For the past three years, school nurses have been on the front lines of Vermont’s Covid-19 testing plans. Through multiple rounds of shifting guidance from the state, nurses have swabbed thousands of nostrils to determine whether students should stay at school or go home and isolate.
That ends this fall, when a shift in state guidance means that school nurses can no longer administer Covid-19 tests to students.
“The health order allowing school nurses to test students in school for COVID-19 has expired and is not being reinstated,” Bennett Truman, a spokesperson for the Vermont Department of Health, said in an email. State officials will “continue to make test kits available to communities, but we are not planning to distribute test kits directly to schools as we did during the heart of the pandemic.”
That shift reflects the health department’s view that the virus is transitioning from a new and alarming disease to something more akin to a seasonal flu. It comes after the state recorded a small uptick in Covid-19 cases last month, which health experts attributed to a new variant known as EG.5.
Kelly Landwehr, president of the Vermont State School Nurses Association and the lead nurse at Middlebury Union High School, said that instead of testing, nurses will evaluate students’ symptoms — fevers, coughs, runny nose — to determine whether a child should remain at school.
Nurses will “go through an assessment (to) determine if this is a kid who’s well enough to stay at school,” Landwehr said. “Or if they’re not in a place where they’re ready to learn and they seem to have some early symptoms and they need to be home resting, we’ll send them home.”
But, she said, “It’s going to be tricky, because we will have, you know, kids with just normal cold viruses and RSV and Covid.”
Officials at the Vermont Department of Health are still tracking cases of Covid-19, as they do for other diseases. The School Nurses Association leadership said that they would continue to report known cases of Covid-19 to the state.
But “you’re only going to report if you test positive, and you’re only going to test positive if you’re testing,” said Becca McCray, the school nurses’ group’s past president and a Burlington School District nurse.
At the end of the 2022-2023 school year, state education officials asked local districts not to dispose of any leftover Covid-19 tests. But in a Wednesday afternoon email obtained by VTDigger, a Vermont Department of Health official told school nurses that at least some of the tests distributed to schools had expired and should be tossed.
“It is noteworthy that all LAMP tests that were distributed or retained in storage have reached their expiration date,” Kaitlyn Kodzis, the state school nurse consultant, wrote to local school nurses. “While it was previously advised schools to retain tests nearing expiration, the present recommendation is to appropriately dispose of expired materials. There is no anticipation for further extensions on expiration dates moving forward.”
That email was sent several hours after VTDigger asked the Vermont Department of Health about Covid-19 testing protocols for the school year. It’s unclear whether schools are in possession of any other types of Covid tests that have not yet expired.
The email also recounted safety guidelines around Covid-19 in schools, little if any of which appeared to be new: Students who are unwell, with or without Covid-19, should be sent home from school. Students could be required to mask while waiting for pickup. Children could return to school once symptoms improved, and schools could not require a negative test for students to return to school.
Lindsey Hedges, a spokesperson for the Vermont Agency of Education, said in an email that she could provide little information about coronavirus testing policies until a scheduled meeting next week between Vermont’s interim Secretary of Education Heather Bouchey and Health Commissioner Mark Levine.
“The Agency of Education continues to collaborate with its Department of Health colleagues to make sure we are making the best decisions to keep students safe and healthy this school year,” she said and referred a reporter to the Department of Health’s Covid-19 safety guidance website.
In an interview on Vermont Public’s Vermont Edition last week, Bouchey said the Agency of Education does not plan to release new Covid-19 guidance to schools.
“We’re pretty seasoned, in terms of knowing how to actually manage another outbreak of Covid,” Bouchey said. “So at this point we’ll be relying on the same guidance and the same directives, technical assistance, that we’ve put in place in prior years.”
Wednesday morning, Landwehr and McCray, the school nurses’ group leaders, said they wished the state had used a more “proactive approach” in disseminating information about Covid-19 testing for the current school year. Nurses had not gotten a clear answer whether the state would continue to provide schools with Covid-19 tests to distribute to families, they said. (Truman, the department of health spokesperson, told VTDigger Wednesday afternoon that the state does not plan to do so.)
Ideally, the state would have reached out in “early August, saying, ‘Here school nurses, this is what we know,’” Landwehr said. “‘We just want to make sure that you’re feeling comfortable and set and ready to go for the year.’”