Yesterday, December 29, 2021, Governor Hochul announced a statewide goal of having as many students as possible tested for COVID-19 as school resumes. To accomplish this, New York State is providing enough at-home testing kits to test every student. To help ease this process for our families, we are reaching out early as we make plans to distribute these kits.
To explain the logistics, we know that the test kits will be shipped to our BOCES, where they will be sorted according to district enrollment and then distributed to each school district. We will then distribute them to you. As you can imagine, the exact date will depend on when the shipments of test kits are received from the State. At this time, we expect them to arrive the week of January 3rd.
To be clear, families are not required or mandated to test their children; they are simply being encouraged to do by New York State, and to facilitate that, the State is providing these at-home test kits.
As soon as we have a date and a strategy for distribution to our Vestal families, we will reach out to you once again. As usual, we anticipate updates and changes relating to the ongoing management of school operations due to the pandemic and will provide that information as it becomes available.
We thank you for your continued patience and support as we do all we can to ensure the safest school environment for all students and staff.