Pennsylvania Ping!
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Posted on 09/30/2021 2:57:03 PM PDT by lightman
One of Pennsylvania’s mitigation strategies for keeping students in schools is providing free COVID-19 testing to school districts, but the program has drawn a lackluster response.
According to state Acting Health Secretary Alison Beam, nearly 400 schools of the state’s more than 3,000 public and private schools have enrolled in the program.
As of last Thursday, nearly 27,800 school-age students had tested positive for the virus since Aug. 16. That, in turn, has prompted some schools to switch to virtual learning and cancel sporting events due to outbreaks.
Despite that, state Education Secretary Noe Ortega said the school year os off to a “good start.”
“Kids are excited to be back in the classroom learning and growing alongside their classmates, something that they’ve been asking for for some time now, " he said.
Ortega and Beam participated in a virtual news conference with reporters on Thursday on Gov. Tom Wolf’s administration’s plans for ensuring school are able to offer in-person instruction this year.
“Safety has been paramount, educators and administrators have been doing the right thing to keep COVID at bay as much as possible,” Ortega said.
The in-school COVID-19 testing program the Wolf Administration launched last month is intended to help with that effort. Beam attributed the low response from schools to participate in it to a lack of awareness it exists.
“I think any reluctance on the part of the schools may be because we need to continue educating them on the availability of it and of course, we’ve tried ad nauseam to make sure schools are aware of it,” Beam said. “We welcome anyone else actually joining us and making sure that their children that are in school actually have access to this program too.”
The state last month announced it had entered into an $87 million contract with Boston-based Concentric by Ginkgo Bioworks to perform weekly classroom COVID-19 testing of public and private school students whose parents consent to it. This program is not available to students in Philadelphia, which has its own testing program.
The funding for the program comes out of the state’s share of the federal coronavirus relief bill.
At last month’s news conference announcing the launch of the testing program, Ginkgo executive Karen Hogan said that the tests were a “nice, shallow swab” that most kids could administer themselves. The test results are available in one to two days.
Beam said schools can still enroll in the testing program. She said the department is speaking to school leaders to make them aware of it as well as the breadth of testing supplies and staff available for it.
Along with testing, Beam encouraged students ages 12 and over to get vaccinated against the virus. She shared that vaccination numbers of students in that age group continues to rise.
At this point, she said 21.9% of children ages 12 to 14 are fully vaccinated and 42.6% of teens ages 15 to 19 are fully vaccinated.
Still, she said, “We need to keep making progress on vaccinations.”
However, she also said there is no plan to mandate vaccinations for students or educators at this point.
“We’re really focusing on just having our students be able to access it,” Beam said.
With the anticipated federal approval of the Pfizer vaccine becoming available to children ages 5 to 11 now weeks away, she encouraged schools to make it convenient for students and families to get vaccinated by making arrangements with local vaccine providers to scheduled clinics.
Beam also addressed an issue that has arisen in school districts across the state where objections have been raised about her order requiring children to wear masks in school. She said the only exemptions to her masking order are for students with disabilities or special needs. However, some districts have decided to let parents decide whether their children should be masked in schools.
Legislation has been offered to give parents that authority and lawsuits have been filed against her order seeking the court to grant parents that authority.
For now, though, Beam said, “just having a parent’s frustration with the order is not one of [the permitted exceptions] and so we’re going to continue to work with schools to make sure they are in compliance with this order to, again, keep students and teachers safe and retain that in person instruction this school year.”
On the issue of the need for more school bus drivers, PennDOT deputy secretary Kurt Myers said the driver pool is down by about 2,000 from four years ago, to a little over 42,000 school bus drivers. He said that is the lowest number of licensed CDL school bus drivers the commonwealth has had in the past five years.
He said PennDOT plans to offer commercial driver’s license skills testing at 23 locations statewide on Mondays for four weeks beginning October 18. Anyone 18 or older is eligible to seek a school bus endorsement on a CDL.
But to help fill the void of bus drivers, he said some of the COVID-19 funds that schools received can be used to “provide a limited reimbursement directly to parents or guardians to safely transport for students to and from in person schooling.”
Lastly, under certain circumstances, federal Elementary Secondary School emergency relief funds may be used to provide “a limited reimbursement directly to parents or guardians to safely transport for students to and from in person schooling.”
More phoney-baloney testing >> more "positive cases.
More "positive cases" >> more students quarantined.
More students quarantined >> more families quarantined.
More families quarantined = DEFACTO LOCKDOWN
And the phoney-baloney "data" will also mean perpetuation of masking and other medicofacist tyranny.
Pennsylvania Ping!
Please ping me with articles of interest.
FReepmail me to be added to the list.
They should be re-doing all their supposedly test postivie with Serology test!
Why not do Serology Test instead of PCR test?
I pray that this baloney thing will end and all the hoaxers, conspirators and masterminds will be rounded up and face Nuremberg 2 trial!
c r y . m e . a . r i v e r
The more tests the more cases....just test the kid if he is sick
I agree.
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