Niagara Falls, NY (WBEN) - The Niagara Falls City School District has become the area's first school district to operate as a COVID testing site, meaning that if the region were to be designated as a yellow zone, testing for students and staff to meet state requirements would be able to be done on-site at schools. In a yellow zone, schools have two weeks to test 20% of their in-person students and staff in order to prove infection rate within the district is lower than in the community, and be able to stay open.
The Niagara Falls district's establishment of the site comes on the day when many districts in Western New York will go back into remote learning because of testing restrictions in the orange zone. Orange zone restrictions state schools must test 100% of students and staff before allowing them back in to the building, and then test 25% of students every week after.
Just over a week ago, the state changed its yellow zone guidelines to ease the testing burden on schools. Should the same be done for orange and red zones?
"I think that would make a lot of sense," said Niagara Falls School Superintendent Mark Laurrie. "It would be virtually impossible, and I feel for those Districts that are in the orange and red zones, to be able to test 100% of the population. It's literally locking the door without a key."
Even though Laurrie has gone through the process of establishing a testing site by receiving a license from the state, they are currently prepared to satisfy the 20% testing requirement for yellow zones. If they were to be designated as an orange zone, even their own testing lab might not be enough to overcome the requirements.
"We'd have to take a really good look at that," Laurrie said. "The tests that we receive for the yellow zone are free, but the cost in woman or man power certainly is exorbitant. The time it takes to do that, it's not going to be done in a regular seven or eight hour day. If you're in orange or red you're really going to have a lot of work to do to get back, and I think the effort may not be worth taking your energy from making a better remote program."
