By March 20, I’d realized that this was one of Those Moments, a historical signpost when your choices and behavior will echo back at you later, whenever someone asks, “Where were you when?” By the middle of that summer, though, as my social world filled with people shocked that their vacations and family reunions had become superspreader events, I’d also realized that we were collectively going to spend most of this catastrophe it away. 

The rest, as they sort of say, became history. The pandemic’s consequences were — are — too dire to ignore, but also too inconvenient to fully acknowledge. Four years later, we’re also at an awkward remove from its most dramatic moments: The pandemic is largely concluded as an historical event, yet we’re not yet far enough out to have anything like a clear view of what’s happened. Most of us are still too battered from the burdens we carried to pause and genuinely reflect. We’ve all spent so many hours of the past four years jabbering into webcams at screenfuls of tiled faces. March 2020 was so many pixels ago. 

That’s why this anniversary should also be an invitation to extend a modicum of grace to ourselves, our peers and our schools. These were four punishing years. Pretending they can be quickly shaken off is . Both individually and collectively, Americans have not yet accepted the scope of the tragedy and we’re taking it out on our schools. 

This odd unwillingness to recognize the pandemic as an unavoidable calamity is part of why we’re still endlessly relitigating pandemic mitigation measures in schools — closures, masks, quarantine policies, and the like. If, in 2019, we’d conducted a thought experiment, asking folks to predict the educational impact of a then-hypothetical viral pandemic that would be transmitted via breathing and , most of us would agree that kids wouldn’t steam forth making the usual academic progress. 

And indeed, the real pandemic unquestionably U.S. students’ academic trajectories, even if they appear to . Yet here on the other side of that disaster, we’re determined to assign blame for dips in U.S. students’ academic achievement, as if learning loss could have — should have — been avoided in a moment of . Say it plain: There was no educational and public health playbook that could have wholly averted the pandemic’s impacts on kids., “[T]he declines, all told, strike me as relatively small, given the context: a brutal pandemic that terrified the country and killed more than a million of its citizens, upending nearly every aspect of our lives along the way.”

But because we can’t face that, we’re now in an educational “One Weird Trick” era, as the field floods with quick-fix solutions to reversing the pandemic’s impacts (particularly with federal pandemic recovery ESSER funds sunsetting). While it’s always appropriate to prioritize high-quality learning opportunities for children, it’s a short step from “let’s help kids accelerate their learning” to “if we do enough now, we can — yet again — banish the pandemic’s impacts from kids’ lives” (particularly if we just buy the right new ed tech product). 

The reality is much harsher. Researchers have known for years that it’s much tougher to shift students’ academic trajectories later in their careers. That’s why children who miss early literacy benchmarks . It’s also why investments in high-quality early learning — like universal pre-K programs — . Now, we have a country of children who, again, , faced . that closures contributed to lost learning, but only as one of many, interrelated variables, and — as noted above — students’ academic achievement in the U.S. appears to have suffered less than it did for students in peer countries that reopened on different timelines and with different COVID mitigation strategies.

Furthermore, the educational story of the past few years is far more complicated and painful than we’d like to admit and its aftereffects won’t vanish because we invest in some limited tutoring programs. Nor could they have been averted if only schools had found some magic mitigations formula to maintain normalcy for kids even as a whole lot of us repeatedly exempted ourselves from responsibility for flattening the curve. 

Why are we so resistant to facing this fact of the pandemic, even now that it’s mostly receded from daily life? It’s flatly impossible to look back at these four years without seeing how national leaders’ rhetoric drove this attitude: real and massive suffering coupled with willful self-deception and disinformation. The Trump administration flailed through COVID’s early stages, insisting it would be over in a few days or weeks, then dabbling in pseudoscience — remember , , and light and/or disinfectant “” into people’s lungs? 

That deadly unseriousness was contagious and collectively punishing. We’ll never know how the country would have behaved under less erratic leadership, but this band of feckless incompetents convinced masses of Americans that the pandemic could be largely ignored if we just wanted it badly enough. Their glib irresponsibility built the narrative that still plagues U.S. public education today — this notion that schools could somehow persist as normal when absolutely nothing around them was. It seems obvious that the ungainly federal response damaged Americans’ trust in public institutions and the social strains it caused ripped deeper holes in our shared social fabric. 

American pandemic flounderings were also personally crushing for many of us. Looking back, I feel a flat, dull, full-body weight settle back into my spine, that familiar 2020-vintage exhaustion. And that’s why, I know this for certain: whatever we all think now about the precise sequence of school closures, reopenings, mitigations, learning loss, and so forth, the past four years ripped a chunk out of the well-being of U.S. , and . 

That’s probably the clearest reason that the country’s still so determined to shift the pandemic out of mind and/or erase its impacts. No one wants to accept how far it knocked us — and our children — off the trajectories we hoped we were following. I remember reaching a point in the endless work-life-kids-panic pandemic juggle where I developed this yearning to just sit quietly on a rocky beach somewhere and watch the waves roll in. To just meditate and let my mind unspool from the tension of masks and ambulances. 

I kept telling my wife, “I bet I could sit there and stare for days before my head finally got back to something like normal.”

Michael Hinojosa left one job this year as superintendent of the Dallas Independent School District only to take on a few more. In one, he’ll be coaching superintendents on how to survive the culture wars and stay focused amid broadsides from local school boards. In another, he’s taken a leading role with a consulting group that he said alleviated some of the “pain points” he faced in Dallas. 

He also seriously weighed a foray into big-league urban politics, citing a desire to give back to the city that raised him. But on Dec. 4, he announced that he won’t run against Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson. Aside from the incumbent’s strong odds of winning reelection, Hinojosa said he’s got enough consulting work to . 

But colleagues who know Hinojosa well have no trouble seeing him as a politician. He already has a track record of staring down powerful opponents, including Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s May 2021 that banned districts from mandating masks.

“He’s a respected voice in the legislature,” said Chris Wallace, president and CEO of the North Texas Commission, an organization devoted to developing the 13-county Dallas region. “People listen when he speaks because he really excels in empowering people. That’s a leadership art.”

A Mexican immigrant, Hinojosa is a product of the Dallas schools and worked as a teacher and basketball coach until moving into administration. He started out leading smaller Texas districts before landing his dream job of heading up the Dallas schools in 2005. After one term, he left to lead the Cobb County district in metro Atlanta to be , who lived in the area. But in 2015, he returned home for another run as chief.

He originally planned to stay through the end of this year, but chose instead to leave in July, saying he had confidence in successor Stephanie Elizalde, who was chief schools officer in Dallas before serving as superintendent in Austin.

Recognizing leadership potential in educators is one of his strengths, said Chaundra Macklin, principal at Joseph J. Rhoads Learning Center, a pre-K site in the district. He interviewed her for her first principal’s job in 2007. She worked at a top-rated school, but then he tapped her to lead one that was struggling.

“He encouraged me as a leader even in my darkest moments, when it wasn’t going so well,” she said. “He said, ‘You just keep doing what you need to do.’ ”

He’s currently serving as the new chief impact officer for , which guided the Dallas district through several challenges, including passage of a $3.2 billion bond issue the fall after the pandemic began. 

He’s also “head coach” of a new effort by the Council of the Great City Schools to support superintendents at a time of unprecedented turbulence in the profession. 

“His commitment to urban education has been proven time and time again,” said Ray Hart, executive director of the council. “He is already playing a pivotal role in the organization’s efforts to train the next generation of leaders and ensure educational equity in the nation’s big-city school districts.”

