“Please treat this as you would any illness,” said a from Hendry County School District in Florida. 

The district’s rules specify that staff and students experiencing coronavirus symptoms should stay home, while those who are asymptomatic and fever-free for 24 hours may come to school with or without a face covering.

Across the country, over 95% of the 500 largest school systems had no mask requirement as of Aug. 22, according to an from Burbio, a data service that tracks school policy. Several, however, do still to wear face coverings for three to five days when they return to campus after finishing a five-day quarantine.

Those policies come after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in mid-August eased their K-12 COVID guidelines. Rather than recommending anyone exposed to the virus self-isolate, the CDC now calls for only individuals who test positive or experience symptoms to stay home, effectively doing away with the test-to-stay programs many schools used during the previous academic year. The guidelines still recommend universal masking where COVID levels are high, as they are in several regions of the country, including New York City.

Regardless, the nation’s largest district will return to school with face coverings optional after lifting its mandate last March. Los Angeles, the second largest school system, will do the same. New York City will also end its requirement that students and staff undergo for the virus. 

Breaking the trend, and are enforcing universal masking as students return students to classrooms. Philadelphia’s rule, however, will lift after the first 10 days of school.

Benjamin Linas, a professor of medicine at Boston University, advises schools not to put an outright ban on mask requirements, because the policies can be a helpful temporary tool for staving off outbreaks and preventing missed learning.

“Sometimes schools have to close because they have so much COVID that kids aren’t coming [or] there’s not enough staff,” he told ����Ӱ��. “When we’re talking about school mitigation and school masking, we’re talking about learning.”

Indeed, an Albuquerque, New Mexico, charter school on Aug. 16 for a week when over 3% of students and staff tested positive for the virus. And Mannsville Schools, a tiny 95-student Oklahoma district, announced a week-long closure starting Aug. 14.

“Due to an increasingly high number of positive covid tests for both students and staff, we are forced to close for this week to allow time for everyone to get better and not continue to spread the virus,” Mannsville Superintendent Brandi Price-Kelty. “We will make up these days with virtual learning days after Labor Day.”

Other areas have set a higher threshold at which school COVID positivity levels trigger policy changes: 10% in Kansas City means until levels drop, according to the district, and 20% in South Carolina ushers a brief pivot to remote learning, according to the .

“There might be a situation in which you put on masks for 10 days in order to break an in-class cluster and get back to school,” said Linas. “I think people could have more in-person learning and more educational opportunities if we acknowledge sometimes you have to put on a mask in response to an outbreak situation in your own building.”

Thanks to vaccines, COVID hospitalizations and death rates are much lower than they were at the height of the pandemic. But because case rates continue to follow patterns of surges and troughs, infections will still be an issue classrooms must deal with for the foreseeable future, he said. 

“This disease is not yet a common cold, it still does major damage… there’s still a lot of morbidity. [Masking in classrooms when cases spike] is the least invasive policy one could have other than just doing nothing. And I think it would be foolish to do nothing at this point.”

Nationwide, reported infections are up 57% since two weeks ago and 4 percent of counties, including large clusters in the Northeast, are categorized as high risk by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s . Another 14 percent are at the medium risk level.

Still, only are requiring students and staff to wear face coverings, according to the latest analysis from Burbio, a data service that has surveyed K-12 policies through the pandemic. 

An outlier, Pittsburgh Public Schools in Pennsylvania recently opted to less than two weeks after having made masks optional districtwide. And Portland, Maine on May 12 also , but clarified that it would not enforce the rule at end-of-year events like graduation and prom.

Much more common, school and health officials are announcing guidance that residents wear masks indoors as case counts rise, but have fallen short of issuing mandates. New York City leaders are residents to wear masks indoors, but the nation’s largest school district has made no changes to its face-covering policy thus far. The Cambridge, Massachusetts superintendent put forward a May 9, “​�ċencouraging our entire school community to mask, particularly when we are indoors,” but added that “we are NOT reinstating a requirement.”

“While a small number of districts are reinstating mask mandates, what we are seeing more often is district superintendents more forcefully recommending use of masks while not requiring them,” Burbio co-founder Dennis Roche told ����Ӱ��.

Mia Miron, 13, is weeks from graduating middle school in Pomona, California. Recently, she’s noticed far more students and staff catching the virus, she said. 

Her friend in science class got infected. And the school called her to the cafeteria last week to notify her of a possible exposure in history class, though she has since tested negative for the virus. Los Angeles County, where Pomona Unified School District is located, has seen a 48% increase in cases over the last two weeks.

“This shot up out of nowhere,” she told ����Ӱ��.

Though the district does not require students or staff to wear face coverings, teachers in most classes now remind Miron and her peers that COVID is spreading and that they should mask up and frequently wash their hands, she said.

The eighth grader has worn a mask in school all year long and continues to now, but few of her classmates have heeded educators’ warnings, she said. 

“It’s kinda like 50-50” in terms of who wears face coverings in the classroom, she said.

Ameera Eshtewi, a Portland, Oregon high schooler who attends the Oregon Islamic Academy, a private school, said her school never dropped its universal face-covering requirement. She’s glad: mask-wearing gives her a “level of safety and security,” she told ����Ӱ��.

Across the country, reported pediatric COVID infection counts have steadily increased over the past month, but remain far below levels from the worst of the first Omicron surge. For the seven-day period ending May 12, the country reported about 94,000 youth cases compared to over 1.1 million over the same time span in late January, according to data from the .

On Tuesday, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to Pfizer-BioNTech’s booster shots for children aged 5 to 11. The agency has hearings to review Moderna’s vaccines for children 5 and younger.

Meanwhile, as the U.S. surpasses the grim milestone of 1 million lives claimed by COVID, just of youth aged 12 to 17 and 28% of children 5 to 11 have received two vaccine doses. The latest wave of infection includes many people who have been both fully immunized and boosted, leading to a belief that schools cannot realistically take a zero-COVID approach to virus mitigation.

Still, masking requirements should return on a short-term basis in school districts where virus risk is high, believes Benjamin Linas, professor of medicine at Boston University. He serves on an advisory panel for his children’s Brookline, Massachusetts school system and advocated for a temporary reimplementation of universal masking, though on May 11 officials instead opted to “,” but not require, face coverings.

“Unless we’re willing to say, ‘That’s it, we’re 100% done, there’s absolutely nothing we can do to mitigate [COVID spread],’ — and I’m not ready to say that — … then we’re at a point where we should be using masks,” he told ����Ӱ��.

The doctor, who was among the first in his liberal suburb to advocate for off-ramps from mask mandates earlier in the spring, added that “once-in-a-lifetime, big events, where interacting with humans and walking around and seeing each other smiling is mission critical to what the event is,” such as prom, should not enforce face-covering rules.

His stance on classroom masking comes less out of concern for curbing community spread, he explained, and more for a desire to keep students from missing school. Face coverings reduce virus transmission in K-12 settings, multiple academic studies have demonstrated, which can prevent young people from quarantine. 

“The reason we want people to wear masks is to protect our own education, now” while cases are up, said Linas.

In early March, a pandemic celebrity best known for advocating that schools should move toward a pre-COVID normal wielded her weapon of choice, arguing in The Atlantic that lifting mask mandates for all but the youngest students is “.”

Emily Oster laid out what she, and many others, understood to be the situation at hand in her opening paragraph: “Although the CDC recently moved to relax COVID guidelines, it continues to recommend universal indoor masking in early-childhood-education programs for those ages 2 and older.” 

The CDC’s coronavirus for child care providers, last updated Jan. 28, lists a number of “key takeaways,” including that the agency “recommends universal indoor masking in [early childhood education] programs for those ages 2 years and older, regardless of vaccination status.”

But in a surprising twist, about a week later, the Brown University economist posted an update on her Instagram story.

“After my piece in @theatlantic last week, the CDC emailed me to let me know they DO NOT recommend masking for toddlers in areas with low or moderate transmission. Toddlers’ masking recommended to align with everyone else,” she wrote. “They are struggling to get the message out so maybe this will help!”

“I realize that seems a little crazy, but I am telling you that is the email I received from a senior person at the CDC.”

The federal agency has a yellow banner at the top of its that says the CDC’s latest recommendations “align precautions for educational settings with those for other community settings.”

“That banner … is intended to replace all of the information that is below it in the bullets that say that kids should still be masking,” Oster said in an Instagram video.

In late February, the CDC made major news when it replaced its previous recommendation that all schools require universal masking, stipulating instead that classrooms could now go mask-optional when community COVID rates were low or moderate, the current virus level across most of the country.

But without a vaccine available for those younger than 5, Oster and many others understood the guidance to apply only to K-12 schools, not early child care and pre-K programs. The CDC is “easing its recommendations for wearing masks in indoor K-12 settings,” the Los Angeles Times .

But in fact, the guidance was meant to apply to all educational levels, including those under 5.

In a Thursday email to ����Ӱ��, the CDC confirmed that “recommendations for masks in K-12 schools and early care and education (ECE) programs are consistent with recommendations for other community settings.” 

