DAVID GREENE, HOST:
The second largest school district in the country began classes this week. But the Los Angeles Unified School District started the school year with remote learning.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
But LA schools hope to resume in-person classes eventually, so they made a plan. They want to test their more than 600,00 students and 75,000 staff members. School nurses will help make that happen. And one of them is Stephanie Yellin-Mednick.
STEPHANIE YELLIN-MEDNICK: Is it going to be mind-boggling? It could be. It'll be, I guess, questionnaires going home to parents where they'll go ahead and tell us what's going on with the family, the children. And then we'll go ahead and test.
GREENE: They'll be testing, as well as contact tracing, which takes aggressive and widespread follow up. One problem with this plan is that LA schools are short on nurses - really short.
YELLIN-MEDNICK: I'm the only nurse. But many elementary schools get a nurse one day a week. And two years ago, I worked as a lead nurse out of the nursing office. And I covered five different campuses.
INSKEEP: Now she's the one nurse for a school with more than 2,000 students. She says the district is doing what it can to hire new school nurses.
YELLIN-MEDNICK: And remember, the plan probably is not to bring everybody back on campus right away. It'll be to split everybody up until we're up and safely running for a while. And I don't think I test everybody in one day. And I don't think I'll be the only nurse doing it.
GREENE: Well, let's hope not. The LA school superintendent hoped to administer the first COVID-19 tests by today. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.