In an interview, Hinojosa discussed his 27 years of leadership and his desire to share his expertise with other superintendents. He also had tough words for charter schools, discussed the “pitfalls of big urban systems,” and recounted the controversy that drew protesters to his house (It wasn’t mask mandates or critical race theory).

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

����Ӱ��: Why did you leave six months before originally planned? 

Michael Hinojosa: There’s never a right time. I love being superintendent. I love the city, and I love the district. But I finally had an epiphany. I could do this to the end of my contract in 2024, but I couldn’t do it for another 10 years. I was being selfish. I didn’t want to be just some guy chasing some kind of record. I’ve seen too many people hang on too long, and they ruined the good they did. I didn’t want to be that guy.

There was an expectation that Susana Cordova [who left the superintendent’s job in Denver to become deputy in Dallas in 2021] would be your successor. But that job went to Stephanie Elizalde. What happened there? 

The board put in my contract to bring in somebody for a succession plan, and I chose Susana. I told her from the beginning that I don’t get to make this decision. She knew that on the front end. The board gets to hire the person they want, and they were very fortunate they had two great candidates, obviously Susanna, and Stephanie, who had worked for me before.

I’ve always argued that if you don’t know Dallas, you can get eaten up alive. They had five superintendents in the 1990s — five superintendents in five years, and went to prison. If you don’t know the pitfalls of big urban systems, and particularly Dallas, then you can really stumble. The board had options, and I thought they both were ready. I was upfront with Susanna, but it was a bit of a surprise to me that she didn’t get that opportunity.

What makes Dallas unique? 

It’s had a history of and you have some very strong, powerful stakeholders. Some of the previous superintendents did some things that were . Everybody was upset and they deserved to be. Performance was not good, so there was very little trust. 

In big cities, you deal with the media, and even though Texas is a right-to-work state, you’ve got to work with labor. If you don’t know the players in the community, that can eat you alive. Not every district is like that, but Dallas is. Now, we’ve had some stability. I was there for 13 years over two terms. Dr. Elizalde knows the community. She was there for five years, so she understands where the landmines are. 

Would you consider a run for mayor in the future? 

I am keeping all options open. The only thing I have going against me is that I am 66 years old but as healthy as ever.

How much did the political battles of the past two years influence your decision to leave the district?

None at all. In fact, I don’t get stressed. I give stress. I’m a carrier. I love being in the fight, and I enjoyed every bit of that. First of all, there was the pandemic. In Dallas, we also had . Other people [in Texas] have had hurricanes, and then you have the cultural wars. As urban superintendents, we’re used to taking the heat, but that’s not true in the suburbs. In fact, now I’m consulting with the Council of the Great City Schools and out of their 77 members, only 20 of them have been in the chair since 2020.

They’ve got all these people lined up, yelling at the school board, yelling at the superintendent.

You’ll be a superintendent-in-residence with the Council. Can you describe your role a little more?  

Since so many superintendents are brand new, there’s going to be a great need out there. One superintendent may need operational help. We’ll have someone who has that expertise. A lot of them may need instructional help. A lot of them have never dealt with school boards. We’re going to have a variety of tools that can help superintendents have a fighting chance to be successful in this environment.

You worked with Engage2Learn in Dallas, and now you’re going to be consulting with them. What did they help you accomplish?

People want problem solvers. They don’t want whiners, so if you don’t have the capacity, you’ve got to have someone help you do it. That’s why I’ve taken these opportunities. Even with the talented team I had in Dallas, there were things we couldn’t pull off. Engage2Learn helped us develop a long-range technology plan. That was the backbone for our bond program. Engage2Learn helped us talk to people — students, staff, community members. They synthesized all that information and put it together into something that was actionable for us. 

We have a partnership with Apple to redesign all of our libraries to look just like Apple stores. They’re going to do 50 schools a year over the next four years, and the goal is to make the library the center of traffic for students and community members. Engage2Learn was able to pull in people to help develop and execute on those plans.

The third thing they helped us with is (an improvement initiative focused on middle schools). We’ve done great with our high schools because of our (a STEM-focused program in which students can earn a postsecondary degree or certificate while still in high school). We’re doing very well with our elementary schools, but our last frontier was middle school achievement. Parents make decisions from grades four to eight, and they’re going to vote with their feet. One time I asked leaders, “What’s our best middle school?” And it was like crickets in the room. 

On the library redesign, did you get any pushback from librarians?

Some of our principals quit using the libraries, and then they traded in the librarian for another instructional coach or the assistant principal. This is bringing the librarians back. They’ve had to rethink how they do business, but it’s gotten them very excited about the library. Even the principals that gave up librarians now want librarians because it’s going to be a way-cool model. 

I’m sure with all these superintendents you’re going to be coaching, the topic of enrollment loss and how to attract families into district schools will come up. Talk about your work in Dallas to reverse that trend.

We had this mantra that if you had 300 students or less in your school, you were on the endangered species list. People aren’t picking you. Some Democrats whine about charter schools. I’m not a fan of charter schools. I’m a fan of great schools. I just don’t happen to think that many charter schools are great schools. We have more capacity, we have more intellect, we have more horsepower. We need to beat the charters at their own game and provide Montessori schools, STEM schools, single-gender schools, biomedical schools. 

We have a northern suburb, and every year, we would lose about 75 students to them and we would gain about 75 students from them because they went to our specialty magnet schools. This last year, during the pandemic, we lost about 60 kids to them, but we gained 500 kids from that school district. We stopped the hemorrhaging.

Those are some tough statements about charter schools. Is that just your experience or your view of charters in general?

We don’t get to pick our kids. We take all of God’s children. That’s my belief system, but I don’t whine about them. I just try to beat them at their own game. 

What was the roughest period you went through as superintendent?

The low point was 2008 when I had to lay off 1,000 teachers. Luckily, the board let me stay. I told him they could have fired me, but I said, “If you fire me, then you’re going to argue for six months about who’s going to be the interim. You’re going to argue for six months about who’s going to do the search. You’re going to argue for six months over who’s going to get the job. I could solve this thing in nine months.”

In fact, we re-hired 600 of the 1,000 teachers that were laid off. We just had to make sure we were solvent. I didn’t eat for two months until we figured it out. I had to go face the music. People were protesting at my house. It had an impact on my family, but I was very blessed that the board let me stay. And then when I left, they brought me back.

That was a lower point than the pandemic and your conflict with the governor?

The pandemic was tough, and we didn’t have a playbook, but that’s what leaders do. Leaders step up in a crisis. The board criticized me a little bit because they were finding out about stuff on CNN. So the next time I took on the governor, I had to step back, pause, and call every board member and tell them what I was about to do.

Command decisions are easy to make, and hard to implement, and consensus decisions are messy. They take a long time, but the implementation is much deeper. When you’re in a crisis, you’ve got to make command decisions, but you also still need to inform people of why you’re making these decisions.

“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 .

“T���re 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.”

Students won’t have to quarantine or take a COVID test to attend school if they were exposed to someone who tested positive, according to  from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released Thursday. The guidance is in line with a version leaked last week.

Students also won’t have to stay in groups, called cohorting, which was intended to limit transmission and make contact tracing easier. And schools are no longer urged to conduct screening tests of students participating in “high-risk” activities, such as contact sports, band or theater. 

Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said the new recommendations allow families and educators to “head back to school this year with a sense of joy and optimism.” 

