Why did Oakland and San Mateo students receive at-home COVID-19 tests earlier than kids in San Francisco and Hayward kids?

Despite state leaders’ promises to get at-home COVID tests in students’ hands before they returned from winter break, Bay Area school districts received them at wildly different times – and some didn’t have tests until days after classes resumed.

And a Bay Area News Group analysis suggests districts that received tests earlier were able to do a better job than others at controlling the spread of COVID among their school communities.

The state’s failure to deliver tests in a timely manner, even as it urged districts to resume in-person classes, has created tension within school communities about whether students and teachers were placed at unnecessary risk. Then, the methods for distributing the tests by the school districts were so uneven that in some cities, parents and kids waited in huge lines for tests while they were received in an orderly manner in other places.

Testing is not the schools’ only concern. Teacher shortages and worries over the rapid spike in COVID infections have caused some schools to delay opening or to close temporarily. There have been student- and teacher-led sickouts and protests for better safety conditions in schools in San Francisco and West Contra Costa. In San Jose, where families were allowed to pick up the at-home tests only a few days before school resumed, some parents say they no longer trust school leaders to keep their kids safe.

It was a different scene in districts like Marin County, Oakland, San Mateo and Berkeley, where most families had tests in hand before the winter break and parents were able to detect the virus in their kids sooner. That kept them out of classrooms, apparently preventing further outbreaks.

Oakland handed out 41,000 test kits and identified 837 positive cases before the first week back at school – even though students in about half a dozen East Oakland schools say they didn’t receive them when everyone else did. San Mateo handed out 9,400 test kits and detected 362 positive cases before the start of school. Berkeley handed out more than 12,000 tests and detected 227 positive cases before the start of school.

“The at-home testing kept a lot of COVID out of our schools,” said Trish McDermott, a spokesperson for the Berkeley Unified School District last week.

Gov. Gavin Newson, State schools Superintendent Tony Thurmond and state leaders touted that millions of students would have at-home tests in their hands before the return from winter break. But delivery was hampered in large swaths of the state by bad weather – including in Southern California, where the case rates surged at Los Angeles Unified after the holidays.

The state has delivered more than 9.6 million tests to California schools and county offices of education as of Jan. 7. About 2 million tests were shipped directly to some schools and school districts in early December, but the bulk – more than 7 million – began shipping on a rolling basis Dec. 22  to county offices of education, and had to be distributed from there.

The Bay Area News Group asked more than a dozen school districts when they received at-home test kits from the state. School districts had discretion in how they gave them out to students, with some handing them out to classroom teachers to distribute to students directly and others hosting districtwide distribution sites for parent pick-ups.

School districts in San Mateo, Oakland, Fremont and Marin received tests in early to mid-December while Dublin, San Francisco, Pleasanton and Hayward districts didn’t receive their kits until early January. All those districts were scheduled to resume classes the weeks of Jan. 3 or Jan. 10, but some didn’t have tests available to give to students until after their schools had reopened following the holiday break.

San Jose Unified was among the districts that failed to provide any information.

Meredith Dodson, a parent of a kindergartener in San Francisco Unified, volunteered along with other parents this week to hand out at-home tests to students on school campuses – one week after the first day of school. She said the late arrival of the tests and other safety concerns were rekindling tensions between students and administrators that had started to fade last semester.

“It doesn’t even matter anymore because the point was to get kids tested before break,” Dodson said. “Well, it matters because it helps now, but it could’ve gone a long way helping things feel safe coming back to classrooms if we had them before the break.”

“This is the most difficult time our public schools have seen in over a century, and we must work together to serve our children and families while living with COVID,” Vincent Matthews, superintendent of the district, wrote in a letter to the school community.

San Jose Unified parents picked up tests from the district the Sunday or Monday before school resumed on Tuesday, Jan. 4, but many parents said that was too late. At West Contra Costa, where students received their tests the day before schools reopened on Jan. 3, administrators later closed classrooms for two days following the start of the semester due to high case rates, lack of testing and teacher shortages.

The school districts that provided data on absence and infection rates showed that early access to the tests likely made a difference.

Marin County was one of a few districts – including Oakland and Fremont Unified – that participated in a pilot program with the state and received tests earlier than others.

The Marin County Office of Education ordered 47,000 tests on Dec. 1 and received its tests on Dec. 10. The county office was able to hand test kits to all students by Dec. 16, well before the start of school. On average, only 3% of students tested positive for the virus and missed class during the first week back from break, said Kate Lane, assistant superintendent at Marin Schools.

“This situation was very positive because people would’ve otherwise gone into school undetected,” Lane said.