Related
With so many questions and changing situations, patience is needed, she said.
“We have to be patient with one another, we need to show a little bit of kindness and understanding that we remain in uncertain waters here,” Arkoosh said.
Arkoosh points to models that say the positivity rate — the percentage of all tests that come back positive — should be less than 5% for children to safely return to schools.
Perkiomen Valley School District Superintendent Barbara Russell said they hope to have a plan for parents by the end of the month.
She said among the challenges are how to fit students in classrooms while keeping them 6 feet apart, how to keep staff safe and address their health concerns, and whether or not it's realistic to think younger students will wear masks and stay away from each other.
“We’re trying to cover all of our bases while we’ve got lots of plates spinning, and we understand there may be some additional guidelines handed down from the Pennsylvania Department of Education along with the county this week,” Russell said.
But she said it’s hard to plan when you don’t know exactly what you’re planning for.
For example, it’s hard to say how many students they should be planning for as, understandably, many families haven’t decided for certain if their kids will be attending school in person or online.
In Philadelphia, the school district Wednesday announced it’s adopting a hybrid back-to-school plan that will see most students returning to their classrooms for two days a week.
Testing in the county
Arkoosh said the “explosion” of COVID-19 cases across the country is causing long delays in getting test results in Montgomery County.
She said she's told the company handling the county’s testing, Quest Diagnostics, that the lag in results is unacceptable, but the company told her they’ve reached their capacity across the country and are working to expand it.
She said Quest isn’t the only company seeing the delays, but the county is exploring partnering with other labs.
The seven- to 10-day delay in results makes it all but impossible to keep an eye out for any COVID-19 hot-spots through contact tracing, she explained, which could also affect schools opening in the fall.
The county operates six testing sites for residents or people who work in the county. Those sites are being paid for out of the federal CARES Act funding.
A site run by the National Guard on the community college campus closed at the end of June, when federal funding for the site ended.