But Leah Perkinson, director of research translation and evaluation at Brown University School of Public Health, said it’s important not to forget lessons learned over the past two years. 

“A lot of schools [and] districts might be relieved to turn the screening testing corner if it means that teachers, leaders and staff focus more on the social, emotional and learning needs of students,” she said. “But we’d be remiss if we didn’t take time to look in the rearview mirror and document what worked [and] what didn’t … when we need to stand up school-based testing again.”

Quarantine rules last school year may have prevented COVID from spreading, but they also contributed to high absenteeism, with some students sent home multiple times because they were a “close contact” of someone who tested positive.

Students missed an average of 15 days between September and January alone due to quarantines, according to But now, after more than two years of disrupted learning, new guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention could keep more students in the classroom.

The agency is expected to update its recommendations to say that those who are unvaccinated can continue to attend school if they wear a mask and test negative five days later, according to multiple news outlets, including and . recommends that those not up-to-date on vaccinations stay home for five days after coming in contact with someone who tested positive. 

“Since the beginning of the pandemic, [messaging] has mostly focused on encouraging students to stay home as a strategy for keeping healthy,” said Hedy Chang, executive director of Attendance Works, a research and advocacy organization. “We think a more balanced approach would be to emphasize that showing up to school matters for health, well-being and learning.”

The guidance would reflect the direction that many states and districts were already moving toward, noted John Bailey, a strategic adviser at the Walton Family Foundation who has monitored COVID policy since the beginning of the pandemic. In July, for example, said students exposed to the disease don’t need to quarantine if they lack symptoms. Many districts aren’t requiring masks this fall, and recently backed off last year’s strict protocols involving daily health declarations and weekly testing. By next week, of the nation’s students will be back in school, according to Burbio, a data company.

“T��� CDC should have released updated guidance in June or July to give schools time to adjust their plans and preparations,” Bailey said. “Releasing it this late creates needless frustration and confusion, which just further erodes confidence in both the CDC and administration.” 

Critics have pointed to multiple lapses at the agency since the beginning of the pandemic, such as allowing teachers unions to heavily influence guidance for schools and fumbling updates to mask recommendations for early-childhood programs.

Some experts think it would have been difficult to start the new school year enforcing the same protocols school districts implemented before — like masking and frequent testing. That’s despite a highly contagious BA.5 variant, being in the high transmission range, and among young children and .

“T��� problem is that these comprehensive efforts are meeting two powerful forces — exhaustion and apathy from the American people, and the clash of politics and public health in ways I’ve never seen in my lifetime,” said John Bridgeland, founder and CEO of COVID Collaborative, a team of experts that has provided recommendations throughout the pandemic. 

Quarantine policies also contributed to a lack of academic progress last year even at a time when students were back in school, researchers with NWEA, a nonprofit assessment organization, said when they released their latest results in July.

Parents complained about inconsistent rules. Some also violated them. In California’s , last year, parents knowingly sent a child who had tested positive to school. And three with zip ties threatened a citizen’s arrest on a principal last fall when the administrator told one of them his child had been identified as a close contact and would need to quarantine. They were charged with criminal trespassing. 

“I think that school will be much more ‘normal’ than it was even last year,” said Annette Anderson, an education professor at Johns Hopkins University and deputy director of the Center for Safe and Healthy Schools. 

‘Seem appropriate’

District leaders certainly hope so.

“Attendance rates had never been lower, and certainly impacted student learning,” said Tony Sanders, superintendent of School District U-46, outside Chicago. “T��� significant drops in attendance always correlated with spikes in COVID cases, mostly following periods when students were on break.”

The week after winter break, when the Omicron variant was prevalent, attendance fell to 72% in the district.

As the new school year begins, some districts are dropping all COVID protocols, according to .

Some parents, however, still want reassurances that schools will take precautions to limit exposure. Alexis Rochlin, a Los Angeles parent, said her preschooler was quarantined multiple times last year, “which was a huge pain.”  But she’s comfortable with the county’s . Close contacts are required to mask for 10 days after exposure and test three-to-five days later. Those who test positive can stop quarantining on the sixth day as long as their symptoms improve and they test negative.

“T���se policies seem appropriate to keep kids safe and limit learning loss. Anything less would be concerning to me,” said Rochlin, who also has a son entering second grade. “But we are in a post-COVID world, I guess, where everyone wants to live with it by ignoring it.”

Disclosures: The Walton Family Foundation provides financial support to ����Ӱ��. Andy Rotherham is a member of the Virginia Board of Education and sits on ����Ӱ��’s board of directors. He played no role in the reporting or editing of this story.

A 5-year-old girl whose mother opposes mask mandates refused to wear a mask in kindergarten last year, telling her school principal, “It’s my body, my choice,” according to court records.

The girl’s mother, Kimberly Reicks of Ankeny, is suing the Ankeny Community School District over the mask mandate it had in place in 2020 and 2021. She also is asking the Iowa courts to expunge any record of her own recent arrest on separate charges of criminal mischief.

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Reicks stood at the side of Gov. Kim Reynolds for the May 2021 signing of legislation that effectively outlawed mask mandates in Iowa schools. At the time, she held a sign that included a photo of her daughter, then 5 years old, that read, “My mask caused a staph infection on my face four times. My body, my choice. Unmask Iowa.”

In her lawsuit, Reicks alleges that after she led a protest, at a school board meeting, over the district’s mask mandates, the district retaliated against her by placing her child “in a plexiglass enclosure” at Northeast Elementary School.

The school district’s lawyers say Reicks’ version of what transpired is “selective and devoid of all context.” They allege that the day after Reicks led her protest against the mask policy, her daughter showed up for school and was asked to wear a mask or a face shield. “T��� then-5-year-old outright refused, stating ‘My mom will be mad at me if I wear my mask,’ and, ‘It’s my body, my choice,’” the district claims in court filings.

The district adds that its desk shields, which allowed the girl to remain in the classroom without a face mask or a face shield, were not a “plexiglass enclosure,” but single-panel, clear, vertical shields that had no back, no sides and no top.

“T���y were not enclosed and are much like the transparent barriers we grew accustomed to seeing in retail establishments to provide protection for cashiers and customers,” the school district told the court in a recent filing seeking dismissal of the case.

The district says that before the protest at the school board meeting, Reicks’ daughter, like other students attending Northeast Elementary School, wore a face covering from the beginning of the school year in August 2020, until early December of that year. That’s when Reicks requested a medical exemption and provided a doctor’s note stating her daughter couldn’t wear a mask due to perioral dermatitis.

The district then allowed the girl to sit at a desk with a district-supplied shield on it. When the girl later opted to wear a face mask, a school nurse checked her twice daily to ensure she wasn’t developing a rash, the district says.

Reicks’ position, the district has told the court, appears to be that the school was obligated to allow her daughter “to do whatever she wanted, based on nothing more than a 5-year-old’s say-so. Any elementary school teacher could speak to the absurdity of heeding such demands.”

A judge has yet to rule on the district’s motion to have the case dismissed.

Criminal case may be expunged

Separate from the civil lawsuit, Reicks was involved in a now-dismissed criminal court case that stemmed from her arrest by Ankeny police in March.

According to police records, at about 3 a.m. on March 6, Reicks and one of her adult daughters were seen by two people intentionally damaging the property of Brody Fleming at Fleming’s Ankeny home. After allegedly causing about $800 in damage to Fleming’s clothing and mattress, Reicks allegedly told the witnesses, “You can tell the cops I did this.”