“Children ages 2-4 have a lower risk of severe disease from COVID-19 and parents of children in ECE programs as well as ECE staff can make appropriate choices about mask wearing in school settings based on local requirements and their personal levels of risk,” wrote spokesperson Jade Fulce.

She did not explain why it has taken the agency several weeks to update its website, but said they would make the information available “as soon as possible.”

To New York City parent Daniela Jampel, whose 4-year-old daughter has continued masking while her older sister goes to school face exposed, the delay is unacceptable.

“It’s ridiculous,” she said. “The CDC is having trouble updating its website so they reach out to Emily Oster?”

“Their website on this issue should not be left to interpretation. It should be very clear,” said Jampel, an early advocate for amid remote learning and now an outspoken critic of the city’s decision to leave masking in place for preschoolers.

Oster agreed that the unconventional communication method underscores the widespread confusion on the issue, but clarified that the CDC did not contact her asking her to spread the word about their policy. Rather, they were correcting what they said was inaccurate information in her Atlantic piece.

“They weren’t like, ‘Oh, by the way, it would be great if you could share with people this information,’” Oster told ����Ӱ��. “They just said, ‘Everybody should already know this.’ But I think it’s pretty clear looking at … how people responded that they have not managed to make that clear.”

Several parents, mostly in blue states like New Jersey, Connecticut and Illinois, responded to Oster’s update saying that their child care provider was still requiring masks, said the professor.

“I showed this (post) to my provider,” many parents wrote, and in response were told, “Well, if the website still says that masks are required, that’s not our interpretation of what that banner is.”

“There is a fair amount of people looking to this guidance and trying to interpret it and the way that it is currently stated is extremely difficult to interpret clearly,” said Oster.

The confusion extended to The Atlantic itself, which did not immediately update Oster’s original column to reflect the CDC’s clarified guidance after Oster received the agency’s email. In a follow-up interview with ����Ӱ��, Oster said she corresponded with her editor, but because the CDC had made no official announcement on how to interpret the vague website, the outlet decided not to alter its story at that time.

“[The fact-checker] read the banner at the top, but then everything below it still said there should be masking,” she said. “It went under the radar.”

However, after this story first published and ����Ӱ�� requested comment from The Atlantic, Oster’s piece was updated Thursday night to reflect the disconnect in the CDC’s guidance between the banner and the information below it.

Many early childhood education providers nationwide continue to require universal masking for 2- to 4-year olds.

Head Start, a federal school readiness program serving over 800,000 children from low-income families each year, 2-year-olds and up to wear face masks indoors, although in a Jan. 1 ruling, a U.S. district judge on the program’s rule in 24 states, mostly Republican. In the remaining 26 states, even those that long ago lifted their school mask mandates, participating toddlers are still required to cover up.

New York City Mayor Eric Adams cited hospitalization data when announcing earlier this month that the country’s largest school district was lifting its K-12 mask mandate but keeping the rule for 2- to 4-year-olds.

“When you look at those under 5, they were more likely to be hospitalized,” Adams . “People wanted to say, ‘Let’s lift it across the board,’ but that’s not what the science was showing us.”

Masking in early child care settings is associated with a in program closures due to virus outbreaks, according to a recent study from doctors at Yale University. But the data were collected during the early months of the pandemic before vaccines were available to staff.

And while federal data show that hospitalizations for children under 5 did spike during the Omicron surge, an outsized share of that uptick was driven by newborns not yet 6 months old, who the masking guidance does not apply to anyway.

Meanwhile, COVID cases in Europe are , fueled by a more transmissible Omicron subvariant. Even as infections continue to , many experts warn that the increases across the pond could foreshadow a coming wave in America.

Jampel, despite frustration with the CDC’s haphazard rollout of its guidance for toddlers, doubts whether more clarity would impact the rules affecting her family. 

“New York City schools have done many things that go far beyond what the CDC recommends,” she said. “I’m not convinced that it’s the CDC holding us up, and I’m not convinced that a CDC change will mean that our political leaders will take notice and change their policies.”

Neither the Department of Education nor the Department of Health immediately responded to requests for comment.

Steven Barnett, co-director of the National Institute for Early Education Research, said the two key questions on the issue are “What are the health benefits from masking young children?” and “What are the developmental consequences?”

“The problem with trying to be an expert on this issue is that there is very limited science on which to base conclusions,” he told ����Ӱ�� in an email. “With respect to the health benefits, the known risks to young children from infection are quite small but this is a novel virus with unknown long-term risks.”

“All this leads me to think,” he continued, “that masks for young children may be prudent when there is a high rate of community transmission” — a conclusion that lands him in alignment with the now clarified CDC guidance.

But with all the CDC’s communication glitches along the way, Oster worries it will impact the public’s faith in the agency, which has been shaken several times throughout the two-year pandemic.

“This erodes trust,” she said. “If people are trying to trust the CDC, they’re trying to listen to them, when the messaging is confused in this way, or incomplete in this way, it makes people less likely to pay attention to the CDC.” 

Like all other public school parents, Plowden faced a choice: On the day New York City’s school mask mandate was lifted, should his son keep his on or take it off in the classroom. 

“I’m going to send him with it, but he can take it off if he wants to,” said the father, explaining that the family has taken COVID seriously, but feels that K-12 masking can’t go on forever. His son contracted the virus and recovered, which gives Plowden a level of confidence that Zayin will be OK, even if he chooses to bare his face.

“I just want him to have a normal school experience again,” said the Brooklyn dad.

On Friday, in an address held in Times Square, Mayor Eric Adams declared that the nation’s largest district would officially be doing away with its face-covering requirement and also rolling back proof-of-vaccination requirements in restaurants, gyms and movie theaters. 

It’s a move that comes on the heels of a tremendous shift away from school mask mandates nationwide in recent weeks, with only of the largest 500 districts now requiring that students cover up compared to 60 percent a month ago, according to data from Burbio, which has tracked school policy through the pandemic. 

In late February, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention changed its guidance, now allowing schools to go mask-optional in areas where transmission is moderate or low.

New York City’s quick pivot — done with the support of the teachers union — breaks from the pattern of other top districts, which have been slower to adjust. Chicago Public Schools will wait another week before going mask-optional March 14, the district Monday, in a move the Chicago Teachers Union said violates a safety agreement requiring masking through the end of the school year. A similar agreement to appears to still be in effect in Los Angeles Unified School District, even as the state plans to lift its mandate March 11.

The change in policy is dividing New Yorkers, many of whom believe it’s too early to roll back pandemic precautions while others are embracing the change.

“I don’t think anyone is comfortable with it,” said Ebonee Smith, a special education teacher at Restoration Academy in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. She entered school on Monday clad with her mask. “It hasn’t been a gradual release.”

Justin Spiro, a social worker in a Queens high school, chose to drop his mask on Monday. “I feel very protected by my three shots,” he said, adding that at times, masks have made his job more difficult.

“Counseling behind a mask is definitely challenging,” he told ����Ӱ��. “We rely, subconsciously, on so many facial expressions for showing empathy and showing understanding and expressing emotion.”

Similarly, Park Slope dad Dan Kurfist, whose daughter is in kindergarten, said he was “thrilled” when the city lifted its mandate. 

As for his daughter, she ran into school screaming, “No mask today,” when he dropped her off Monday morning, Kurfist said, estimating that about three-quarters of students were unmasked.

Face coverings will still be required for NYC kids younger than 5 in pre-K and child care, the mayor stipulated on Friday. That age group is not yet eligible for vaccination and has been overrepresented among all pediatric hospitalizations, according to a from the New York State Department of Health. 

About 75 people  gathered in City Hall Park Monday demanding that the mask rules be lifted for 2- to 4-year-olds, holding signs that read “#UnmaskOurToddlers.” One parent, attorney Michael Chessa, said he planned to sue and to seek an injunction lifting the ongoing mask mandate for preschoolers.

“I’m done with the mayor forcing my kid to wear a mask while he spends all day in preschool chewing on it anyway,” said Renana Teplitsky.

“Mask mandates have been lifted everywhere else, so it doesn’t make sense to punish kids 2 to 4,” said Liz Bernstein. “We’re super pro-mask,” the mother-of-two added, but because her 12-year-old child will now be exposed at school, she doesn’t see the use of continuing to mask her toddler. “Kids have siblings,” she pointed out.

Meanwhile, a group rallying under the hashtag #MaskingForAFriend gathered last week, imploring Adams pre-emptively to reconsider his plan to scrap the school mandate.

To Lupe Hernandez, a Tribeca parent of two who is immunocompromised, the mask-optional policy makes her fear for her family’s safety. She herself had COVID twice and is still suffering from long-term side effects, she said. She’s concerned that NYC schools serving low-income students of color than whiter, more affluent schools. Citywide, just over half of students are fully vaccinated.

“I think this is way too early” to drop masks, she told ����Ӱ��. If it weren’t for the fact that her 8-year-old has a paraeducator who works with him at school, she would have considered keeping him home on Monday to avoid sitting next to unmasked classmates. The Department of Education reported that attendance was Monday.

“Masks haven’t prevented my child from developing,” she added, saying her son learned to read while attending school wearing one.

