Massapequa Park Parents Rally Against State's COVID Testing Rules

MASSAPEQUA PARK, NY — Members of the Massapequa PTA held a demonstration on Sunday to speak out against the state's mandate that children in some of the districts schools undergo mandatory coronavirus testing.

The state designated Massapequa Park a yellow zone on Nov. 23 after having a seven-day rolling average of positive cases of more than 3 percent. The yellow zone is a precautionary zone designed to stop the area from becoming a full-blown micro-cluster. Schools in the yellow remain open for in-person learning, but the state mandates that the school has to test 20 percent of students and faculty each week.

The testing mandate affects three schools in the Massapequa School District: McKenna Elementary School, East Lake Elementary School and Birch Lane Elementary School. The schools need to test 20 percent of people each week or else go to distance learning.

But parents from the PTA gathered together on Sunday in front of the McKenna School to speak out against the measure. The PTA kept the gathering small — only about two dozen people — but their request was clear: find a better way.

"We don't want to see our children mandated to do COVID-19 testing in order to keep the schools open," said Jennifer Azzariti, the president of the Massapequa Council of PTAs. "The state already has a database that tracks all the cases in the school. So they can already look and see, and they can track on the district level. So this is kind of redundant."

Azzariti said that testing in the school didn't make sense. Though the district has had to close its buildings multiple times this year due to coronavirus cases, nearly all of those cases came from outside the schools. Very few cases were actually spread within the school buildings.

Parents at the gathering also expressed concern about nasal swab testing special needs children who may have problems with certain sensory stimulus.

Because of all the precautions the school takes to keep children from catching the coronavirus, Azzariti said it may actually be a bad place to test, since it's not an accurate reflection of the community. Instead, she said she would rather see the resources spent to open more testing sites in the community to test more people.

"I think we'd get better numbers if we had some place for healthy people to test," she said.