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Port Chester schools can't meet testing rules, will stay closed until January at least

Sophie Grosserode
Rockland/Westchester Journal News

Port Chester schools will not attempt to reopen until after the winter holidays, Superintendent Edward Kliszus announced at Thursday night’s Board of Education meeting.

The district was on the verge of having to close even before the Village of Port Chester became Westchester County’s first state-imposed yellow zone on Nov. 6, Kliszus said, due to a combination of staffing issues and parents pulling their children out of school in favor of all-remote instruction. 

Now, with COVID-19 positivity rates in Port Chester soaring and access to testing extremely limited, the district cannot comply with the state's testing requirements to keep schools open. In January, if numbers drop, they will try again to reopen schools for hybrid instruction. 

“I can't see, at this point, testing 1,000 people at $50, $100 a person,” Kliszus said. “Even if we could do it, spending that kind of money on something that's so tenuous … we want to get the kids back in, but it's just not possible right now. Let's get through the holidays.”

Edward Kliszus, Superintendent of School for the Port Chester School District, stands in front of the Port Chester Middle School on Dec. 21, 2017.

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Port Chester is the first district in the region placed by the state into a micro-cluster to announce that it will not attempt to reopen schools until infection rates drop. The village has 231 active cases of the coronavirus as of Wednesday.

Schools in an orange zone are required to test 100% of students and faculty to remain open. After reopening, 25% of the population must be tested weekly.

When he got the call last week that Port Chester was placed in a yellow zone, Kliszus’ first call was to ask what resources Westchester County could provide. He was told the county could test 100 people a day, countywide. Port Chester could need 1,000 tests a week. 

His next call was to state legislators, Assemblyman Steve Otis and Sen. Shelley Mayer, who said they believed the state should provide testing at no cost and they were working on it. 

“Here's another thing about the testing: We can't pay for it,” Kliszus said. “The tests are $50, sometimes more. Who's going to pay for it? Imagine doing 1,000 tests a week. We've already lost $2 million up front in our budget because of budget cuts.”

Port Chester was soon downgraded to an orange zone, and Kliszus said he expects the village could soon be in a most-restrictive red zone. Even if the district could test as required by the state, he said, opening schools would not be safe.

“It's a dire circumstance, but I have to tell you folks, the safety of our children is number one,” he said.

Even if the district could do the required testing, Kliszus said, some of the tests would be positive, leading to the quarantining of staff and students and the likely closure of schools.

But even before the micro-cluster, Port Chester’s situation was becoming tenuous. School buildings had only been open for hybrid instruction for three weeks, and the district had reported 31 cases of COVID-19, according to the state report card. 

Every time word went out about another COVID-19 case, Kliszus said, a dozen or so requests would come in from parents who wanted to pull their children out of school and back into remote instruction. Teachers were in classrooms with only two or three children present. 

Ten of the district's 40 custodians were in quarantine, and the district was reaching “a tipping point,” he said.

“You have to have custodians, or you can't run the school," he said. "We were dangerously close [to] closing, because we lost 25% of our facilities.” 

Port Chester High School.

Hours before Kliszus’ update, five more yellow zones were declared in Westchester. They include Yonkers and New Rochelle, the largest districts in the county. That puts even more strain on testing resources for all districts, Kliszus said.

“We do not have the means to test 1,000 people,” he said. “We don't have that in our hands. It's not available. [The resources] don’t exist anywhere.”

If the infection rate falls by January, the district plans to bring back special education students first and do the necessary testing, hopefully with help from the state. Then it would bring students back by grade level, beginning with the youngest.

“It's tough,” he said. “We can get them back in school. We're committed to doing that as soon as we can.”

Sophie Grosserode covers education. Click here for her latest stories. Follow her on Twitter @sdgrosserode.