After careful consideration, the Wright City R-II School District has decided to proceed with COVID-19 antigen testing for staff upon returning for the second semester on Jan. 4. 

It was decided at the December monthly board meeting that as a result of limited personnel trained for testing, only staff members who are symptomatic will be eligible for testing. R-II has four nurses who will administer the tests at two sites, West Elementary and the middle school. 

“We took this idea to the board last month and had a lot of questions about it,” explained Superintendent Dr. Chris Berger. “We had a discussion about it in November and brought it back as an action item for December.”

While R-II initially considered the possibility of testing students as well, it found several barriers to that endeavor.

“We pretty quickly assessed that we weren’t going to have the staff to test both employees and students,” said Berger. “From that we also saw complications if we attempted to test the students.”

Among the concerns was the conflicting message between keeping a child at home if they are experiencing any symptoms and the possibility a parent may want to send their child to school for the sake of being tested if they were to be experiencing symptoms.

“After consistently encouraging families the whole first semester to keep their children home if they were symptomatic, to now say send them to school to be tested if they’re symptomatic doesn’t seem to align,” said Berger.

R-II’s justification for choosing to test staff is that it would help prevent the need for closing down buildings due to teacher shortages. While a limited presence of students does not prevent classes from proceeding, a lack of teachers could potentially halt the educational process.

“Our number-one risk of having to close is not having enough teachers available,” said Berger.

With the antigen testing, an individual would know within about 15 minutes whether their test returned positive or negative. Staff members would still be encouraged to pursue additional testing through a more advanced polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test.

The district initially received around 2,000 free test kits, accepting the maximum order when the idea of in-house testing originally surfaced earlier in 2020. Berger said approximately 1,500 of those kits will be returned, keeping 500 available to test part-time and full-time employees. R-II has 159 full-time employees.

“We’ve got our correspondence ready to go out for staff,” said Berger. “We think it’s a really good opportunity for them. It’s still voluntary, but this will be an option to potentially reduce quarantine time and keep staff in the building.”

The tests, which were accompanied by personal protective equipment, were provided through a cooperative effort between the Department of Health and Senior Services and the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education.