Where are the COVID tests?

When the pandemic hit last year, schools quickly transitioned to distance learning to ensure students would continue to receive an education while keeping our community safe. Despite the historic challenges, our schools, students, educators and families stepped up and did their part. Now it’s time for the mayor to do his part.

Last month, students, teachers, staff and families won a court case that would finally ensure that New York City includes public charter schools in its COVID-19 testing and screening program. But instead of embracing its responsibility to all students, the de Blasio administration has vowed to challenge that ruling, claiming that it’s not their “obligation” to provide free testing for our students. In so doing, however, the judge ruled the Department of Education improperly “arbitrarily differentiates” between DOE public schools and public charter schools.

The COVID-19 pandemic doesn’t distinguish between charter students and district students — so why does Mayor de Blasio?

At Launch Expeditionary Learning Charter School, we share a public school building with a district school that occupies the first two floors of our three-story building. The school with which we share a building is kind and generous in the ways that it shares space with our school. In pre-pandemic times, our students and staff pass each other in the halls, eat together in the cafeteria, and play and interact together in our gymnasium, auditorium and schoolyard. We are all part of the broader community, and we all work in the same space each day, tirelessly endeavoring toward the same goals: supporting all students to develop the knowledge, skills and character to become the leaders of tomorrow. Yet, during this public health crisis, New York City has determined that students from only one of those public schools are entitled to free public COVID-19 testing.

This year, our school has been open and serving children, in the building, since September. Using our unique distance teaching model, which we developed with a group of parents over the summer, about one-third of our families have elected to send their children to school five days per week. Students work in small pods, practice social distancing and wear masks. These interventions help, but as public health experts and scientists have told us from the start, a robust testing program is the cornerstone of fighting the pandemic until we can all be vaccinated.

By refusing to provide COVID-19 testing to public charter students, the city is forcing schools like ours to choose between spending critical resources on education, or the health of our school community. This inequity must end. Our school has already spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on computers and internet hotspots for all of our students, PPE, air purifiers and other resources we need to make our building safe. We do this to ensure the safety of our students and staff, and to ensure the same for the students who attend the public district school downstairs, and the rest of the public in our community and beyond.

The mayor, inexplicably, has argued that public charter schools are not eligible for free testing. Neither the law nor common sense are on his side. The virus does not care if a student attends a district or charter public school. It does not distinguish between students on the second floor and the third floor in the same building. It defies logic for the mayor to implement a testing program that only applies to a handful of students in one building.

This is a fight that we are all in together. New Yorkers have done a remarkable job understanding our shared responsibility, and we commend the mayor for all of the steps he has taken to promote this very mindset. And while the pandemic has certainly revealed the strength of New Yorkers, it has also shined a light on the glaring inequities in our education system. For the sake of our school community, we urge him to take a page from his own playbook, and immediately implement free testing for all public school students. Anything short of this response will put additional lives at risk.

Nearly eight years ago, de Blasio campaigned on writing a new, better chapter in the “tale of two cities” told by our education system. To bridge that same divide, families have chosen to send more than 138,000 of their children to public charter schools citywide. We are all working toward the same end. With less than a year left in office, it is not too late for the mayor to show that he supports all public school families.

In a time of difficult decisions, this is an easy one. Please, Mr. Mayor, support our public school students and their families with the testing program they deserve.

Roehm is founder and executive director, and Kussell is the principal, of Launch Expeditionary Learning Charter School in Brooklyn.