She was later charged with third-degree criminal mischief, an aggravated misdemeanor, and a no-contact order was issued barring Reicks from having any contact with Fleming.

On June 28, a Polk County prosecutor asked the court to dismiss the case, noting that Fleming had asked that the charges be dropped. The case was dismissed and the no-contact order was lifted.

Earlier this week, Reicks’ attorney, Alan Ostergen of the Kirkwood Institute, a self-described “conservative public-interest law firm,” petitioned the court to expunge any record of the criminal case.

Reicks said Friday that Fleming is the ex-boyfriend of one of one of her adult daughters.

“T���y had broken up and I went to go pick her up at his house,” she said, adding that she didn’t damage any property as witnesses claimed. “This actually will be wiped completely off my record.”

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Iowa Capital Dispatch maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Kathie Obradovich for questions: info@iowacapitaldispatch.com. Follow Iowa Capital Dispatch on and .

He was a senior at Colorado State University and worked as chair of All The T.E.A. in Denver, an organization focused on HIV education and advocacy. Would the new outcry over teaching critical race theory — originally an academic framework used to understand structural racism, now a GOP catch-all for lessons addressing race, sex and gender — interfere with his team’s access to schools, he wondered?

“A lot of [our] historical work has been going into public schools and doing basic sex ed, HIV 101s and talking about how race and LGBT issues intersect with sexual health and with HIV specifically,” said Babcock. “So it was a really scary year to think about the ways that we might end up losing that access in certain counties.”

So far, the group has not been blocked from continuing its work in any districts, said Babcock. But in Fort Collins, his college town, some parents on May 24 against gender and sexuality alliances in local schools, underscoring to Babcock the barriers his organization is up against, especially in areas with large swaths of conservative-leaning parents.

It’s one example out of many students shared of how the hot-button issues facing education this year impacted youth nationwide. With the school year having now drawn to a close, ����Ӱ�� convened members of its Student Council to share how the key K-12 storylines played out in their own lives.

Staffing shortages

For Mia Miron in Pomona, California, staffing shortages impacted her learning. Across the U.S. this past school year, there were more open positions at K-12 schools than during any previous year going back at least a decade, according to . At Miron’s school, her math teacher left early in the year, and from then on, her class was led by a long-term substitute.

“That kind of set me behind,” the eighth grader said.

She now is attending summer classes offered by her school to catch up and prepare for the transition to high school.

Diego Camacho, who recently graduated high school in Los Angeles, also attended a school that was short a math teacher. During his junior year, they were forced to combine the pre-algebra and pre-calculus classes, with students mostly learning from online Khan Academy lessons, he said.

Mental health

Numerous students articulated struggles with mental health. Sydnee Floyd, a high schooler in Franklin, Tennessee, said that during the first year of COVID, she experienced bouts of depression as the pandemic shut down many of her favorite activities. 

To make matters worse, in her community, she felt a stigma around discussing issues like depression or anxiety. 

“It’s kind of like you shove it to the corner and you don’t really talk about it,” she said.

But fortunately, a teacher who, Floyd said, was “like my second mom” picked up on the girl’s troubled state.

“She could tell that I was struggling and she just asked me an honest question. ‘Are you OK?’ And I was like, ‘No, I’m not. I’ve been really struggling,’” Floyd recalled. “So she got in contact with our school counselors, and got me the help I needed.”

In Needham, Massachusetts, Maxwell Surprenant’s school tried to take an honest accounting of the mental health difficulties its student body was facing. The administration carried out anonymous polling during fall 2021 to better understand young people’s stress and anxiety on the heels of COVID. 

“T���y found that our student body was, on the whole, generally more stressed than the average stress level of high school students, but had very few cases of extreme anxiety,” said the high school senior. “Most people reported having resources and people to talk to, friends to reach out to, good support systems.”

At the same time, in his own life, Surprenant deepened several friendships as his school rolled back COVID protocols like mandatory masking. 

Because lockdown had taken away so much, “everyone wanted to make the most of the relationships that they had going forward,” he said.

School safety

Just weeks after the school shooting at Robb Elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, left 19 fourth graders and two teachers dead, several students had school safety at the front of their minds.

Babcock said he personally knows two victims of mass shootings. A friend of his survived the in Douglas County, Colorado, and his older sibling’s close friend died in the of 2012. There’s a psychological impact of proximity to those sorts of tragedies, he explained. 

“It does really make you feel like you always have to look for an exit,” he said. “This year, it was really painful to see that nothing had really changed since my senior year (in high school) when the Parkland shooting had happened.”

At Za’Nia Stinson’s school in Charlotte, North Carolina, a bomb threat this year brought a SWAT team to her school, complete with a bomb-sniffing canine unit. The disruption made her reflect on just how difficult it would be to learn in an environment where such threats are more common. 

“It’s so sad that someone goes to school to learn and has to worry about, ‘Will this be my last day or not?’” said Stinson.

Missing school

High rates of absenteeism plagued school districts across the country this year, as students missed class due to quarantine and poverty-related issues exacerbated by the pandemic, such as needing to work part-time jobs. 

In Floyd’s Tennessee district, she reported that a bunch of her peers “kind of just gave up on school.” By her estimation, more people were absent than usual throughout the year, but not necessarily because of COVID — instead taking days off “to live their life a little bit more.” 

“T���y kind of just went and did what they wanted to after being kind of locked down for two years,” said Floyd.

For Joshua Oh, who just finished eighth grade in Gambrills, Maryland, many of his peers struggled to stay up to date with their coursework after testing positive for COVID and being forced to quarantine. He personally caught the virus over winter break when he wouldn’t fall behind in school, but infections went up this past spring amid the second Omicron surge.

“A lot of people’s grades have tanked … and the teachers haven’t really exempted them from grades,” he said. “For friends, they’ve had to either email teachers or just have a low grade or just try to get extra credit or re-do [assignments] and get a late work [penalty], which deducts a couple points.”

Devin Walton, a rising high school sophomore in South Torrance, California also struggled with missing school. But in a reminder that normal teenage life events also continued through the pandemic, his absences had nothing to do with COVID.

“I would sleep almost the entire day and whenever I did wake up, I would just go eat something and then go back to sleep. And my mom was getting worried about me because she thought I was sick or I was depressed,” Walton explained. “But it turns out, I was just going through a major growth spurt and I was getting really tired.”

Paths forward

Most of the young people on the council agreed that life is still not fully back to normal after the pandemic, and teachers can be a key support.

“Students right now are really feeling disconnected,” said Babcock. 

It goes a long way when educators find meaningful ways to connect with young people, he believes. 

“Just making sure that, from the first day, teachers are making themselves known as a safe person for a variety of issues, whether it’s bullying, LGBT issues, experiences of race in the classroom,” he said. “T���re are so many ways that you can make yourself open to students.”

Thoughtful personal touches can also have a big impact on improving classroom environment, reflected Mahbuba Sumiya, who finished high school in Detroit with virtual learning and is now a rising sophomore at Harvard University.

“During the remote senior year of high school, some of my teachers would play music in the background while everyone was getting into the meeting to bring the energy,” she said. “T��� small things that educators do inside and outside the classroom to share love mean a lot to students like me.”

Another tactic, suggested Oh, is more hands-on activities in class. At the end of the year, he designed and built a diorama of an environmentally friendly eco-city in his science class, which, he said, allowed him to feel engaged and have fun at the same time.