Adams on Friday acknowledged the wide-ranging viewpoints on how to navigate this current stage of the pandemic, joking that the city has “8.8 million people, 30 million opinions.”

“It’s reasonable to consider removing masks at this time,” said researcher John Giardina, who emphasized that vaccination continues to be an effective way to stave off severe coronavirus outcomes. 

In mid-February, the Harvard University Ph.D. student was the lead author on a peer-reviewed study spelling out exactly how many cases unmasking in school might trigger depending on factors like vaccine coverage and local transmission.

“There is no one-size-fits-all policy for a city as big as New York City,” he cautioned, emphasizing that individual school leaders may want to look at the vaccination levels of their own community to determine the best public health decision.

The breakdown of parent opinions tends to fall along racial lines, Farah Despeignes has noticed. Despeignes is a Bronx mother of two and president of the Community Education Council in District 8. Herself a former educator, she decided to homeschool her children in September rather than send them back to the classroom amid a pandemic. In her experience, Black and Hispanic families, who were more likely to have lost loved ones to the virus, seem to be more cautious in their approach to school COVID mitigation measures.

“I understand that whiter populations may see it more as a question of freedom. But I can tell you, here, it’s not a question of freedom. It’s a question of safety,” she told ����Ӱ��. “A lot of these parents and children live in multi-generational homes. They have comorbidities that can be fatal.”

Still, many families fall somewhere in the middle.

On Monday morning, Sonia Maynard dropped off her grandchildren — all masked — at P.S. 093 in Brooklyn. 

“We’re waiting to see how everything goes,” she told ����Ӱ��.

Some of her grandchildren’s classmates, Maynard knows, might not be covering up, and that doesn’t bother her. After some days or weeks, it’s possible her grandchildren may join them — “We’ve got to get back to some kind of normalcy,” she said — but not today.

“Our schools have been some of the safest places,” said Adams, citing a COVID positivity rate this week of 0.18 percent in schools. “We are lifting the indoors mask requirement for DOE schools.”

“We want to see the faces of our children. We want to see their smiles,” he said.

The seismic move in the country’s largest school district was in accordance with plans the mayor signaled on Sunday, days after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lifted their universal masking guidance for schools in areas with low to moderate transmission.��

After a tumultuous two years in which the teachers union and City Hall were often at odds over COVID protocols, United Federation of Teachers President Michael Mulgrew endorsed the change in a brief emailed statement.

“Our doctors agree with the city’s medical experts that this is the right time to safely move from a mask mandate to an optional mask system,” he said. “This is the responsible, thoughtful way to make our next transition.”

Face-covering requirements will stay in place for those younger than 5 in pre-kindergarten and child care settings, Adams said, noting that age group is not yet eligible for vaccination. That distinction will set up a scenario in some city schools with pre-K programs that certain grade levels can go mask-free while others cannot.

In February, Pfizer and BioNTech postponed their request that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration authorize their COVID shots for toddlers, pushing the timeline back several months for that age group.

Over three-quarters of all New York City residents have received at least two vaccine doses, including 87 percent of adult residents, according to . Studies show that three doses of the COVID vaccine are at preventing hospitalization, even against the Delta and Omicron variants.

However, student vaccination rates vary widely from school to school, from just under 10 percent coverage in some places to above 90 percent at others, reveal. Schools in wealthier areas tended to have higher rates of immunization, leading some to worry that lifting the face-covering mandate will lead to a disproportionate toll on underserved families who have suffered outsized death tolls through the pandemic.

On Wednesday, parents took to the steps of Tweed Courthouse to protest the city’s plans to drop universal masking in an event organized by the parent advocacy group . They rallied under the hashtag #MaskingForAFriend to emphasize the need to protect the most vulnerable, including the immunocompromised and the elderly, they said.

“I know there’s some who state that they still want their children to wear their masks,” acknowledged Adams. “You can.”

He himself will continue masking in crowded venues from time to time, he said, and wants to ensure that no child is ostracized for their decision to cover up.��

Monday will also mark the end of proof-of-vaccination requirements for gyms, restaurants and movie theaters, though individual businesses may keep their rules in place if they so choose, the mayor said.

Meanwhile, his administration has indicated that they are interested in creating a virtual learning option for families who prefer to keep their children out of the classroom, but has provided no concrete details on a timeline, frustrating parents who have advocated for that possibility since . In January, at the height of the Omicron surge, Adams told officials that the process could take as long as six months.

The mayor closed his Friday address on a rejoiceful note.

“This is a celebratory moment,” he said. “We’ve been waiting for this day for so long. And it’s here.”

Watch the full address:

It’s a major departure from the agency’s prior stance, which held that schools should enforce universal masking regardless of virus levels.

“Since July 2021, CDC recommended universal masking in schools no matter what level of impact COVID-19 was having on the community. With this update, CDC will now only recommend universal school masking in communities at the high level,” said CDC epidemiologist Greta Massetti in a media call.

The change comes as part of a wider reconfiguration in COVID policy now recommended by the CDC, easing masking guidelines for most Americans. Rather than using community case rates as the sole metric to determine risk levels, the agency will now use a new formula that also takes COVID hospitalizations and hospital capacity into account. 

Only in counties where COVID risk is high does the agency now recommend universal masking indoors, though individuals may continue to choose to wear face coverings at lower levels depending on their own personal risk and comfort, officials said. 

While only about of U.S. counties were considered low or moderate risk under the old framework, nearly 60 percent now fall into that categorization, accounting for about 70 percent of Americans. Individuals may check the updated risk level for their county on the CDC’s .

The change in school masking guidance comes after weeks of movement at the state and local level to scrap face-covering policies. In early February, several states including New Jersey, Connecticut and Massachusetts announced the end of their school mask mandates, and on Tuesday, the Maryland State Board of Education voted to , though the change needs legislative approval before it will go into effect. ​�ċOf the 500 largest U.S. school districts, currently require students to wear masks, down from 60 percent at the beginning of February, according to data collected by Burbio, which has tracked school policy through the pandemic.

States such as California and New York have yet to announce an end to their school masking rules. But in a small step toward loosening restrictions, New York City students will on school grounds starting Monday, officials announced Friday morning. California Gov. Gavin Newsom said he will announce an end date for school masking in his state Monday.

The CDC’s move to ease masking guidance represents a broader effort to help Americans return to a “new normal,” even as the virus continues to circulate.

Over 200 million Americans have received their primary vaccine series, pointed out CDC Director Rochelle Walensky, half of whom have been boosted. Many more have a level of immunity due to prior infection.

“With widespread population immunity, the overall risk of severe disease is now generally lower,” said Walensky. “Now as the virus continues to circulate in our community, we must focus our metrics beyond just cases in the community and direct our efforts toward protecting people at high risk for severe ailments and preventing COVID-19 from overwhelming our hospitals and our health care system.”

President Biden and the CDC have previously speculated the end of the pandemic, even giving the summer of 2021 the hopeful title “summer of freedom,” before the Delta surge quickly proved that COVID would continue to disrupt daily life.

Perhaps with awareness of that history, Massetti emphasized that schools — and the wider community, too — should adjust virus mitigation rules based on changing conditions.

“Public health prevention strategies can be dialed up when our communities are experiencing more severe disease and dialed down when things are more stable.”

Walensky added, “We need to be able to dial them up again should we have a new variant or a new surge.”

Still, some have critiqued the choice to ease masking guidelines as motivated by politics and pandemic weariness. As the CDC prepared to announce updated recommendations, several disability advocates the plan on Twitter.

The new metrics do not take community or school vaccination rates into account, though officials emphasized that vaccination greatly decreases the likelihood of severe illness and hospitalization and thus is indirectly reflected in the new thresholds.

Nationwide, a quarter of children aged 5 to 11 and 57 percent of youth aged 12 to 17 are fully vaccinated against COVID-19, according to data from the .��Shots for children under 5 will not be available for over a month.

On Sunday, Gov. Kathy Hochul announced that New York state will end its mask requirement for schools and child care facilities starting Wednesday. “The day has come,” the governor said. On Monday, California Gov. Gavin Newsom said indoor masking at schools and child care facilities after March 11. For students in Los Angeles Unified School District, masking appears to remain in place through the end of the year per an agreement between the district and the teachers union, although the timetable could be renegotiated. New York City Mayor Eric Adams already followed the governor’s lead, saying that he plans to drop the city’s school masking rule — along with vaccine requirements for restaurants, gyms and movie theaters — on March 7. Adams said his administration would continue to monitor COVID case rates and promised to make a final decision by Friday. “New Yorkers stepped up and helped us save lives by reaching unprecedented levels of vaccination,” he in a statement.

In early February, a flurry of Democratic states including New Jersey, Massachusetts and Connecticut announced the end of their K-12 face-covering rules. Yet a few holdout states, and many individual districts, still require students to cover up without a set end date — and decision makers are seeking further clarity on when to safely drop the practice.

As if on cue, two new papers deliver a clear, quantitative look at just how many cases unmasking might trigger, helping school leaders set customized benchmarks for the end of mandates based on their community’s expressed goals.

