Each week, Kristen Cox administers a coronavirus test to her 4-year-old son at their home in the Adams Morgan neighborhood of Washington. To make it easier for him, sometimes she’ll “test” her son’s stuffed animals, too. A new measure rolled out recently in D.C. Public Schools requires students in its prekindergarten program to test each week and provide a negative result to come back to school on Monday.
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Over 3,500 prekindergarten students have submitted results each of the first four weeks of the program, which started Jan. 18, and is intended to catch coronavirus cases detected through rapid antigen tests before students head into classrooms. This week, 4,110 pre-K students submitted results, with18 students testing positive, according to data from school officials. That’s down slightly from the previous week when 4,152 students submitted results. That week, 20 pre-K students tested positive.
The prekindergarten testing program is unique in the metro area and expands on the school system’s “test-to-return” initiative after winter break, which required all staff and students to test negative for the coronavirus before returning to school. With the weekly pre-K initiative, school leaders say parents are becoming more comfortable with the testing and hope it is a way to keep more students in school.
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The city’s early-childhood education program has faced drops in enrollment since the pandemic began. Roughly 5,300 students are enrolled in D.C. Public Schools’ prekindergarten program for 3- and 4-year-olds, according to data from the Office of the State Superintendent of Education. In the 2019-2020 school year, before the pandemic began, 6,088 were enrolled. Officials have said they are planning other initiatives later in the school year to reclaim those unenrolled students.
In recent weeks, about 3,900 prekindergarten students have come to classes each week, with some out because they were quarantining or absent, school system officials said. Children are not required by law to attend pre-K.
Quarantine protocols for these students have historically been stringent: If one child tests positive for the coronavirus in a prekindergarten class, the entire class has been sent home to quarantine for 10 days. To cut down on the time out of school, the system is trying out a separate program that allows students exposed to the coronavirus through close contact with a classmate to frequently test at school. If the results are negative, they stay in school.
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In Cox’s case, her 4-year-old son, Harrison, had been in quarantine for 10 days last month because a student in his classroom at Marie Reed Elementary School tested positive. A week later, the weekly program caught another student who tested positive — preventing the child from interacting with the other students and possibly sending the class into another quarantine period, Cox said.
“Otherwise, we would have gone back to school assuming everything was okay,” said Cox, 41. “So, I think the more that we can test would be fantastic.”
D.C. required negative coronavirus tests to return to school. Did it work?
The city launched the initiative to target young learners who are not yet eligible for the vaccine, which is available to those ages 5 and older. Families with students enrolled in prekindergarten receive a test in their student’s backpack each Friday that they have to administer on Sunday and upload results to the school system’s online database. The program is compulsory for prekindergarten students and optional for kindergarten students, who are also given the weekly take-home coronavirus tests.
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In its first week, approximately 3,910 students in both prekindergarten levels submitted results — with 43 testing positive, according to the D.C. Public Schools Reopen Strong website.
Forty-six of those results from the first week came from Patterson Elementary School in the Bellevue neighborhood, where Principal Victorie Thomas said she was confident that more students would submit results as the program continued. Thomas and other Patterson staffers have hosted virtual sessions with parents to explain the importance of the testing program.
Some of the parents were having trouble navigating the system, which involves taking the tests and uploading the results online. Patterson Assistant Principal Fatima Johnson-Avery said she walked through how to do so with a few parents.
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“Most of our parents have been very receptive,” Johnson-Avery said. “I think it’s just taking them through the process. They’re very amenable to doing it.”
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“One of my statements [to parents] has been, ‘It’s not about your child; it’s about everyone’s child,' ” Thomas said. “ 'And it’s for the safety and well-being of all of our students in the school.’ ”
The results remained steady in the weeks after, but in the most recent report from the school system Monday — four weeks after the initiative began — Patterson’s submissions declined slightly. Forty-three students showed proof of a negative test and no prekindergarten student reported a positive result. There are 63 students in the school’s prekindergarten program.
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At the school entrance on Mondays, Patterson staffers verify that prekindergarten students have uploaded proof of a negative result based on a report D.C. Public Schools distributes to school administrators each week. Classroom teachers at Patterson are also given a roster to check that the students entering the classroom participated in the testing protocols, Thomas said.
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Some parents have shown proof of a negative result at the school instead of uploading it online, school officials said. Families of students who show up without proof of a negative result are given a test to administer back at home, officials said. Once the family conducts the test and receives a negative result, the student can return. School officials said there has been “a minimal need to do this so far.”
Parents navigating the system said the program has brought clarity on what’s happening in schools to mitigate the spread of the coronavirus. Inez Steigerwald, who has a 4-year-old at Bunker Hill Elementary in the Michigan Park neighborhood, said that since her daughter is so young, it has been hard to keep track of what’s happening in school. It’s unclear if students are keeping their masks on in class, or how often her daughter gets tested through the school system’s random asymptomatic testing it conducts for all grade levels.
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“I would say goodbye to my daughter in the morning, and then it was just a black box where I have no concept of what kind of testing is happening in her school because she certainly can’t tell me and nobody else is telling me,” Steigerwald, 34, said.
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When the weekly testing program was announced, Steigerwald was relieved to have some information, she said. The prekindergarten testing program “is a step in the direction” of being able to catch more cases before it spreads, she said.
Parents are notified of the cases detected through the program through the school system’s typical notification protocol: The school community receives a letter notifying parents of a positive case, and a total daily case count at each school is posted to the DCPS Reopen Strong website.
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While the program thus far has helped catch cases, there may be a need for more testing, Cox said. One of her children’s classmates tested negative in the morning but positive in the evening.
“I think the more that we test, the more we can catch people and keep them at home,” Cox said.
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For Rachna and Aaron Pultz, whose 4-year-old son is enrolled at H.D. Cooke Elementary School, the “general level of responsibility” the city has shown during the pandemic has been distinct. Both said they were grateful to have the tests provided by schools.
“When I talk to friends who live in other parts of the country and they’re not experiencing that,” Aaron Pultz, 47, said, referring to the amount of testing being done in D.C. schools, “there’s a lot more loose interpretation of the types of rules that should be enforced, or no enforcement. And that would cause me a lot of stress.”
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Their youngest child, Theodore, 2, tested positive for the coronavirus during the Christmas holiday, and his experience was bad.
“Once they implemented the test-to-stay program, I felt really assured that there is a plan in place,” Rachna Pultz, 45, added about the outlook for her older son. “We’re not just kind of like flying blind on this in that if there is an exposure, here is what is going to happen, and they seem to be sticking with the plan.”