McMaster’s surprise announcement of COVID tests in schools took weeks to complete | Palmetto Policy

COLOMBIA – Governor Henry McMaster’s recent announcement that the COVID-19 test will be available soon in public schools in South Carolina seemed to come out of nowhere.

But that followed weeks of back and forth problems that included whether districts could adjust the writing of a state’s parental consent form and use their own letterhead.

The news came in the middle of a press conference on November 19, organized so that the Republican governor could publicly urge people to “take the test before the turkey” to meet responsibly on Thanksgiving, as the visual indicated prepared next to him.

The move to school tests, with the goal of bringing students back to classrooms full-time, surprised almost everyone outside of their inner circle, including the head of state schools Molly Spearman, who was noticeably absent from an advertisement. about schools.

Bombarded with questions from district officers, Spearman’s office quickly sent an email to local superintendents informing them that she also did not know that the news was coming and that she would pass on the answers when she received them.

“Many overworked school nurses were surprised by this,” said Spearman spokesman Ryan Brown.

But it was a lack of coordination at the moment, not in the substance of what McMaster said, which was the shock.

He came after six weeks of discussions between the state’s public health and education agencies, working through the state school’s consulting nurse, who is jointly employed by both.

“School nurses know that this has been happening since schools started,” said Dawn MacAdams, health coordinator for Richland Two and immediate past president of the state School Nurses Association. “We just didn’t know it was going to be announced.”

The 220,200 quick results COVID-19 nasal swab tests currently available to participating K-12 public schools in South Carolina are part of the 150 million being distributed across the country for use in schools, nursing homes, assisted living centers, historically Black colleges and tribes.

President Donald Trump announced the initiative on September 28, two months ago, in an effort to further encourage personal learning and help stem the spread among populations particularly vulnerable to the disease becoming deadly.

Although health homes have been closed since March, they are responsible for about 40% of deaths, due to the unintentional spread of the team. And minorities have been disproportionately affected, which experts believe is the result of historic barriers to the health care system.

The federal government has already sent nearly 441,000 of the tests directly to nursing homes, assisted living facilities, hospice operations and historically black colleges in South Carolina. In addition, the State Department of Health and Environmental Control is scheduled to receive 1.55 million before the end of the year.

So far, the agency has received about 586,000 of the tests that produce a result in about 15 minutes, instead of days. It is not clear how many will go to K-12 public schools.

Whether they go beyond the 220,200 distributed to the districts this week, will depend on the interest and the speed with which the participating schools pass them, according to DHEC.

Otherwise, they are going to nursing homes, assisted living facilities and state prisons.

Young people, especially school-age children, rarely become seriously ill because of the illness that affects the elderly and those with underlying health problems. No one aged 5 to 19 died of COVID-19 in South Carolina, while 71 percent of those who died were 70 or older, according to DHEC.

The hope for schools is that the ability to quickly discern whether common symptoms, such as cough, congestion and headache are COVID-19 or anything else, will provide confidence for more districts to offer an entire week of face-to-face learning and maintain classrooms open during the cold winter and flu season.

Other states implemented their school testing plans for kits provided by the federal government weeks ago. Texas began with a pilot program for eight districts in mid-October. Hundreds of other districts in the State of the Lonely Star soon signed up.

One of the biggest obstacles in South Carolina was how to get the medical permission that the school nurses needed to give. This was largely resolved by McMaster’s executive order, issued on Wednesday, which allowed the DHEC guidelines to serve as a doctor’s permanent medical prescription.

They basically say, “If you see ‘X’, you can do that,” said MacAdams.

McMaster waited to sign the order until more logistics were resolved. His announcement a week earlier forced some movement in the backstage conversations.

The day after the press conference, schools received their first batch of DHEC guidelines, including the symptoms that make a student or employee eligible for the free trial and a checklist of what schools must do to participate.

But much of the local planning work remains.

This includes figuring out how to dispose of used tests and the manpower needed to make all of this happen, especially in the 79 schools across the state that do not have a full-time nurse. DHEC said that a sports trainer can replace a school nurse when applying the tests, but chances are good that if a school does not have a nurse, it probably will not have a sports trainer either.

As of Friday, it was still unclear what the parental consent form would look like, a source of disagreement for several weeks.

Sending messages has also been an obstacle. After weeks of begging parents to keep a sick child at home, some fear that the availability of tests at school means that the opposite is much more likely to happen.

DHEC says that districts may choose to offer tests outside, such as in the parking lot, for students who start to feel bad before the school day starts, as long as they don’t arrive by school bus.

But this can be difficult to arrange when school nurses are already busy internally with their regular duties, such as dispensing medicines for children, as well as the additional responsibilities this year of identifying close contacts of any employee or student with a positive test for COVID- 19

“It will all come down to the workforce,” said MacAdams.

“The test will be a good thing, especially to help our medically underserved areas, where parents may not have the resources and transportation to take a child to be tested,” she said. “It’s just working on logistics in each district.”