D.C.'s prekindergarten students will start getting coronavirus test kits in their families’ mailboxes in January, City Administrator Kevin Donahue said at a D.C. Council meeting Friday.

       D.C. public schools regularly test students for the novel coronavirus, but the city’s youngest public school students have had trouble spitting into the vessels used to collect their saliva for the tests. Donahue said that by sending at-home test kits to prekindergarten students, parents will be able to use nasal swabs on their children, which may be easier for small children than saliva tests.

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       The kits will arrive at students’ homes by FedEx, and parents will be responsible for sending the swabs back via FedEx to be processed, Donahue said. He did not say in the meeting how much the city is spending on the test kits and postage.

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       Council member Charles Allen (D-Ward 6) said he was glad that the city would stop trying to use saliva-based tests for young children, but he wondered whether asking parents to administer and mail the tests made sense. “Why not just do the nasal swab [at school] while the kids are there?” he asked. “I have some questions about how effectively we’ll be able to get this testing done.”

       Patrick Ashley, the head of emergency response for the D.C. health department, said that the school district would rather students spend the school day in their classrooms than with a medical professional attempting to swab their noses. Moving testing from school to home, he said, would be a “shift to an environment they’re more comfortable in, and it’s not disruptive to the learning environment.”

       Donahue said that the city will make the at-home tests available for other preschools in the city, not just public schools.

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       Council member Christina Henderson (I-At Large) said it’s not just youngsters who have complained about the saliva tests. High-schoolers also say that the spit tests take them away from their classrooms for too long, and a nasal swab would be faster. Donahue noted that students can complete the spit tests themselves, while a nasal swab would require a trained professional to administer the test at school to each child.

       The District has been criticized by parents for the initially low number of students tested at school, and some parents and teachers continue to ask for more students to be tested on a regular basis.