“Instead of saying, ‘Well, you know, masks off, people get sick. Masks on, fewer people get sick,’ [officials can understand] what exactly the magnitude of these outcomes are,” said John Giardina, the lead author of one of the papers and a Harvard University Ph.D student.

His , which was peer-reviewed and published Feb. 14 in JAMA Network, uses simulation modeling to identify the COVID transmission levels at which virus spread would stay in control even when classrooms are mask-optional. 

It comes as New York Gov. Kathy Hochul said leaders in her state are such as community COVID transmission levels and pediatric hospitalizations as they decide whether to lift the statewide school mask mandate in March. And California officials say they are examining student vaccination rates to when schools might be able to scrap their mask rules, even as health officials say the county will likely for other settings by late March.

“We’re among the 13 states that have not ended their school masking requirements,” California Gov. Gavin Newsom said . “I have stated very clearly that on the 28th of this month we will be announcing a specific date. That date with destiny, the masks will come off, and we’ll do it in an appropriate manner.”

Meanwhile, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have signaled that they will be looking to in the coming weeks, with an emphasis on preventing hospitalizations rather than avoiding transmission altogether.

The study Giardina published with co-authors from universities such as Stanford, Brown and Johns Hopkins allows decision makers to consider all of those metrics — case rates, vaccination levels and hospitalizations — simultaneously.

Using the ‘formula’

School leaders can select from three possible objectives: Avoiding all in-school transmission (which Giardina acknowledges may be an unrealistic standard), keeping the average additional cases due to unmasking below a specified level, such as 5 per month, or keeping the average additional hospitalizations under a threshold, such as 3 per 100,000 people per month. 

Then, based on the share of students who have been inoculated with COVID vaccines, they can find the appropriate community transmission level for unmasking.

“If you have your goals and you have the context you’re in in your community when it comes to vaccination and how effective you think masks are, you could certainly look at that table as a kind of formula and say, ‘Should we take off masks, or shouldn’t we?’” Giardina told ����Ӱ��.

He cautions, however, that the model used in the study relies on certain assumptions that decision makers should take into account. For example, it uses transmission rates from Delta rather than Omicron, and assumes a school with 638 students and 60 staff.

“I would still hope policymakers take all the uncertainties into account and how things might differ for each particular community,” he said.

In the table above, schools can usually focus on the middle column, the researcher explained, which assumes the switch to mask-optional classrooms will decrease overall COVID mitigation effectiveness from 70 percent to 30 percent. But if the building has particularly effective ventilation, staving off some virus particles even when kids don’t cover up, they might push to the left column, where mitigation remains slightly higher even after scrapping face coverings. Conversely, if the school previously helped students access high-quality masks like KN95s, the dropoff in mitigation effectiveness when unmasking might be steeper, pushing schools to the right column.

A school with 50 percent student vaccination that assumes an average drop in protection without masks (middle column) and is willing to accept an average of up to 10 additional COVID cases per month due to the policy change could go mask optional once community transmission falls below 22 cases per 100,000 residents per day, according to the table. If the school increases its student vaccination rate to 70 percent, the threshold jumps to 32 cases per 100,000 because the stronger immunization rate will help stave off the higher community transmission rate.

Fifteen states and Washington, D.C. were at or below per day, as of Feb 22. Another 15 were below 32 per 100,000. Nationally, case counts are trending downward, in some communities dramatically with 60 to 75 percent declines over the last 14 days.

Of the 500 largest U.S. school districts, currently require students to wear masks, according to data collected by Burbio, which has tracked school policy through the pandemic. That’s down from 60 percent at the beginning of February, and other districts have mask-optional policies set to kick in in the coming weeks.

In New York, where no end to the statewide school masking rule has yet been specified, of registered voters said they supported Gov. Hochul’s plan to review COVID data in early March before making any changes, while 30 percent thought the mandate should already have been lifted, according to a from the Siena College Research Institute released Tuesday. Another 10 percent said they wanted the policy to end after this week’s school vacation.

A second datapoint

As the move toward unmasking continues, a out of Duke University’s corroborates Giardina’s findings, adding a second tool for school leaders to use in their decision making.

Like the study published in JAMA Network, the ABC Science Collaborative paper links school face-covering policies to additional likely COVID cases based on community transmission rates.

“You can see the differences in masking versus not masking and how many cases per week will happen in the community as a result of school policy,” said Danny Benjamin, professor of pediatrics at Duke and co-chair of the Collaborative, explaining his findings to educators in a Feb. 14 . “You can then match these differences with your community’s risk tolerance as it relates to COVID.”

The paper, which the authors call a “blueprint” for navigating school policy this spring, draws on data from 61 school districts with varying mask rules. The researchers used those figures to then project the implications of mask-optional versus mask-required policies in a hypothetical 10,000-student school system.

When community case rates are high, mask mandates prevent much would-be transmission, the authors found. In universally masked schools, it generally takes 20 to 25 COVID-positive individuals to set foot in the building for one case of in-school transmission to occur, said Benjamin, compared to other settings where the average infected person tends to pass the virus on to at least one other person. 

“The short version is that masking clearly works,” he said.

However, when community case rates are low, the difference in prevented cases shrinks and school leaders may decide that enforcing a mandate is not worth the downsides. Research suggests that masks may hinder youngsters’ and interfere with for people of all ages.

When case rates are just 100 per 100,000 residents per week, or about 14 per 100,000 per day (roughly the infection level before the Delta surge), districts with universal masking prevent only three additional cases compared to districts with voluntary masking. At 250 per 100,000 residents per week, where many communities currently stand, school mask mandates fend off an extra 10 cases in the district per week, the paper projects.

The brief does not break down expected cases by school vaccination rates. Nationwide, just under a quarter of children aged 5 to 11 and 56 percent of youth aged 12 to 17 are fully vaccinated against COVID-19, according to data from the .

For some broader perspective, Benjamin reminded school leaders that children are just as likely or more likely to be hospitalized when they catch the flu or RSV compared to the coronavirus in all age groups except for 12- to 17-year-olds who have not been vaccinated against COVID.

Still, Benjamin’s co-chair at the Collaborative, Kanecia Zimmerman, emphasized that any shift in policy has implications not just for families’ physical health but also their mental health. An early February conducted by CBS News found that 57 percent of parents of school-aged children believe masks should still be required in school while only 36 percent said they should be optional. Another 7 percent want face coverings banned in classrooms.

Even when epidemiologically sound, a shift to voluntary masking may create distress for families, and the Duke associate professor of pediatrics urged school officials to consider bolstering the mental health supports available to students.

“Unmasking … is going to represent a substantial change for many families, for many districts, for many children,” she said. “When you’re making decisions about how to move forward, make those decisions in light of how you might be able to do things for the whole child.”

Massachusetts officials announced Wednesday morning that students and staff will no longer be required to wear face coverings in school starting Feb. 28, when the current statewide masking mandate expires. “With Massachusetts a national leader in vaccinating kids, combined with our robust testing programs, it is time to lift the mask mandate in schools and give students and staff a sense of normalcy after dealing with enormous challenges over the past two years,” Gov. Charlie Baker said.

As Omicron cases recede in most areas of the country and K-12 debate turns to the contentious question of whether students should still be required to wear masks, two Democratic states have charted a middle path that offers highly immunized districts the option to scrap face coverings in school.

Massachusetts and Maryland allow districts to drop mask requirements if more than 80 percent of students and staff are fully vaccinated. In Maryland, school systems also wield the option to change their policies once the surrounding county surpasses 80 percent immunized, regardless of student and staff rates, or when community coronavirus transmission has remained low to moderate for two weeks straight.

“You cannot mask in perpetuity,” Maryland State Superintendent Mohammed Choudhury told ����Ӱ��. “You have to be able to have a responsible off-ramp.”

A growing chorus of experts would agree. Scott Gottlieb, former Food and Drug Administration chief, said on Sunday he expected to see more governors lift mask mandates and that we have to “try to at least make sure that students in schools have some semblance of normalcy for this spring term.” , and all recently published columns to a similar effect. And five Bay Area medical professionals on Tuesday penned an op-ed with the provocative headline “”

On Monday, New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy, a Democrat who has enacted some of the strictest statewide COVID mitigation rules in the nation, the end of the state’s K-12 face-covering mandate, allowing schools to go mask-optional starting March 7. Delaware Gov. John Carney also made a similar move, stipulating that his state’s K-12 face-covering mandate would end . And hours later, Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont followed suit, announcing that the state’s school mask mandate would be .

“We can responsibly take the step given the continuing drop in new cases and hospitalizations from Omicron, and the continued growth in vaccinations,” Murphy wrote on Twitter..

In New York, where the mandate was already in , Gov. Kathy Hochul Wednesday. She announced that she was lifting the indoor masking requirement starting Thurs., Feb. 10 but would wait to make a call on face covering in school until early March, after students’ winter break.

“This fight is not over. We’re not surrendering, this is not disarmament,” Hochul said.

Meanwhile, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Tuesday that with COVID cases still high in parts of the country, its guidance on masking in schools .

