It took nearly a full day of packing, countless Ziploc bags and a “human assembly line” to have rapid antigen tests ready for elementary students at the London District Catholic School Board on Monday, after a shipment from the Ontario government arrived ahead of schedule.
During an episode of London Live with Mike Stubbs, Director of Education Vince Romeo offered an inside look at how the London, Ont., school board worked tirelessly to follow through on a plan from the Ministry of Education to send elementary students home with two tests each, as the province made its return to in-person learning amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
While the school board was planning to receive the tests the weekend leading up to the reopening of schools, Romeo says he was shocked to find the shipment had arrived at 3:30 a.m. on Friday.
“We deployed volunteers and staff to quite literally create a human assembly line in our board office, and we processed 32,000 kits between 3:30 a.m. and 11 p.m. Friday night,” Romeo said.
The entire operation had anywhere between 10 to 50 volunteers on shift throughout its duration, who were all tasked with packaging and delivering each test.
“We finished packing on Friday night, three-quarters of those deliveries, for us, happened on Saturday and we finished the deliveries early (Monday) morning to the elementary schools that still needed them,” Romeo added.
Packaging the tests required the human assembly line to open up the cases on the skids they arrived in. Within those cases, the kits were contained in boxes that held 25 each.
“So we literally had to open up the boxes, separate those 25 – we separated the solution, the swabs, the recorder, the caps – two-by-two, place those in Ziplocs and then repackage them for delivery,” Romeo said.
“I think we emptied the south London Costco… because that’s where we drove up Wellington to pick up as many (Ziploc bags) as we could get our hands on.”
“If we didn’t do that, there would be no way that our schools would those kits there today.”
Romeo says the LDCSB is still waiting on about 20,000 test kits to serve students in secondary school, but he hopes the shipment arrives at a more reasonable time than 3:30 a.m.
“I don’t think anyone will answer our calls if we do that the second time around.”
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