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Below you will find the final results of the pooled testing which was done last week. Please remember that a pool can contain anywhere from 3 to 10 swabs. Next week we will be making a change in which pools will be established in much smaller groups of 2 - 5. This will hopefully result in a smaller amount of follow-up on testing. Right now if a pool turns positive every student/staff member in the pool is retested via BinanxNow testing . This is very time consuming and often only one student in the pool is positive. 

High School, MIddle School, and Boutwell
There were 174 pools from these three school
Positive results:
17 at the high school
6 at the middle school north
4 at the middle school south

Elementary School
There were 54 pools from Swallow and 8 tested positive
There were 82 pools from Florence Roche and 4 tested positive
Boutwell all pools positive

While the number of positive pools for the high school, Swallow and middle school north are higher than what we had experienced prior to Christmas, the number of positives at MSS, Florence Roche and Boutwell are all as expected.

There are items we would like to emphasize

1. Pool testing is one of our best defenses against COVID and we strongly encourage families to sign up their students, 

2. Students/staff who tested positive may return to school 5 days after testing positive if they are asymptomatic or there has been a significant improvement in their symptoms. Questions regarding this issue should be referred to your students’ school nurse. 

We will continue to send home our pool testing data, as well as the numbers we send to DESE every week. Weather and administrative challenges can affect the timing of this information being sent out,