State Department Of Health Breaks Down Teacher Testing Plan

A few months ago, Gov. Kevin Stitt announced the state would be offering free and optional testing for Oklahoma teachers and support staff.

Since the announcement, the Oklahoma State Department of Health has been busy drafting up plans on how they were going to make this happen.

“I think we have been reworking and revising throughout as different options become available,” said OSDH's Adrienne Rollins.

Right now, they are visiting every district once a month, but teachers are still encouraged to go to their county health department for a test and all they need is an ID, Rollins said.

"We have utilized a partner that can go out and offer some of our larger school districts testing and then the state Department of Health is actually going out with our staff to offer some of the smaller communities testing on site,” said Rollins.

Since the testing has been going for a small amount of time, Rollins said there haven’t been as many teachers as they thought coming to get tested.

"As far as the testing sites that we have set up for them, we have offered a little over 24,000 appointments for teachers and staff and out of those we have had about 1,100,” said Rollins.

Right now, they are offering the PCR tests but in the coming weeks they should have more options.

"We are rolling out the process for saliva testing over the next week. We did get antigen tests last week so we are hoping to roll them out together,” said Rollins.

Rollins said they plan to offer this through the end of the school year.