LOS ANGELES (KNX) — Students across the country are walking out, boycotting class in protest of COVID-19 testing and safety protocols and demand more testing be done.
Tuesday, hundreds of Oakland, Calif. high school students gathered more than 1,200 petition signatures, following a huge uptick in COVID-19 cases in the Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) after the holiday break, KCBS reported.
Le'Lani Walker, a student at Oakland High School told KNX the boycott was organized after teacher “sickouts” organized in the city earlier this month. Touching on something the students have been accused of, she said it has nothing to do with getting a day out of school.
“I have peers and counterparts who are sacrificing their wellbeing as far as them eating lunch or time spent in class — simply because they don’t feel comfortable or safe at school with regard to COVID safety and the precautions that OUSD has implemented, or hasn’t implemented,” Walker said.
Organizing for the last two weeks, Walker and fellow OUSD students first staged a “sickout” last Thursday, encouraging students to stay home from school. Walker said since then, two of their three demands have been met. She said they are now waiting on OUSD to implement more frequent testing.
“We do need that testing…for the simple fact that not everyone is vaccinated — and [the district is] rationalizing tests for elementary schoolers because the elementary schools cannot get vaccinated. So we’re walking around and sharing spaces with people who are potentially contaminating our classrooms, our hallways, our restrooms.”
Walker said she and her fellow students are asking OUSD to test everyone at least two times per week.
Updates from the district
In an update shared by OUSD Tuesday, district officials said more than 10,000 people are being tested each week in its COVID-19 Testing System.
“We are running, I think, one of the biggest testing operations in the county right now,” Sailaja Suresh, the head of the District’s COVID Response Team, said in a statement.
“[The week of January 3] we administered more than 21,000 tests, which I think was about one-seventh of all the tests that were administered in Alameda County.”
District officials said help from the state has also allowed them to provide at-home tests to staff and students, including 41,000 test kits that went home for winter break.