Educational games that encourage healthy use of phones and laptops, like can also be a good tactic to boost engagement, suggested Stinson of North Carolina.

To make up for time lost to the pandemic, teachers should encourage students to link learning to the real-world issues they care about, suggested Camacho, in L.A.

“Educators that listen to their students will quickly discover what their students are passionate about. Educators, now more than ever, should push students to explore their passions,” he said.

For all COVID robbed them of, Walton observed, it also was a potent reminder to be grateful for the day-to-day interactions that in-person school can bring.

“When I was in lockdown, I thought, ‘Oh yeah you have to stay at home all day, this is going to be a nice long break,’” the California teen said. “And the longer I was at home, I was more like, ‘This is starting to get boring. It’s not as fun as I thought it would be.’”

“T��� more we were in lockdown because of this pandemic virus, the more we realized how much school meant to us.”

Years from now, if Stinson has children one day, she knows what she’ll tell them about living through this extraordinary period.

“I would tell my kids that this was a very crazy time. It was a weird time.”

This story was brought to you via ����Ӱ��’s Student Council initiative, an effort to boost youth voices in our reporting. America’s Promise Alliance helped in the recruiting of our diverse 11-member council and the idea was conceived as part of Asher Lehrer-Small’s Poynter-Koch Media and Journalism Fellowship.

Some, like Joshua Oh, who started sixth grade in 2019-20, never experienced a full year free from virus worry at the campus they’re now leaving. To mark the occasion, we invited a few members of ����Ӱ��’s Student Council who are graduating, including Oh, to take stock of the current moment, reflect on the highs and lows of pandemic schooling and share what they’ve learned along the way.

Joshua Oh, graduating from Crofton Middle School in Gambrills, Maryland

My views on life and school have drastically changed from the start of middle school to my graduation. I was excited about a new school and new people when I first started middle school in sixth grade. I remember being sad that there was no recess and having a completely different group of friends.

That first week is always the most nerve-racking but fun, meeting new people and fitting into groups. As the year went on, I realized how diverse the people were, unlike in elementary school. The kids were racially different and there was less teasing. I found friends that I connected more with and started to drift away from my original friend group. I met new people and got to talk to them every day until the pandemic started. 

At the time, everyone was happy getting a break from school, not knowing how long this break would be. Those two weeks increased from weeks to months until the lockdown started. I would watch the news and be scared that people I know could get COVID and die. I felt like I would be stuck inside forever and the world was falling apart. I had peers around me losing family members and it really scared me when a close friend’s uncle passed away. I was afraid the same thing could happen to the people I care about.

I was happy playing video games and doing nothing, but virtual school started a short time later. It felt like the first day of school again, but communication with everyone had stopped. The rest of the year was easy, with little teaching and easy assignments. 

The school system used summer break to fix virtual learning, and when the new school year started, we got actual work. There were no requirements for camera use during class, so nobody used them. Nobody knew what each other looked like, making it difficult to break the ice. At the time, I didn’t have much communication with my friends except through video games. I lost a couple and gained a few friends, but this was a low point in my middle school career. 

Things started to get easier when hybrid learning was introduced, although optional. I was one of the few to pick this and got to make new friends. I didn’t learn much from this year, but it is something I will never forget. Restrictions started to decrease during that summer, and I hung out with my friends more. When the new school year started, in-person learning was required, along with masks. School started to feel normal again, and masks became optional. As the year went on, COVID faded from the news. It felt like COVID was gone and as if a dark cloud was lifted from everyone’s head.

I’m now in the last month of middle school, and it feels surreal that it’s all ending. In sixth grade, I thought middle school would be fun and would last a while, but it is almost over. I have changed a lot from the start of sixth grade to the end of eighth grade. I skipped a year where many things changed, including me, and I don’t get excited about the same things. I used to be insanely happy about things like Christmas and Halloween, but COVID has made me care about other things like time with friends and family. 

I hope in high school COVID won’t cloud my thoughts and I want to spend more time having fun with friends. It feels like COVID is attached to middle school and high school will be a fresh start. COVID will affect my future challenges by helping me realize that these problems are small. I know that I have overcome a huge obstacle and am much stronger and more resilient than I was before. The pandemic has taught me how to adapt when situations like these occur and changed who I am.

Diego Camacho, graduating from Collegiate Charter High School in Los Angeles, California

There is a strange connection between journalism and physics. At their very best, both subjects seek to expose an objective, unyielding truth. That concept, the search for reality, has motivated all my academic endeavors. 

But, unfortunately, COVID limited my high school’s ability to offer avenues for exploring the two subjects I love so much.

Whatever underlying issues were present at my school were exacerbated by the pandemic. With a small campus and student body of 200, certain problems can become more prominent than in larger schools. The resignation of a teacher, for example, may mean the loss of an entire class for the remainder of the year. Course offerings one year may be very different from the previous years. 

My school once had a physics class. After talking with the school about the possibility of taking AP Physics for my junior year, I learned the school no longer offered it and only allowed two AP classes per student, per year, assigned based on grade. Thankfully, dual-enrollment at East Los Angeles Community College allowed me to take classes the school was unable to offer.

Many educators I had the pleasure of meeting my sophomore year left the following year. We lost our PE/biology teacher, an English teacher, our enrichment coordinator and a mathematics teacher, among quite a few others. For a small school, this was incredibly difficult. On top of that, our principal resigned that summer. Since then, the school has had many temporary principals. That looming, hectic uncertainty affected students’ ability to plan ahead.

Without a mathematics teacher, the school had to combine their pre-algebra and pre-calculus courses. Seniors and juniors shared a Zoom call, relying on Khan Academy’s free online courses rather than live teaching. 

With in-person learning for senior year, I asked for an exemption to my school’s two AP class policy, hoping to stuff my senior schedule full. My school counselor was unable to grant me the exemption.

Although I did not have many STEM opportunities at my high school, my passion for physics and journalism never waivered. COVID, teacher shortages, and strict policies were stepping stones to greater things. There are countless avenues for discovery, learning and growth outside of school. From dual enrollment at your local community college, to student research, to internship opportunities at the L.A. Times, genuine passions can’t be quelled. 

Currently, I am preparing for a gap year of learning, project-finishing and internship-taking before I make a college commitment. Now, with the conclusion of my senior year, I am optimistic that future graduating classes at my former school will not face the COVID-related challenges I did.

Kota Babcock, graduate of Colorado State University in Fort Collins, Colorado

After eight jam-packed semesters at CSU, I walked across the stage and received my diploma on May 13. It’s only been about a month since then, but already, leaving behind my identity as a student has been harder than I expected. 

With each exam, I found myself craving the freedom from homework, on-campus jobs and the stress of student life. As I now walk away, it’s strange to think that for the first time since I was 5  years old, I cannot call myself a student.

While in undergrad, I was deeply involved in HIV and LGBTQ activism. As the chair of All The T.E.A. (Teach, Empower, Advocate), I drove over an hour from Fort Collins to Denver to coordinate workshops, attend local community conferences and to meet with the activists who taught me everything I know. My efforts with All The T.E.A. shaped my interest in fighting antisemitism on campus and in advocating for the full inclusion of minority students at Colorado State. 

I also worked as KCSU-FM’s news director and as the Rocky Mountain Collegian’s arts and culture director, interviewing a variety of musicians, small business owners and other notable locals. 

