62,000 students and staff have COVID as LAUSD resumes on Tuesday
Students wait in line at a LAUSD COVID testing site run by LAUSD in Leimert Park.
One in seven COVID tests for LAUSD students and staff came back positive for COVID-19 in the past week. It’s the highest positivity rate the school district has seen since the beginning of the pandemic. And kids are headed back to in-person school on Tuesday.
Large school systems in Detroit, Cleveland, Milwaukee, Chicago, Madison and Newark all delayed the start of their spring semester, or switched to online instruction because of the recent Omicron surge.
LAUSD isn’t one of them.
That has some teachers worried for their safety, and parents concerned that their kids will contract the virus when they go back to school.
“Feeling safe? I can’t be 100%, no,” says Tierra Smith, who brought her sixth grader Brandeis to Crenshaw High School on Friday to get tested. “It’s scary, but I mean he has to go to school. So I just pray about it and hope for the best.”
Brandeis Smith, 12, says he agrees with his mom, Tierra Smith, that COVID transmission risk at school is worse than it used to be.
LAUSD has conducted weekly PCR testing for all of its students since the school year began, and in order to come back after the winter break, they are accepting PCR tests and rapid antigen tests. Students had to upload their test results by Sunday.
Parent Danielle Peters, who lives near the Fairfax neighborhood, is keeping her kids home for most of this week because she says it’s too easy for COVID cases to slip through the baseline tests undetected.
“I could conceivably have taken a test … gone to a wedding of 200 people where five of them have COVID, come back infected and still been okay for school because my test was negative,” she says. “That doesn't make sense to me.”
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Parents say kids aren’t safe from COVID as LAUSD restarts Tuesday (kcrw.com)