As of Feb. 7, about of the top 500 school districts required that students and staff wear masks in classrooms, according to the data service Burbio, which has tracked school policy through the pandemic. Face-covering rules still tend to fall along partisan lines, with Democratic districts mostly requiring masks and Republican districts mostly leaving the decision to parents. States such as Florida, Texas and, more recently, Virginia have moved to outlaw mask mandates in school, but have in many cases . 

But in deep blue Maryland, the state superintendent says that it may be time for schools to rethink their status quo, pointing out that not only have COVID vaccines been available to children 5 and up for months, but that even toddlers may now soon access shots.

When Choudhury set out to extend his state’s K-12 masking order amid Omicron, he also sought to build in provisions “incentivizing the right set of behaviors to be able to tackle COVID-19,” he said. 

The state superintendent combed through safety guidelines from states across the country, ultimately pulling from models in Massachusetts and Nevada to allow districts to do away with mask rules when vaccinations are high or when case counts are low.

“We cannot miss this opportunity to return to normal when we have the tools at hand,” Choudhury said. “Let’s not let fear overcome the ability to come back to normal.”

Howard County is the only Maryland county so far to surpass the 80 percent community vaccination threshold, according to state data, and Montgomery County, which has 209 schools and some 160,560 students, is just a few points away at 77 percent immunized. Yet with transmission rates still high in the wake of Omicron, Howard County Public Schools said that it is not yet ready to go mask-optional.

“While COVID cases are continuing to decline rapidly, we continue to have indoor masking in place,” Brian Bassett, communications director for the 57,325-student district, wrote in an email to ����Ӱ��. “We will continue to evaluate all our COVID mitigation strategies for the remainder of this school year and heading into next year and adjust as we’re able.”

The 80 percent vaccination threshold is what Benjamin Linas, professor of medicine at Boston University, and a team of researchers recommended as a marker at which schools could safely drop masks in a November that has not yet been peer reviewed. But that guidance was based on data from the Delta surge, he points out, not Omicron.

“With Omicron, if your goal is really to eliminate transmission, it’s about more than just vaccination. It’s about how much transmission there is,” the Boston doctor told ����Ӱ��. 

That said, serious illness from Omicron in vaccinated individuals has been vanishingly rare, Linas added. His own thinking on the topic, he acknowledged, is shifting to a stance of: “We’re going to have to accept that there might be some COVID (in school), and that’s OK.”

In Linas’s Massachusetts, which implemented its mask-optional threshold in late September, at least have sought and received permission to drop mask mandates after documenting that they had surpassed the 80 percent student and staff vaccination threshold, according to reporting from The Boston Globe. While the majority have not yet scrapped their policies due to Omicron fears, at least five took the plunge before mid-December and for the most part did not see large increases in COVID cases.

Seventy percent of youth at Hopkinton High School, the first school in the state to do away with universal face coverings, reported that the change in policy improved their school experience, while 8 percent said it made it worse, an early December found. Students reported better class discussions as well as “contagious smiling.” Research suggests that masks may hinder youngsters’ and interfere with for people of all ages.

But even if many students happily anticipate the end of mask requirements, policymakers will have to contend with widespread hesitation from another key constituency: parents.

A of over a dozen polls since the summer found that most parents wanted to keep kids covered up in school. The most recent survey, conducted in January for The New York Times, found that of American adults supported universal masking for students to limit Omicron spread.

Teachers unions in major cities like Los Angeles, New York and Chicago have also influenced decisions on COVID mitigation in schools throughout the pandemic, and amid Omicron called for . Los Angeles Unified School District has taken the step of , instead requiring that students wear surgical masks or respirators like N95s or KN95s. The and the continue to recommend universal K-12 masking, with a preference for .

Linas acknowledges that pivoting away from universal masking may be understandably scary for many.

“It’s not going to be obvious the day when it’s safe to go to school without a mask,” he said. “It’s still going to be controversial and people are still going to protest it and be uncomfortable.”

Yet, “‘masks forever’ is not a solution. ‘Masks forever’ is a problem,” Linas believes. Given that, school leaders must identify benchmarks for when it’s safe to drop face coverings.

Those benchmarks, said John Giardina, a PhD student at Harvard University and lead researcher on Linas’s study using simulation modeling to predict transmission in classrooms, can work in two directions: Below the case rate threshold it’s safe to drop masks and above it, it’s time to reinstate mandates.

“[It] would be the same cutoff when masks might need to be added back on in response to a new wave or variant,” he told ����Ӱ��.

Maryland school districts that unmask after two weeks of mild community transmission are required to follow a similar protocol, re-activating their universal face-covering rules if COVID spread remains elevated for 14 straight days.

“There’s an on-ramp at the transmission level,” explained Choudhury.

In Massachusetts, case counts remain “way off-scale for where we want to be before we start taking off masks (in school),” said Jeremy Luban, professor of medicine at UMass Medical School, who isn’t convinced that schools should be unmasking.

“But we’re getting there,” he added. “I think it’ll be pretty soon.”

In December and January, his 8,900-student district just north of Atlanta partnered with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to study classroom virus transmission, ultimately adjusting their distancing protocols to reduce spread. In September, after reading an written by a Harvard University professor that proposed using rapid antigen tests to give healthy kids an alternative to quarantine, he reached out directly to the author asking about the model — and ultimately implemented the “” scheme in his schools. Now, the district is planning to hold for students this month as COVID shots roll out for younger kids.

But despite a keen eye for the latest coronavirus safety research, Rivera made another move in mid-October that many parents had clamored for, but health experts cautioned against: He lifted Marietta’s mask requirement.

“​�ċWe tried to get to a solution that we think is good for our community,” the superintendent told ����Ӱ��. “Could I give kids a bit more sense of normalcy back that they haven’t had for two years? I think that’s a question we’re grappling with.” 

The move typifies a trend emerging nationwide, as school leaders respond to .

At least a dozen districts that previously required face coverings are now mask-optional, including ; and . Of the 200 largest U.S. school systems, 135 now have mask mandates — down from 150 on Oct. 1 and lower than at any point this school year since mid-August, according to , a data service that has tracked school policy through the pandemic.

That pattern worries Benjamin Linas, professor of medicine at Boston University.

Over the summer, the health expert used simulation modeling technology to predict how many positive COVID cases would be transmitted in schools, depending on their vaccination rates and mitigation measures. The that he and his team published in August recommended that schools drop universal face-covering rules only once 80 percent of students and staff are fully immunized and community transmission is below 10 cases per 100,000 people. 

Currently, the U.S. averages . And while as many as , of eligible youth have received both shots.

Vaccines for children ages 5 to 11 are expected to roll out in days and as many as with children in the age group plan to have their kids immunized, according to surveys, but a significant share before doing so, they say. About a quarter said they definitely would not vaccinate their children.

With vaccination rates as they currently stand, school buildings are largely full of people unprotected against the virus, Linas pointed out.

“That is a setup for trouble in the future, having ongoing smoldering transmission because people are under vaccinated and we’re not wearing masks,” he told ����Ӱ��. “The virus continues, new variants emerge — those threats are real.”

Other experts, including Joseph Allen, the Harvard public health professor that Rivera corresponded with about Marietta’s test-and-stay approach, argue that schools should take a more dynamic approach to masking requirements, dropping them when transmission falls. Given the current situation, he advocates for the end of all school face-covering requirements by January, if not sooner.

“If things change for the worse — and they might — then we just pull the masks back out of the drawer. But we must be just as willing to put them away when things look better,” Allen wrote in an October .

At the state level, Massachusetts has set a benchmark that aligns with the Linas’s recommendation, for any school that reaches 80 percent student and staff vaccination. But new guidance in allows schools to scrap face coverings where community transmission is low and gives districts the option to do the same if they maintain stringent quarantine rules. Neither policy accounts for immunization levels in the school community.

Georgia, similarly, is a state that gives local school leaders the power to set their own coronavirus safety policies. In Marietta, the district’s program for testing students and staff who may have been exposed to the virus played into the calculus for Rivera’s decision to go mask-optional.

“There’s an interplay between these approaches,” the superintendent said. “Your approach to masks will impact the distance at which you are identifying close contacts — three feet vs. six feet, indoors. The number of students who are identified as close contacts, that drives your test-and-stay demand.” 

Because 98 percent of would-be quarantines in his district never ultimately tested positive, Rivera hoped the testing policy, which the district has funded partially through relief dollars, would keep students learning in the classroom, regardless of whether they were wearing masks. 

Out of 281 tests so far administered by the program, 271 have come back negative, the superintendent said — meaning those students have been able to stay in the school building.

The “test-to-stay” strategy has been this fall and is lauded by public health experts. The CDC said in mid-October that they are considering into their school coronavirus guidance.

Regarding masking, the CDC recommends universal use, but in practice, the policies have been much more controversial, with eruptions over the mandates in dozens of districts. 

“I felt like I’ve had to navigate this path by myself,” said Rivera. “I feel like most people sit on either side of it. Either it’s, ‘Nope, we have to follow blindly what the CDC says,’ or we pretend that COVID doesn’t exist. And I don’t think either one of those is right, there’s a balance in the middle.”