I’m fortunate enough to have found a job right away as a general assignment reporter at a local Wyoming newspaper, the Laramie Boomerang. But striking the balance with continuing my activism work now presents a new challenge. 

I still make my way to Denver each month (sometimes virtually) to work toward the same goal All The T.E.A. has worked toward since I was in middle school: empowering people living with HIV and advocating for a better future for all people impacted by HIV. A difficulty we faced since 2020 continues to plague the organization, as COVID-19 made it nearly impossible for people to consider HIV an urgent enough public health and social justice issue to volunteer their time to. As our organization moves toward the future, we’re building partnerships to continue offering educational resources, free HIV testing, a shared community and more. 

As for life in Laramie, it’s much different than the experiences I had growing up in Denver, although somewhat similar to the college town I spent the last four years in. Shopping options are a bit scarce, as are easy-to-find LGBTQ spaces for non-students compared to any city in Colorado. Despite Wyoming not having a single gay bar, the aftermath of pushed forward intense change in the small city. When Shepard attended the University of Wyoming in Laramie in 1998, two men from the city beat Shepard and left him for dead outside of town, and Shepard later died in a Fort Collins hospital. Now, most of downtown Laramie is covered in gay or transgender pride flags, and the city recently celebrated its sixth annual pride festival. The story of Shepard haunted me in my youth, especially as my friends and I dealt with anti-gay bullies throughout middle school just over 100 miles south. His death deeply impacted the local communities in both Colorado and Wyoming, and it served as a warning to openly LGBTQ people throughout my pre-teen and teenage years. Fort Collins, it seems to me, has largely moved on while Laramie remains mournful. 

Looking back on my career as a student, I sometimes grieve what the pandemic took from me — my study abroad plans were canceled twice — but I also reflect on what I’ve learned. Student media taught me to stand up as loudly as possible for change. From my coursework to my two on-campus jobs and my work with the Hillel Jewish Center at CSU, I learned that to survive as a minority in any space that marginalizes your experiences, you must be as loud as you can be. 

While I never went into journalism with the intent of uncovering secrets or exposing corruption, I did go into it knowing that people in powerful places don’t typically want social change or transparency, and fighting back against that is my goal in everything I do. As I move into my adult life, I won’t forget this lesson and I hope that incoming college students can understand this as well.

This story was brought to you via ����Ӱ��’s Student Council initiative, an effort to boost youth voices in our reporting. America’s Promise Alliance helped in the recruiting of our diverse 11-member council and the idea was conceived as part of Asher Lehrer-Small’s Poynter-Koch Media and Journalism Fellowship.

It’s a major boost in efficacy compared to data from Moderna, which announced in March that its two-dose regimen is 51% protective in toddlers 6 months to 2 years old and 37% protective in youngsters 3 to 6 years old.��

Researchers believe both vaccines offer a strong defense against severe illness and hospitalization in the age group.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration on Monday its vaccine advisory committee will meet June 15 to review Moderna’s and Pfizer-BioNTech’s emergency use authorization requests for kids ages 6 months to 5 years old and 6 months to 4 years old, respectively. Pfizer and BioNTech have not yet submitted an EUA request, but plan to do so by the end of the week, BioNTech CEO Ugur Sahin said in a .

The agency’s advisory committee will make a recommendation on whether to approve the shots at the end of the meeting, which the FDA typically follows. Many experts hope the agency will greenlight shots soon after the mid-June meeting.

“I have some optimism that this will go well at [the] FDA advisory meeting and we might begin immunizing under 5 beginning next month,” Peter Hotez, co-director of Texas Children’s Hospital’s Center for Vaccine Development, wrote on .

Children under 5 years old remain the last Americans without access to COVID vaccines, and parents are eager to protect their children, especially as cases once again rise, said Atlanta-based pediatrician Jennifer Shu.��

On Monday, as the Pfizer news was announced, multiple parents of young children asked whether they could get their kids on a waiting list for the forthcoming vaccines.

“I assure them that we will make availability for everyone who wants [the shots],” said Shu, explaining that her practice has received ample pediatric vaccine supply every time they have placed an order. “I don’t think that access is going to be an issue.”

The news from Pfizer and BioNTech comes on the heels of a months-long saga that has repeatedly raised the hopes of parents anxious to vaccinate their toddlers against COVID only to later send them crashing down. In late February, Pfizer-BioNTech first submitted a request asking the FDA to grant emergency authorization for a two-dose regimen of their vaccine for children 6 months to 4 years old, only to then withdraw the application just five days later.��

Then in April, when Moderna was on the verge of submitting its EUA application for the age group, that the FDA might postpone the review process until Pfizer’s shots were also ready, a reveal that angered many parents and spurred a congressional letter asking the agency to explain the reported delay. The announcement of the June 15 committee meeting appears to confirm those speculations of a simultaneous review.

The trial results released Monday clarified what experts have hinted at since February — that Pfizer’s two-dose regimen never offered the full intended protectiveness for young children.

“It was always a three-dose vaccine,” said Hotez.

The news comes as reported U.S. coronavirus cases are up 53% since two weeks ago and youth infections are also rising, though less steeply. With the increased prevalence of at-home testing, those numbers may fail to capture the full scope of new case totals, said Shu.

During the winter’s massive Omicron surge, children under 5 were hospitalized with the virus at five times the rate they were during the Delta surge, a from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently found. And in February, the agency’s data revealed that kids under 18 had been infected by the virus.

Still, repeat infections remain a threat, and can happen of each other. Children who have not yet been vaccinated are more likely to get sick and, in turn, more likely to experience severe outcomes than immunized peers, said Shu.

“T��� kids who are ending up in the hospital are more likely not to be vaccinated,” she told ����Ӱ��.

Just 28% of children 5 to 11 years old and 58% of youth 12 to 17 years old have received two vaccine doses, rates that have remained nearly stagnant for months.

Aside from recommending that kids roll up their sleeves as soon as they’re eligible, the pediatrician believes schools should consider reinstating universal face-covering rules while infections multiply. While a few schools and districts have made that jump, the vast majority continue to keep masks optional, though some have upped their language recommending masks.��

Shu, however, knows of some children who have chosen to mask up at school as they’ve watched their peers get sick. It’s prom and graduation season, the pediatrician noted, and young people don’t want to miss out.

“If you miss some of these things, you can’t make them up,” said Shu.

During a hearing Tuesday in Boone County Circuit Court, assistant attorney general James Atkins said the new cases would involve districts that have policies triggered by the number of students who are ill or by the prevalence of cases in their communities.

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Schmitt’s office is to districts seeking justification for the policies and warning them that local agencies have no authority to issue public health orders.��

“Every time a mask goes on a kid, the attorney general is going to look at filing another lawsuit,” Atkins told Circuit Judge Josh Devine, who was hearing arguments over the ongoing case .

Classes will end in a few weeks in most districts across the state. In January, classwork resumed after the Christmas break as daily COVID-19 cases were peaking at 12,000 cases per day. That month, Schmitt filed 47 cases with mask mandates.

Cases fell to their lowest levels since June 2020 in the second week of April, and most of the lawsuits have been dismissed as the district mask mandates were removed. Many cases have been dismissed at Schmitt’s request and critics have accused him of filing them to generate headlines in the competitive .��

The lawsuits cost Schmitt a House-approved increase of $500,000 for his office’s budget, stripped out in the Senate Appropriations Committee, by Sen. Lincoln Hough, R-Springfield, who complained Schmitt had sued “most of the citizens of this state.”

