Schools and early childhood centres hope hundreds of thousands of rapid antigen tests (RATs) will keep attendance up.
Photo: AFP
The government has announced that it will send nearly a million test kits to schools and early learning services for staff, children and families with Covid-19 symptoms.
In addition, it will provide enough kits for twice-a-week surveillance tests in early childhood centres and special education units that want them.
The move comes as schools report thousands of Covid-19 cases every day among staff and students.
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said it would make it easier for people with children in school or early learning to get tests when they need them.
"Every parent will know that there will be a time or an occasion where their child may be perfectly fine when they go to school and then suddenly may come down with a fever, a sore throat, or feel unwell. This is a really practical thing that we can do to make it easy for families if their child, when they're sent home, goes home with a rapid antigen test for the family, just to make it easier," she said.
In Wellington, about 86 percent of schools had children or teachers away with Covid-19.
Te Kura Kaupapa Māori o Ngā Mokopuna tumuaki Rawiri Wright said providing tests was a good move.
He said the country's 66 kura kaupapa Māori recently persuaded the government to provide tests which they had been sharing with whānau for a week already.
Wright said it helped his kura contain the spread of Covid-19.
"Just by closing in the first instance and being able to have those RATs to encourage whānau to test helped each whānau to better manage their own isolation and their awareness," he said.
In Auckland, Papatoetoe High School principal and Secondary Principals Association president Vaughan Couillault said he had no problem with his school acting as a distribution centre for tests for its families.
"We've already started doing that with the RATs that we have been able to get hold of. If we know that the family's got vehicular access issues, rather than making them go to a testing site, we've actually just been throwing three or four at them because it just makes sense, it's the right thing to do morally," he said.
Couillault said the tests were welcome, but he still wanted the government to make it easier for teachers to leave isolation with sick family members if they tested negative for Covid-19.
Under the critical worker exemption scheme, isolating teachers who tested negative could return to work only if there was nobody else available to supervise children who could not stay home.
"I've currently got in excess of 20 teachers sitting at home at the moment. About nine or 10 of those have tested positive, certainly understand that but there's 10 of them that are sitting at home just in case. It would be great given that we're already wearing masks and taking all sorts of precautions to make sure that we limit spread, it would be great if those just-in-case people sitting at home could get back into work," he said.
Early childhood centres, special schools and schools' special education classes could also use the government-supplied tests for surveillance testing of teachers at a rate of two tests per week per teacher.
Te Rito Maioha: Early Childhood NZ chief executive Kathy Wolfe said staff in early learning centres were in chaos because of the pandemic.
She said the allocation of tests was overdue but very welcome.
"For us, it's amazing. It will absolutely help services and parents to manage how they keep their services open, how children can attend the services, and just keep everybody safe," she said.
Principals Federation president Cherie Taylor-Patel said the tests would help schools.
"The best use of them is to bring down anxiety levels and for people to know that they are testing negative before they make a decision about whether or not they're going to go to work or go into a school situation where you might have at-risk students or at-risk staff," she said.