By ZEKE MILLER| AS­SO­CI­AT­ED PRESS

WASH­ING­TON (AP) — The Biden ad­min­is­tra­tion is in­creas­ing fed­er­al sup­port for COVID-19 test­ing for schools in a bid to keep them open amid the omi­cron surge.

The White House an­nounced Wednes­day that the ad­min­is­tra­tion is mak­ing a ded­i­cat­ed stream of 5 mil­lion rapid tests and 5 mil­lion lab-based PCR tests avail­able to schools start­ing this month to ease sup­ply short­ages and pro­mote the safe re­open­ing of schools. That’s on top of more than $10 bil­lion de­vot­ed to school-based tests au­tho­rized in the COVID-19 re­lief law and about $130 bil­lion ear­marked in that law to keep kids in school.

The new ini­tia­tive comes as the White House faces mount­ing crit­i­cism over long lines and sup­ply short­ages for test­ing and af­ter the na­tion’s third-largest pub­lic school sys­tem, in Chica­go, closed for days af­ter an im­passe be­tween teach­ers and of­fi­cials over re­open­ing poli­cies. The clo­sure was a black eye for Biden, who made re­open­ing schools — and keep­ing them open — a pri­or­i­ty.

“We have been very clear, pub­licly and pri­vate­ly, that we want to see schools open,” White House press sec­re­tary Jen Psa­ki said Mon­day. She cit­ed the mas­sive amount of fund­ing for schools as ev­i­dence of the ad­min­is­tra­tion en­sur­ing “we were pre­pared and had re­sources need­ed to ad­dress what­ev­er may come up in the pan­dem­ic.”

The new crop of tests is enough to cov­er on­ly a small frac­tion of the more than 50 mil­lion stu­dents and ed­u­ca­tors in the na­tion’s schools. The ad­min­is­tra­tion hopes the tests will fill crit­i­cal short­falls in schools that are hav­ing dif­fi­cul­ty se­cur­ing tests through ex­ist­ing fed­er­al fund­ing or are fac­ing out­breaks of the more trans­mis­si­ble COVID-19 vari­ant.

The White House says states will be able to re­quest the tests im­me­di­ate­ly and the tests will be avail­able for use by the end of the month.

The ad­min­is­tra­tion is al­so work­ing to tar­get oth­er fed­er­al­ly backed test­ing sites to sup­port school test­ing pro­grams, in­clud­ing lo­cat­ing Fed­er­al Emer­gency Man­age­ment Agency sites at schools.

Ad­di­tion­al­ly, the Cen­ters for Dis­ease Con­trol and Pre­ven­tion is set to re­lease new guid­ance lat­er this week to help schools im­ple­ment “test-to-stay” poli­cies, in which schools use rapid tests to keep close con­tacts of those who test pos­i­tive in the class­room.