The Los Angeles Unified School District will employ a strict testing and contact tracing plan to help keep nearly 700,000 students and staff members safe amid the coronavirus pandemic.
According to the Los Angeles Times, the plan will involve administering COVID-19 tests to nearly 500,000 students and 75,000 staffers within the district.
"Extraordinary circumstances call for extraordinary actions, and while this testing and contact tracing effort is unprecedented, it is necessary and appropriate," superintendent Austin Beutner said. "This program will provide public health benefit to all in the school community as well as the greater Los Angeles area. It will also provide significant education benefits for students as it will get them back to school sooner and safer and keep them there.
"The level of new cases in Los Angeles are still two and a half times the state guidelines, and while the portion of those testing positive is below state thresholds, it’s still considerably higher than the World Health Organization standards and those in place for New York."
The testing plan is expected to cost about $300 per person during the school year, for a grand total of roughly $150 million. The district has not yet announced where the money will come from.
The LA school district is starting the fall semester with remote learning. There is no specific timeline on when students will return to physical classrooms.
The 2020-2021 school year starts Tuesday.
According to Johns Hopkins University data, LA has experienced roughly 222,000 COVID-19 cases and more than 5,200 deaths.
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