Some schools are re-imposing mask mandates because COVID-19 cases have increased to about four times the level of mid-April. In the most recent data, reported last week by the state Department of Health and Senior Services, cases were .

The Columbia district Feb. 10 and is seeking to dismiss the lawsuit. Schmitt opposes dismissal because the district policy, Atkins said, would allow the mask rule to be reinstated without a new vote from the Columbia Board of Education.

Devine heard arguments for more than 2½ hours Tuesday. He gave the attorneys two weeks to file post-hearing briefs and said he would likely take as much as 15 additional days to reach a decision.

The case is scheduled for a trial in October but that date could be pushed back, Devine said.��

The Columbia schools attorneys, Natalie Hoernschemeyer and Grant Wiens, argued two separate reasons for seeking dismissal — that the case is moot because the district is not currently requiring masks and that the case should be dismissed because Schmitt is misapplying the law.

“If there is no live controversy, the court has no authority,” Hoernschemeyer said.��

Devine questioned Hoernschemeyer about whether masks could be required in the future and if the requirement was dropped to avoid a court reckoning.��

All of the decisions about whether the district students must wear masks have been based on the advice of health authorities and the prevalence of COVID-19 in the community, Hoernschemeyer replied.

“To say there will be masking in the future is purely speculative,” Hoernschemeyer said.

Of the 47 lawsuits, . Along with the Columbia case, the other active cases are against Lee’s Summit School District, which has filed a counterclaim asking a judge to declare the attorney general overstepped the limits of his authority, and University City Public Schools, which requires masks in classrooms.

A case against St. Charles Public Schools was dismissed May 5 by Circuit Judge Daniel Pelikan, because the district was not requiring masks.

Columbia Public Schools was the first to be over its mask rules. In September a Boone County Circuit Court judge declined to allow Schmitt to use the against all districts with mask requirements, and it was later dismissed by Schmitt when the district allowed its mask mandate to expire.

If Schmitt was serious about testing whether the law allows districts to require masks, he could have continued the original case against Columbia schools, Hoernschemeyer said.��

“If they truly wanted this case litigated, they have had a year,” she said.

Devine asked Atkins why it wouldn’t be better to wait for a decision in the University City case, where the mask issue “is more of a live controversy.”

A decision in St. Louis County would not be binding on Columbia schools, Atkins replied. He also argued that districts were dropping masks to get cases dismissed.

“Every time we get into the courthouse these mask mandates drop and the case is mooted and dismissed,” he said.

The other argument for dismissing the case — that Schmitt lacks the authority for his lawsuits — hinges on whether school mask mandates are public health orders as defined in state law and whether the law governing health orders includes school districts in the definition of political subdivisions.

Schmitt asked lawmakers to change state law this year to , but it failed in the legislative session that concluded last week.��The legislation was noted in Tuesday’s court hearings but not discussed extensively.

The orders have no impact outside school buildings and are an “internal safety protocol,” Wiens said.

Michael Talent, an assistant attorney general who argued on the issue of health orders, said the orders clearly address health issues. They also exceed the powers granted to districts to prevent sick children from attending school, he said.

Masks do not work to prevent the spread of disease and wearing them causes “psychological harm to students,” Talent argued Tuesday.

COVID-19 for most children is no worse than seasonal flu, Talent told Devine.��

“For most people, except for the old and very frail,” he said, “it is not really a disease to be scared of.”

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Missouri Independent maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jason Hancock for questions: info@missouriindependent.com. Follow Missouri Independent on and .

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, “​​encouraging 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. 

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

Delta was causing cases to spike, and the schools where many Head Start programs are housed typically had mask mandates in place. 

But in February, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention revised its guidance to reflect lower transmission rates. Mask rules for young children, the CDC said, should be the same as those for the general population.

Now Coyne, a Head Start director in the Boulder area, is confused. “Head Start feels like the lone place where masks are required,” she said. “For staff, it feels really out of context.”

Members of Congress, including several Democrats, agree.

Earlier this month, the Senate approved that would “disapprove” the rule, essentially wiping it off the books. was introduced last month in the House, but it’s unclear if action will be taken soon. The White House said President Joe Biden won’t sign it. Officials say the mandate — which even requires staff and children to wear masks outside — gives parents “additional confidence” that their children are safe and protects infants and toddlers in Early Head Start programs who can’t wear masks. It’s also necessary, they argue, because a vaccine for young children has yet to be approved.

“Parents of children under 5 are in a really difficult position right now. They don’t have the choice to vaccinate their children, so they are dependent on the adults who care for them to do everything they can to continue protecting them,” Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, a Democrat and chair of the education committee, said before the May 3 vote. 

She opposed the resolution, saying it would permanently hamstring the administration’s ability to mandate masks and vaccines in Head Start in the event of a new,dangerous variant or a future pandemic. , in fact, have reinstated mask mandates or are strongly urging students to mask because cases are rising.

Once a vaccine is available for younger children she said it could make sense to revisit the rule, “but we are not there yet.”

Both Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech have asked the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to approve their vaccines for younger children. Reviews were scheduled for , but the governors of Colorado and Massachusetts have to act sooner. 

South Dakota Republican Sen. John Thune, who sponsored the resolution, suggested that if Biden can on immigration along the southern border, he should do so for young children. 

“T��� scientific evidence for masking toddlers is shaky at best,” he said on the Senate floor, citing the World Health Organization against masking children under 6 and that masks inhibit language and social skills. Children also face of serious illness from COVID, studies show. 

Researchers, however, have found that masks on preschoolers interfere with their development. 

Meanwhile, half the states don’t have to follow the rule because in two cases blocked it. That leaves the rest of the country in limbo.

“It’s messy, it’s tricky, and that’s why we go back to Head Start roots — locally driven with high standards,” said Tommy Sheridan, deputy director of the National Head Start Association, which represents both families and programs. The rule, he said, is making it hard to hire staff. “T��� administration knows this is something that needs to change.”

In December, the association asking for waivers from the rule or solutions that “balance safety with local circumstances.”

David White, CEO of WNCSource Community Services, a Head Start grantee serving four North Carolina counties in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, estimates that his centers have lost about 25 of their 220 staff members because of the vaccine mandate. With early-childhood programs already coping with staff shortages, he’s concerned about having enough teachers this fall.

If the vaccine mandate makes it harder to attract and retain staff, and if it “means having closed classrooms because parents don’t like the mask mandate,” he said, “at some point it becomes counterproductive.”

Rosemary Miranda was excited to send her first-grade daughter Isabella to school knowing she will be able to remove her mask after the Los Angeles Unified School District lifted its mask requirement late last month.

“From my perspective with children with disabilities, it’s better because… due to sensory issues they can’t keep it on all the time,” said Miranda, explaining that Isabella’s attention deficit hyperactivity disorder makes the mask uncomfortable and distracting to wear for hours.

Outside Eastman Avenue Elementary School in East Los Angeles, parents and other caregivers offered a range of opinions on LAUSD’s recent decision to make masks “strongly recommended” but no longer required in schools.��

Miranda frequently reminds Isabella, 6, she must continue to sanitize her hands frequently and to be cautious when around other children.��

She is plainly relieved Isabella doesn’t need to mask up all day. “She still wears her mask, but she pulls it down when she needs to, which is great now,” said Miranda.��

At the end of February, Governor Newsom masks would not be required indoors, but still recommended.

