
We’re now on track to have enough vaccine supply for every adult in America by the end of May
The Associated Press reported that Biden told state governors to prepare more doses of the vaccine in the coming weeks. More reports out of Washington say the White House, with a newly-installed Education Secretary, plan to escalate a campaign urging schools to re-open.
With that news as a backdrop, more studies point to the averse effects of remote learning on students. Earlier this week, the non-profit Bellweather Education Partners estimates that nearly 3 million students have gone missing from school since March of 2020.
These studies, combined with optimistic news on the vaccine and the federal government’s nudging to re-open schools, stoke lingering tensions amongst parents and public school officials.
In D128, there is disappointment amongst residents in what they perceive as the board’s overly cautious approach to offering a all-day full-time learning option.
In an open letter posted on social media, Libertyville resident David Acosta wrote:
The hybrid model that our children have at LHS is not preparing them for the future and it is not providing them the best learning experience for them to excel.
Keeping kids out of full time in person instruction is not the right thing to do anymore and quite frankly no longer justifiable. Which leads many of us to believe the decisions being made for this district are being driven politically instead of being based on real data and community need
Libertyville resident Shannon Gordon, on a D128 parental Facebook group, said the following:
My take was that they have no intention of moving beyond hybrid this school year. There was little to no mention of anything student or education related. No mention of the ineffectiveness of the current online/hybrid learning. No discussion about improving the experience for students. No reflection as to the number of or cause for students dropping hybrid learning at LHS.
Kim Waitek Bissing, an administrator of the Facebook group, said this:
(Pat) Groody and (D128 Superintendent Dr. Prentiss) Lea have 1.5 months left. They are enjoying their atta-boys until their time up. They are not going to do any kind of work whatsoever before April 6th.
Whether listening to parent’s concerns or assessing the national conversation around in-person learning, D128 officials are re-thinking school procedures for the remaining three months of 2020-21.
At a meeting held Tuesday night (March 2), the board and district administrators introduced an all-day option for students beginning on April 5 (currently the district offers half-days for in-person students). According to Groody, more surveying is needed to determine the right direction for the remainder of the school year.
“Based on (March 2 meeting) feedback, I expect we will move forward with the full day option,” Groody said Wednesday. “It’s hard to predict who will elect for remote and who may elect to stay with the half day option.”
Groody said he remains steadfast in his belief that pushing for weekly rapid antigen testing was the correct decision then and in the near future. And not just for the health and safety of the district he represents, but for the Libertyville and Vernon Hills populations as a whole.
“The testing for us is a significant investment no doubt. I don’t deny that. From our perspective it is the cost of doing business,” Groody said. “We are spending $20 per week per kid and $400 until the end of the year. But because of that, we are going to prevent a lot of infections not just in the school but in the community. You have to look at it in a broader perspective.
“There are some who get it and there are others who just don’t want to hear it. They want to waive a wand and say, ‘you should have been back in school in August, you should be back in school five days a week. And you know what? If you want to make schools a super spreader, you go ahead and do that.”
In April, Groody’s term as school board president expires. After 16 years on the board and 12 as president, he has no plans to run again. Lea is retiring in June, meaning the district will turn over its two most significant leadership positions in the same year.
His tenure winding down, Groody said he is content with choices made and satisfied the district is well-positioned to cope with the challenges that lie ahead.
“We took a very measured approach through the entire year. We have been very structured in what we have done, very consistent in what we have done,” Groody said. “We have relied on data to make our decisions. We’ve taken a lot of political heat for it but none of our decisions have been made on popularity or political opinion.”