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This year, the L.A. Unified School District ordered all students and staff to take COVID-19 tests each week — and the costs of this regimen are ballooning fast.
LAUSD projects spending more than $527 million on testing and contact tracing before the end of the school year, according to a briefing officials delivered to school board members Tuesday afternoon. That’s more than four times the amount LAUSD expected to spend on testing last June.
The district has administered between 1-2 million tests each month this school year — around three times the number of tests they expected to conduct last June.
#LAUSD is conducting roughly 3x-4x more on #COVID19 testing than they expected when they wrote the budget in June 2021.
— Kyle Stokes (@kystokes) February 23, 2022
Consequently, they're spending 4x more than anticipated — about $400M over-budget pic.twitter.com/BfMqCbFDqP
It’s unlikely this cost overrun represents a financial problem for the district. District officials expect the Federal Emergency Management Agency to reimburse LAUSD for a substantial portion — if not all — of that cost.
Still, Superintendent Alberto Carvalho signaled LAUSD may soon be able to revisit its testing policy, which requires weekly negative tests regardless of symptoms or vaccination status. He noted positivity rates on the district’s tests have been trending downward — and almost all staff members are vaccinated.
“Is it still necessary to test,” he wondered Tuesday, “at the frequency and intensity we have been testing, given the extreme cost?”
The superintendent said no change will be made without input from medical experts.