The softened masking rules have had some real benefits, according to teachers in the district. Foreign language classes, for instance, were strained when everyone had to cover up.

“It is really tough when kids are learning a new language for the first time to pronounce new sounds, not seeing how to form their mouth, or [seeing] my mouth because I’m covered up in a mask,” Wendy Locke, a French teacher at Marietta High School, told ����Ӱ��.

Barbie Esquijarosa, who teaches English to non-native speakers at the high school, agrees that face coverings make school more difficult for young people learning English. But she also worries that the mask-optional policy presents an added stressor for the students she teaches, many of whom may live with older relatives and lack health insurance.

“They come in concerned,” said Esquijarosa. “They’re wearing [the mask] the whole time. They’ll stay away from the kids who don’t wear the masks.”

What’s more, many of her students lack transportation, meaning they aren’t able to participate in Marietta’s test-and-stay program if they have possible COVID exposures.

Rivera recognizes that the program is accessible only to students with transportation and is working to designate a bus to pick up kids for COVID testing. But as of yet, no such route is in operation. Like many other districts across the country, Marietta’s bus driver reserves are amid wider facing schools and the U.S. economy.

Elsewhere, some school districts have taken an opposite stance on masking. When the department of health in Douglas County, Colorado moved to remove face-covering mandates, the school district sued on behalf of nine medically vulnerable students — winning a on the new rule.

“No parent should be forced to choose between sending their child to school and risking their child’s health, and no family should have to fear that their child may face life-threatening illness just to access their right to a great education,” Superintendent Corey Wise said in a statement.

Back in Marietta, there has been no increase in coronavirus infections since Rivera dropped universal masking rules. Total infections have fallen from 233 in the first five weeks of schools to 143 in the seven weeks that followed, according to the district.

Still, Linas, the Boston University medical expert, cautions against the mask-optional policy. 

Breathing room now for students and staff may mean breathing room for the virus — to mutate and evolve — in the long run, he said.

“It just doesn’t make sense to start rolling those dice when we’re so close to the actual finish line.”

Under the mandate, all employees of San Antonio Independent School District were supposed to get vaccinated against the virus by Friday — directly challenging Gov. ’s ban on COVID-19 vaccine mandates. Then-Superintendent Pedro Martinez enacted the rule in August, drawing lawsuits from Attorney General .

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Supreme Court justices sided with Abbott and Paxton to temporarily block the district from enforcing the mandate while the legal battle over the ban continues, but .

A representative for San Antonio ISD did not immediately return a request for comment.

Abbott has grown increasingly aggressive on cracking down on vaccine mandates of any kind. On Monday, the governor from requiring their workers to get the COVID-19 vaccine — expanding his ban beyond cities, counties and school districts — and called on state lawmakers to send him a bill solidifying the prohibition.

This article , the only member-supported, digital-first, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.��

As COVID cases surged across the country this summer, fueled by spread of the highly infectious Delta variant, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention joined the American Academy of Pediatrics in recommending that all students and staff wear masks in school. But in Texas, as in a handful of other conservative states, an executive order banning mask mandates forbade school districts from following that guidance.

In Dallas, Superintendent Michael Hinojosa felt that he was faced with a choice: risk over 153,000 students’ safety or risk legal challenges. The superintendent chose the latter, defying Gov. Greg Abbott’s ban and paving the way for dozens of other districts in the state to follow the same path.

Now nearly a month into the school year, and as COVID rages through the Dallas community, the struggle is making its way through state courts. And all the while, Hinojosa is contending with the urgent question of how to bring students back up to speed after a year of disrupted learning.

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This year, Dallas is rolling out discipline reforms to end racial disparities in suspension, new social-emotional supports and revamped school calendars to boost students’ learning time.

����Ӱ�� caught up with Hinojosa over the phone to hear how those efforts are unfolding and get the latest on the district’s legal showdown over masks.

This conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

����Ӱ��: It’s been a pretty surreal back-to-school season and Dallas has been in the news a lot. What’s top of mind for you right now?

Hinojosa: Last year was a year like no other, and this August has been an August like no other. Even as surreal as last year was, this August has been even crazier.

On Aug. 3, our county went to code red (representing high COVID transmission). The very next day, I’m attending a meeting of some superintendents … and we heard from a very prominent attorney that maybe the governor can’t enforce this (ban on mask mandates). So the Houston superintendent calls me and is telling me they’re thinking about implementing a mask mandate protocol and so I said, “I’m with you.” I really felt it was under my authority, since I have the authority to run the day-to-day operations of the school district.

Aug. 9 we announced our mask protocols, and then everything breaks loose.

I’ve been following along with the legal developments. Dallas ISD’s mask mandate was challenged, and then a judge ruled in your favor. But now the state attorney general has appealed. Can you give me a sense of where you think this whole thing is headed?

Well, it changes almost on a daily basis.

We prevailed at the district court. But the governor (Greg Abbott) and attorney general (Ken Paxton) can appeal to an appeals court and we think we’ll win there. But we think eventually we’re going to lose at the (Texas) Supreme Court … because they’re all conservative members.

It’s very interesting that the attorney general and the governor have both said publicly that they’re going to prosecute anybody who implements a mask protocol. But in the court pleadings, they said that they had no authority to do that. Then the commissioner of education (Mike Morath) has come out and said that they’re not going to enforce anything until all of these court proceedings are over.

So what I predict is that eventually this will go to the Supreme Court and we will be told at some point that we cannot have our mask protocol as we want it. But there’s going to be no enforcement, because I don’t see the local district attorneys coming after all 60 superintendents in Texas that are defying the governor’s executive order.

We’ve said all along, this was temporary. Come November, if we get back under 500 COVID cases in the county and we’ve stopped the spread on campuses, then I’ll be glad to lift the mask mandate. I don’t really like it myself, but we’re trying to protect the health and safety of our students.

As I’m sure you know, the federal government is opening civil rights probes into five states over their ban on mask mandates in schools. Texas isn’t on that list because the issue is already in the hands of the courts. But more broadly, what type of federal involvement might be useful in Texas? And do you see bans on mask mandates as a civil rights issue?

One of the reasons [the U.S. Department of Education] didn’t go after Texas is that they now have the understanding that what the governor has done is unenforceable. So that’s why we weren’t included in that order.

But it could be a civil rights issue. We’ll have to see how that plays out. We do get federal dollars for special education and economically disadvantaged students and, of course, they have given us significant dollars for the Recovery Act. So the feds do have some skin in this game and they’re not just sitting on the sidelines.

Seems like the federal government is trying to find out whether bans on mask mandates systematically exclude specific students, perhaps immunocompromised students from the classroom.

Yeah, that’s the focus of their inquiry, which gives them standing on this matter and, of course, those students are all over the country, so it does give them an entrée, I believe. But I’m not an attorney.

Over the weekend, Dr. Fauci told CNN that school [COVID] vaccine mandates for eligible students are a good idea based on the benefit-to-risk ratio. Schools already require a number of other vaccinations for enrollment and the FDA recently gave full approval to the Pfizer shot for folks 16 and up. What are your thoughts on the topic of mandating student vaccinations?

I’m supportive. I’m not ready to litigate at this time yet. What we’ve done instead to start with is we’re giving a $25 gift card for any student who provides his or her proof of vaccination. So we’re going down that path, we’re going a little bit more slowly (than we did with our mask policy).

But we would be supportive, especially when our younger students can take the vaccine, and we’re now hearing late November, early December when that vaccination will be available. I would be in favor of [a student immunization requirement]. You’re exactly right. We require other vaccines and so I would be very supportive of that, although I’m not going to be as assertive on that one as we have been on the mask protocol.

So just to clarify, when students under 12 do become eligible for shots that might open the door for Dallas to move toward mandating student vaccines? 

Yes, I would definitely consider it at that point because it’d be much more universal.

And for staff vaccine mandates, they’re banned in Texas but have been implemented in a number of states. Do you think making COVID shots mandatory for teachers might be an appropriate public health measure? And how do politics play in?

We have 22,000 employees and so we told them that we would give them a $500 stipend if they prove that they were vaccinated. Within three hours, we had 6,000 staff turn in their documentation. We are now up to around 11,000 and then the ones that just went out and took the vaccine, it takes them a while to get their documentation. So we anticipate we’ll get probably three-quarters on a voluntary basis.

But to answer your question, yes, I would be very supportive, especially for campus employees who deal with children to be required to have a vaccination. But even our county hospital can’t require vaccination in Texas for their nurses because of the state laws that are in place. When San Antonio ISD tried to do that, they got halted by the attorney general.

And in a sentence or two, what’s at stake in these safety decisions for students, families and teachers?

Everything’s at stake here.

Not only their safety, but the data is overwhelming that in-person instruction is by far the best. A few, maybe five percent of the students, do better virtually. But can you imagine if we have to have students at home because [COVID] spread got so bad that they lose another year of instruction? A whole generation could be at risk of falling so far behind that they can’t catch up. So there’s a lot at stake.

