Only These Three School Districts in Chester County Have Enrolled in the State’s Free COVID-19 Testing Program

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students sharing a pen
Image via Pavel Danilyuk at Pexels.
Only three school districts in Chester County are using state resources for COVID-19 testing.

Despite low child vaccination rates and spikes in the number of coronavirus infections, Pennsylvania schools have been slow to take advantage of the state’s free COVID-19 tests. Here in Chester County, only three are participating, according to Jamie Martines’s report in The Philadelphia Inquirer.

Only 750 out of the more than 5,000 charter, private, and public schools in Pennsylvania have enrolled in the state health department program as of Feb. 16. About half the participating schools are currently actively testing, while the rest are in the onboarding process.

“That’s not enough,” said Acting Secretary of Health Keara Klinepeter. She added that the state is continuing with “further outreach” to encourage participation.

The program has struggled to gain momentum due to schools having to juggle competing issues: COVID-19 outbreaks fueled by new variants and exhausted school staff.

In considering the state’s public school districts alone, only about 25 percent of the 500 total are using Harrisburg’s testing program.

In Chester County, the three participating school districts are Octorara, Owen J. Roberts, and Phoenixville. They represent less than a quarter of the county’s 14 districts, a total that includes Twin Valley and Spring-Ford.

Read more about school-district use, or not, of the state’s free COVID-19 tests in The Philadelphia Inquirer.

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