The Kansas City, Kansas, Public Schools are moving to self-administered COVID testing for employees for the time being, according to Dr. Anna Stubblefield, superintendent.
Dr. Stubblefield said at the Tuesday night school board meeting that the company it had hired has notified the district it would no longer provide testing, as of the end of this week.
The school district has an employee testing policy for those employees and volunteers who are not vaccinated.
Dr. Stubblefield said they are working to get more saliva COVID tests but they are not readily available, and there is a shortage of tests.
She said the district’s health service team will create protocols around self-administered tests for employees who have not shown proof of vaccination and are required to test.
Although it would be a change in practice, it isn’t a change in policy, according to district officials.
Dr. Stubblefield also told the school board there were individuals who have refused to test, with the district now going through an employee process, and their cases may be brought to the board in the future. Some employees, for medical to religious reasons, are choosing not to do the tests, she added.
Board President Randy Lopez said the original idea of the district’s testing policy was to encourage employees to get vaccinated.
Board member Rachel Russell made a motion to remove the testing policy until further notice, but she later withdrew the motion after more discussion with Tiffany Lewis, director of health services for the school district. The board also discussed having only symptomatic persons tested for COVID, but that idea also did not move forward. Russell said there was no point in being tested if the employees were answering “yes” to any of the three COVID screening questions they are asked.
Board member Wanda Brownlee Paige said that there is a problem with that, as some employees in the past still showed up at school despite having symptoms.
She said she would like to table the motion, so the health services team could come up with a proposal. The board should not hurry to do anything but should think it through, she said.
Russell said making the decision to no longer contact trace COVID cases hurt them more than losing the tests, as there is no way of knowing where the cases are coming from.
Lewis said the school district did not stop contact tracing, it just moved to a more generic form of contact tracing. Instead of calling each individual who was a contact of a positive case, the district now sends a generic letter to each building, she said. With the surge in COVID cases, the contact tracing team fell behind, and couldn’t make individual calls, she said. They still work with building administrators, notifying buildings and children, she added.
Dr. Stubblefield said most employees notify the district if they are sick. The district is still allowing time off.
The district will expect employees who have symptoms to stay home, and take a home test, she said. The district has sent out notifications and updates based on quarantine rules.
Lopez encouraged the health team to come back with a recommendation or options at a future meeting.
In response to a question from board member Valdenia Winn, Dr. Stubblefield said if employees do not get vaccinated and refuse to get tested, the policy is to follow a progressive discipline model , eventually going to the board, recommending termination. They are almost there with a couple of people now, according to the superintendent.
Lewis said there have been some occurrences where unvaccinated employees did not want to test, but in most cases they did take a test the second time.
Dr. Winn said she believed COVID is not going away, which is why she was a little reluctant to support doing away with the testing policy.
Russell said she believed a 70 to 80 percent vaccination rate is pretty good for a district that has 4,400 employees.
Lopez said the intent of the policy was to encourage staff to get vaccinated, not to suspend or terminate staff.
Earlier in the meeting, the school board heard two community comments. One was from an advocate of doing away with masks in the schools, who denied that masks were effective. The other commenter was a district teacher who pleaded with the board to keep the mask rule in place, as they were trying to prevent COVID from spreading through the schools.