We’re very proud that we got to 97 percent of our projected enrollment and out of that, 96 percent of it is in person. So our students are glad to be back. Our families are glad to be back, but boy, we’ve got a big hill to climb academically.

On that topic of catching students up, especially given the fact that more often than not, some of those students who fell furthest behind last year were those who perhaps had fewer supports or financial resources at home, what efforts are underway in Dallas to help kids get back up to speed? I read about a tutoring program, for instance.

Well, we had 36,000 households without connectivity, so we put together a program called Operation Connectivity to connect our families and we executed on that plan. [At first] we did hotspots, but now we put up towers so that at least they can have access if they’re having to learn from home.

We’re also going to have tutoring during the school day, afterschool and in the summer.

But we now have three different calendars. One of them is a year-round calendar, where you get more time. Another one is what we call an intersession calendar, where you go five weeks, and then you’re off a week, go another five weeks, and you go off a week. We catch students up [who are behind during that week off]. For our most challenging schools — we have 60 that we call “high-priority campuses” — we have a very robust afterschool program from 3 to 6 p.m. for enrichment activities and strong academic activities to try to get them caught up.

And we’ve completely reinvented our summer school. So we’re doing all of those things all at the same time to accelerate learning.

Can you tell me a bit more about those different calendars? Where did the idea come from, what’s the goal, and do you know of other districts using that same model?

There’s a school district in the El Paso area called Socorro that has had this intersession calendar ever since the ‘90s and they’ve had good academic results where they bring in the students that are behind during the week that they’re off. Garland ISD, which is one of our neighbors, went to that calendar last year, but there is no other district that has the multiple options that we have.

To be one of the five schools using the year-round calendar or [one of the] 41 schools that are in intersession calendars, each had 80 percent of the teachers and 80 percent of the parents opt into those calendar options. … We didn’t want to force families to take one of those calendars.

At scale, nobody else is doing it like we are, other than the two that I mentioned, Garland and Socorro. So we think that students in those schools they’re going to have a better opportunity to catch up than if you just went with a traditional calendar.

We’re using a lot of our federal ESSA dollars to pay for this extra time. We know who our best teachers are, and our best teachers get more money to teach those intersession opportunities. Instead of working 180 days, they’ll be working 210 days. So there’s significant dollars that will be going into the pockets of our teachers, and especially our best teachers, because they’ll get the opportunity to do a lot of those enrichment and intervention opportunities.

I know last year Dallas moved to end suspensions. Where does that effort now stand?

We’re pulling forward with it. Ten percent of our students are African-American males, yet 51 percent of our suspensions were African-American male, until now. If you [engage in severe misbehavior] you will still be suspended, but we’re talking about the discretionary suspension and the discretionary suspensions were 75 percent of our suspensions. We’re going to have a different alternative on how to redirect their behavior.

We’ll have some data sets at the end of the first nine weeks about where we are and we’ll also have data in a year about how this journey to redirect behavior through these reset centers went. So stay tuned.

We’ll be following those results. Turning to the social-emotional well-being of the wider student population, I know that last fall Dallas ISD teachers were trained in trauma-informed care. What results did you see from that training? How do you see Dallas ISD’s commitment to social-emotional learning changing in response to COVID-19 traumas? 

We got $7 million from the Wallace Foundation to implement social-emotional learning districtwide. They hired the RAND Corporation to do a research study. But we ran into a problem because we couldn’t have a treatment group and a control group. All of our campuses wanted to have that training and so we kind of threw the research out the window.

We trained the teachers first so they could help deal with the students and we also hired 58 mental health and social work professionals last year, knowing that we were going to need them this year. … We just went all in, as many as we could afford.

Last question, what’s sustaining you through the pandemic? Where are you finding positive stories to counterbalance all the tense circumstances?

People don’t want a whiner. They want a problem solver. So if you lose hope and aspiration, then that gives other people permission to lose hope. I’m generally a positive person, I look for solutions.

I’ve had very little pushback on my mask mandate protocol. In fact, I’ve had mostly universal support and so I think that just shows that if you’re willing to take a risk, and look to the future in a positive way that people will climb aboard with you. So far, so good.

After just eight days in classrooms, 37 positive coronavirus cases in the 16,000-student district outside Indianapolis had triggered hundreds of student quarantines, forcing young people to miss out on classes and extracurriculars.

Superintendent Jeff Butts knew he had to act fast. The district had begun the year mask optional in late July. But in early August, he stumbled on a solution, hidden in plain sight: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had just updated its guidance, exempting students from self-isolation if they and the infected student were properly masked and spaced at least 3 feet apart.

“That was my biggest tipping point, quite frankly, when the CDC came out and made that change,” Butts told ����Ӱ��. “I realized that if we had all of our children in masks … I can quarantine fewer children.”

But not everyone got the message. It doesn’t appear that the guidance trickled down to many other school systems, where , according to a recent survey of 100 districts from the University of Washington’s Center for Reinventing Public Education. One reason for the disconnect is that CDC made little attempt to billboard the policy shift, which only appears in an on case investigation and tracing updated Aug. 5.

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“It’s buried in some appendix to the close contact definition,” Emily Oster, Brown University economist who has tracked schooling through the pandemic, told ����Ӱ��. Under many school systems’ quarantine protocols, spending 15 minutes within a six foot radius of an infected individual — sitting next to them in class, for example — can force students to stay home for up to two weeks. The new exemption allows schools to bypass that rule in cases where both individuals mask up.

Across the country, as school leaders struggle with quarantine totals that are stretching into the thousands just weeks after schools opened their doors, the new masking exemption to self-isolation guidelines, could help districts sidestep chaotic reopenings amid divisive politics surrounding the use of masks.

In the past week across the country, New Orleans School District after 299 recorded COVID cases. Mississippi has statewide, an official announced. And a district in Texas . Meanwhile, Texas — among other states like Florida, Arkansas and Arizona — maintains a ban on mask mandates, though school systems like those in Dallas and Miami are .

The CDC did not respond to ����Ӱ��’s request for an explanation of why the update wasn’t publicized more widely. But Oster, the Brown economist, said it’s possible that when the CDC updated the definition of close contact for quarantining, “they didn’t realize how important it would be for school guidance,” and thus didn’t heavily broadcast the change.

At the very least, it’s clear the hidden clause gives districts a “huge incentive to have everybody mask,” Oster said.

As of Aug. 11, all students and faculty in Wayne Township are now required to wear face coverings. Site leaders have told Butts that the district is already seeing fewer quarantines, though the superintendent said he doesn’t yet have this week’s numbers.

Wayne Township is not the only locale to pull the trigger on face coverings in response to skyrocketing COVID absences. Elsewhere in Indiana, Greater Clark County Schools adopted a universal masking rule on Aug. 7 after some 70 COVID cases . In Arkansas, the Marion schools superintendent mourned that the state-level ban on mask mandates had caused a nearly in his district. And in Ohio, in an effort to avoid the fate of mass quarantines, Lakota Local Schools outside Cincinnati announced a , just two days before students returned to classrooms.

“Because we want to keep our kids in school all year long, just like we did last year, we made a decision this weekend to move to masks,” Superintendent Matt Miller told ����Ӱ��.

Where school systems have the latitude to set their own face covering rules, “all these school districts are probably going to go to masks because there’s too much COVID right now,” said Dennis Roche, co-founder of the website Burbio, which has tracked school policy through the pandemic.

While exposure to infected individuals often keeps large numbers of students home from school, very few students in isolation actually turn out to contract the virus themselves, Oster noted. Having a rule that allows healthy students to avoid missing class is crucial, she said.

“The quarantine itself is tremendously disruptive. And so I think that having an off ramp or a way to make it possible for people not to have to quarantine after an exposure is just huge for generating a functioning school system.”

As Delta variant COVID cases continue to surge, allowing students to come to school without masks and spread the virus is inexcusable, said Dan Domenech, executive director of the School Superintendents Association.

“If you have to now quarantine a student because they’ve been exposed to somebody because nobody was wearing a mask, that’s a problem,” he told ����Ӱ��. “From a logistical point of view, the easiest thing to do is to say everybody needs to wear a mask.”

Despite the potentially large implications for schools’ daily operations, there was “not much emphasis” on the CDC’s policy change, said Domenech — meaning many districts may still be struggling to catch up.

From a public health perspective, the move aligns with what Phil Chan, medical director for the Rhode Island Department of Health, says are the best practices to prevent the spread of COVID.

“Where we are with our case transmission rates across the country… I think [masking] makes all the sense in the world,” he told ����Ӱ��. It’s “the bare minimum we should be doing at this time.”

Still, in his home state, face covering policies in school are “all over the map,” he said, which he fears could spell unnecessary COVID spread and lost learning.

Last week in Georgia, for example, four school districts — some of which had mask-optional policies — due to COVID outbreaks.

As summer ends and students return Wednesday to Lakota Local Schools, that’s precisely the situation that Superintendent Miller hopes to avoid.

“I think the social emotional pitfall of masking is bad enough, but I think the social emotional pitfall of being at home and learning again from home is probably worse.”

When teens and adolescents first became eligible for COVID-19 vaccinations in mid-May, demand for shots was like a spigot turned on full blast.

