The Greenfield School Committee voted by majority to repeal a policy that required pooled testing for all middle school and high school athletes.
Members Kate Martini, Susan Eckstrom, Jean Wall and Chair Amy Proietti voted at a recent School Committee meeting in favor of repealing the policy that’s been in place since the fall. School Committee member Elizabeth Deneeve voted ‘no’, while members Glenn Johnson-Mussad and Mayor Roxann Wedegartner abstained.
“From a nursing standpoint, they’re not sure that continuing this practice is very efficient,” explained Superintendent Christine DeBarge, who asked the committee to consider repealing the policy. “We also have very few cases in the district in general.”
There were 12 positive COVID-19 cases in the district as of last Wednesday, according to DeBarge, who noted this was a “tiny increase” from the prior week.
Wedegartner said while she was happy to hear numbers were “manageable,” she was curious as to why pooled testing wasn’t a reasonable practice to continue.
“We have had some challenges with testing partners coming in, so we’ve been running extremely short-staffed,” she said. “With all the other things that need to be done, the burden on the nurses is substantially more than the benefit we believe we are gaining from mandated pooled testing.”
She noted that the spring sports are largely outdoors.
Johnson-Mussad asked whether it would be possible to set up a “triggering event” that would put such a policy back in place if warranted.
“We would be working with the (Department of Public Health) at the state level and (Greenfield Health Department) around any changes to mitigation strategies, quite honestly, for any communicable issue,” DeBarge said. “Flu, for example, could require us to have conversations about what we do about levels of infection … I think it would be very challenging at this point in what would be described as becoming an endemic to put hard and fast numbers on, ‘if it reaches X number of cases, we will reinstitute.’”