Now, the once-steady stream has slowed to a feeble drip.

Last week, only 315,000 youth rolled up their sleeves for immunizations, down from a peak of 1.6 million in late May, according to an .

“[T]he rate of youth vaccinations has slowed in recent weeks,” Jennifer Shu, a pediatrician and spokesperson for the AAP, wrote in a message to ����Ӱ��. That trend poses a grave risk, she says.

“​�ċVaccinating teens and adolescents is their best protection against severe COVID illness. Also, having higher vaccination rates overall can reduce the potential of variants — which may be more contagious — to develop and spread in schools and communities.”

As of July 14, some 6.8 million Americans under the age of 18 were fully vaccinated, representing 38 percent of 16- to 17-year-olds and 25 percent of 12- to 15-year-olds. Another 2 million teens and adolescents had received a single dose.

The slowdown in youth immunization tracks with what Nicolette Carrion, who worked in May and June as a youth vaccine ambassador in her hometown of Nassau County, New York, has heard in conversations with peers about the shot.

When youth first became eligible for vaccinations, many were eager to get immunized so that they could enjoy events like prom, graduation and summer hangouts with friends, she said. But now the social pressure has eased off.

“At this point, everyone (who’s) vaccinated, they’ve been done with it, and they don’t want to talk about vaccines anymore. And everyone unvaccinated probably wants to avoid that conversation,” Carrion, a rising sophomore at Georgetown University, told ����Ӱ��.

Low youth vaccination rates spurred the AAP on Monday to recommend universal masking for students and staff as classrooms reopen this fall.

“There isn’t a uniform way to determine who and how many individuals within a school are vaccinated … and therefore [it’s] difficult to enforce masking simply for unvaccinated people,” explained Shu. “So universal masking is the best way to be consistent in protecting everyone.”

That stance clashes with guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which holds that mask-wearing in school is only recommended for individuals who have not received COVID-19 immunizations. The AAP’s recommendation contributes to , according to recent reports.

Nationwide, eight states bar school districts from requiring face coverings in the classroom, while nine states mandate that all schools enforce universal masking, according to Burbio’s . Most other states leave the decision up to individual school systems.

Those policies come as experts struggle to understand what exactly is the risk to unvaccinated kids of the new, more contagious Delta variant that has quickly spread across the country.

Last school year, a collection of 130 studies found that schools were not the locus of community spread, and could safely reopen as long as safety measures like ventilation, masking and distancing were in place and infection rates in the surrounding area were not raging.

But in June, experts told ����Ӱ�� that this summer and fall may mark the “most dangerous” time in the pandemic for unvaccinated individuals and young people due to spread of the Delta variant. In the United Kingdom, a new study found that youth were behind the country’s most recent surge, testing positive for the virus at a rate .

Those warning signs should spur officials to revisit school safety policies, says Shu.

“This pandemic is a moving target and we are constantly adapting and adjusting guidelines including those on masking,” she said. “States that currently ban mask mandates could adapt given new information and recommendations.”

But while the most recent COVID mutation is undeniably more infectious than previous strains, it is . It spreads rapidly, but there is not evidence that the health outcomes for infected individuals are worse than those who got sick from other versions of the virus — meaning kids’ chance of hospitalization and death remains low.

Earlier this month, FDA officials said that authorization of COVID vaccines for children under 12 is .

In the meantime, vaccine requirements at as many as could help encourage older teens to receive their shots. On Monday, a to Indiana University’s mandate that students must be immunized before returning to campus.

For younger teens and adolescents, the trick may be to rethink the incentives for vaccination, suggests Carrion. Offering video games as a prize, or tapping influencers to speak up about vaccination could help, she says. Bringing pop star Olivia Rodrigo to the White House last week to she thinks was a good start.

“That age group is very impressionable,” said Carrion. “It all matters.”

​�ċ

Working as a school nurse is “not just ice and boo-boos.”

That’s how Marisa Thomison, a nurse at a Hutto Independent School District elementary school, explains her profession, which has become a crucial component of public health during the pandemic. At Veterans’ Hill Elementary School, she manages students’ medical histories, administers medications, provides health education and tries to keep COVID-19 from spreading widely among students and staff.

Among her tasks: keeping parents and teachers calm when she calls to tell them they were in contact with someone who tested positive for COVID-19. Thomison said she and her colleagues have been “cussed out” and even physically threatened by parents who are scared and frustrated at having to keep their children home for weeks.

“It’s the immediate, ‘Oh my God, I have a job. How can I have someone watch my kid? What am I going to do?’” Thomison said.

Unlike their peers in hospital COVID-19 units, school nurses have not had to care for dying patients. They are serving on the front lines of the pandemic in a different way: tracking who has been exposed to the virus, testing staff and students who experience symptoms and diagnosing signs of anxiety in traumatized students.

Thomison is one of 13 nurses in her school district, which makes her lucky. Texas law doesn’t require public schools to have full-time nurses, and many don’t. In 2019-2020, more than 8,000 Texas public schools employed about 6,100 full-time school nurses, according to state data.

State Rep. , D-Houston, has filed this legislative session to require all districts to employ at least one full-time nurse per school and keep a ratio of at least one full-time nurse for every 750 students enrolled. Hiring more nurses would cost districts or the state money, and Thierry said she wasn’t yet sure exactly how much.

“These are essential workers, so it is a cost that we can’t afford to cut any longer. Even one child’s life lost would be tragic,” she said.

Similar bills have failed in previous sessions, but the coronavirus pandemic has shown the scope and importance of school nurses’ jobs. Without a trained health professional to track how the virus has spread on campuses, schools are less able to avoid major outbreaks, said Becca Harkleroad, advocacy chair for the Texas School Nurses Organization and a nurse in Lake Travis ISD.

“I can’t imagine what it’s like during this time to not have a nurse. A lot of times it falls to the front office staff to take care of the kids and send kids home who may be sick,” she said. The advocacy group is also asking the state to track how many schools have nurses and whether they are covering more than one campus, a current hole in available state data. And it is championing filed by state Sen. , D-Burleson, which would allow schools to use money previously allocated for school safety to pay for additional nurses.

The sole school nurse for 320-student Marfa ISD, Beverly Dutchover, springs into action after a parent or teacher reports a positive COVID-19 case. She asks who they ate lunch with, tracks down class schedules and calls dozens of parents. Sometimes, if more than one person in a small classroom tests positive, she closes down the entire room and demands everyone stay home and quarantine for two weeks.

In the fall and early winter, tourists flocking to Marfa and Big Bend National Park and overwhelmed local hospital capacity. Cases among Marfa ISD students and teachers spiked to about 15 in October before dropping again. Now that Gov. has repealed the state’s mask mandate, Dutchover worries cases will spike again.

“It upset me. It made me sad to think that especially with all these nurses and doctors who work so hard to keep people alive in the hospitals, and then he went and did this,” Dutchover said of the governor’s decision.

This spring, the state gave school boards the power to opt out of requiring masks on their campuses, which could make some school nurses’ jobs even more challenging.

Debates over which safety policies are necessary for in-person learning have fractured some school communities, with 56% of students learning in person as of January. Marfa ISD will continue to require masks, but some school districts have already opted out. Dutchover knows that even if students and teachers wear masks on campus, they may not wear them while hanging out with friends or running errands, heightening the risk of transmission.

Masks indoors are crucial in preventing the virus from spreading, experts say, and school nurses know from experience. Tracy Ayers, district nurse in rural Caldwell ISD, recalled the time about five players on the girls soccer team tested positive for COVID-19. Upon contact tracing, she learned the outbreak stemmed from close contact on a school bus: The girls were eating with no masks. By contrast, the football coaches were adamant about having their players wear masks and sit far apart on the bus, and the season netted few cases.

“When I see lax behavior in mask wearing in particular is where I tend to see cases that will rise,” she said.

At the beginning of the school year, about half of Caldwell ISD’s students were learning in person. Now, nearly all are. The district’s school board will likely hear public comments after spring break from community members advocating to drop the mask order.

“Even taking a trip to one of the local grocery stores, some will wear masks and others don’t,” Ayers said. “I understand where parents are coming from in that they want normalcy for their kids. From where I’m coming from as a health provider and seeing how much masks are working, I want their kids in school and I want them healthy.”

The symptoms of the pandemic go beyond the purely physical. Thomison has noticed an increase in anxiety among staff members and students. Recently a student came into her office for the second day in a row, concerned about their symptoms. Before the pandemic, Thomison would have sat on the cot next to the student, met them at eye level and convinced them to open up. Now, she had to sit six feet away in a chair, fully outfitted in goggles and a mask. The student eventually confessed to being terrified of getting COVID-19 because a relative had it, and Thomison calmed them down.

She felt the strain of the distance between her and the student. “We can’t do for our students like we normally would. Our work can only provide so much comfort but it’s not going to allay anybody’s true fears,” she said. “I can’t nurse the way I’m used to because we do have safety restrictions. …It takes a big toll. We’re trying, but we’re also feeling the effects.”

Aliyya Swaby is the public education reporter at , the only member-supported, digital-first, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.