But LAUSD’s update of its mask policy took longer than the state and other California schools districts because L.A. Unified had to negotiate an end to the mask with United Teachers Los Angeles.��

The two sides reached a tentative agreement on March 18 to make wearing masks indoors optional for K-12 students and staff. In a of understanding, the two sides agree masks would be “strongly recommended” inside schools, but not required.

“UTLA educators, parents, and our school communities have fought for LAUSD to be the vanguard of health and safety in public education across the nation during this pandemic — an accomplishment due in large part to the weekly testing program and the strong safety protocols we’ve bargained with the district,” UTLA president, Myart-Cruz said in a. “As we monitor the trajectory of the virus, we will continue to put health and safety first.”

Grandmothers Marina and Estella, who asked their last names not be used, said they feel more confident in sending them to school wearing their masks.��

“It’s much safer for the kids to keep their masks on,” said Marina, as she picked up her grandchildren at Eastman Avenue Elementary School. “Sometimes a lot of parents will know their kids are sick and send them to school like that without thinking about everyone else.”

Estella said she understands how frustrating wearing a mask can be, especially for younger children, but the safety of her grandchildren is her top priority.

“We would also like to not have to wear the mask, and sometimes I won’t have mine on while outside, but it’s not the time to remove them completely yet,” Estella said.

Ana Sanchez, a mother of two LAUSD students, said she is not yet ready to remove her kids’ masks.

“[My son] has talked to me about the mask being optional but he said he’s going to keep his on until [the pandemic] calms down,” Sanchez said. “He just feels more secure by wearing the mask when inside of class.”

In a statement released on March 18, LAUSD superintendent Alberto Carvalho shared his enthusiasm for the change.��

“I strongly support ending the indoor mask requirement and am committed to continuing to uphold our science-based approach to COVID-19 safety and protocols,” Carvalho said.

“We know some in our school communities and offices will continue to wear masks, while others may not. Please consider your situation and do what is best for you or your child.”

Weekly testing for students and staff will still be required. If COVID-19 conditions worsen, UTLA and LAUSD will meet again to change safety protocols as necessary.

Destiny Torres is a graduate student at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism pursuing a master of science degree in journalism. She earned her bachelor’s degree at CSU Dominguez Hills. She is passionate about culture and social justice issues.

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. “T���y 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. “T��� CDC is having trouble updating its website so they reach out to Emily Oster?”

“T���ir 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.

“T���y weren’t like, ‘Oh, by the way, it would be great if you could share with people this information,’” Oster told ����Ӱ��. “T���y 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.”

“T���re 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?”

“T��� 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.

“T���re 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.

Alberto Carvalho, who took over as superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District just two weeks ago, wasted little time in setting ambitious goals for his new administration. In a unveiled last week, he said he would focus on academic recovery and consider shifting funds from the district’s expensive COVID testing program to pay for it. 

He also wants to reduce class sizes, expand early learning and streamline hiring to address staff shortages. The agenda, which he discussed during a virtual welcome reception Thursday, came after an already jam-packed two weeks in which he attended his first school board meeting, met with each one of the district’s union presidents and taught two biology classes. 

The nation is watching whether the success Carvalho had as the 14-year superintendent of the Miami-Dade County Public Schools will follow him to the nation’s second-largest school district. In December, the school board to hire the award-winning leader, with board Vice President Nick Melvoin calling him “the right person to lead L.A. Unified students out of this pandemic into a better future.”

On Friday, he spoke to ����Ӱ�� about his plan to live up to those high expectations. “I’m very optimistic about the possibility in Los Angeles,” he told ����Ӱ��’s Linda Jacobson. “If I wasn’t, I wouldn’t be here. I chose L.A. as much as L.A. chose me. I have never failed. I’ve made mistakes. I’ve erred. I’ve tripped. I’ve fallen, but failure is not in my DNA.” 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

����Ӱ��: Talk a little bit about declining enrollment, which fell by in Los Angeles this year. What’s on your agenda for getting families to come back and attracting new families?

Alberto Carvalho: That’s not unique to L.A., nor New York or Chicago — or most urban centers across America. Affordability has been significantly diminished and wages have not kept pace. That has forced families to move, and when the family moves, they don’t leave the kid behind. There has been significant internal mobility that has shifted membership in and out at the school system. 

Then there is this third arena that really concerns me — families and students that have completely disappeared. Calls have been met with disconnected phone lines and knocks at the door. The neighbor does not know. We are beginning to learn anecdotally that some of these families may have had a fragile immigration status. They made decisions as a result of prior immigration protocols and obviously have not returned. It’s a complex issue. Other parents have pulled students from the public school system and moved to their second home because they could afford a second home and pay for private tuition.

Now the solution: In L.A., if you want choice, you have magnets and you have charters. Then there are district-affiliated charters and independent schools. Whoever decided to restrict choice on the basis of those parameters? There are single-gender schools, career academies. Choice does not need to conform to magnet or charter. Where are the programs in L.A. where we see long waiting lists of parents? Why aren’t we expanding more of those programs to where the demand is?

You’re talking about more of those programs in neighborhood schools?

Correct. Have we done an analysis about the amount of time a child is on the bus to get to that one program that really motivates him or her — that great engineering program, fine arts, performing arts, cybersecurity, robotics, STEAM, STEM, dual language, dual enrollment, International Baccalaureate, Cambridge, whatever?

I can fill an entire wall with a repertoire of options for parents. Why aren’t we offering all of that? L.A. Unified is a much bigger district than Miami. L.A. Unified has about 300 magnet programs. Miami-Dade offers 1,100 choice options. We have work to do. If we don’t do that, we will continue to bleed out students because parents are living in a reality where they have an entitlement to choice. If we don’t do that, it is tantamount to burying our head in the sand as a tsunami of choice washes over us. I choose to ride the top of it. I think it’s better for kids, it’s better for communities, and that is one of the key elements of reenergizing interest in our public school system.

On Friday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention updated its guidance on masking, saying schools can drop mandates when COVID-19 risk is medium or low. Any reaction?

We learned that the state of California and the CDC are relaxing protocols with one significant exception — . But conditions have improved significantly in our community as a function of good weather, but also because of the insistence on vaccination, on masking, on testing. We are waiting now on additional data from the county but also guidance from Sacramento specific to school protocols. One of the elements that we are carefully analyzing right now is the possibility of relaxing testing protocols particularly at the secondary level. It’s a very costly proposition. The frequency and cadence is churning through financial resources.

Do we need to continue to invest at this level? We have an opportunity to reinvest those dollars in educational programs, in tutorial, acceleration and social-emotional programs.

Is that something you think the union would oppose?

We will need to have an open dialogue with the bargaining units. I will not surprise our collective bargaining representatives. But if we are a science-driven district, we follow the science not only when things are getting bad; we also need to follow the science as conditions improve.

Many parents say that they want , especially small-group and one-on-one tutoring. Why was that not spelled out in your 100-day plan?

It was. When I speak about an augmentation of educational opportunities, before and afterschool programming, that is inclusive of tutorial services. When I speak about the concept of year-round schooling opportunities, I’m not singularly speaking about schools being open. I’m speaking about before- and afterschool tutorial services that can be provided by the school system, but also by private entities, not-for-profit entities. When I talk about maximizing these educational opportunities, that’s exactly what I’m describing. It was not ignored. It is actually very much part of the strategy moving forward.

I think when parents hear terms like expanded learning opportunities and afterschool, they just think of large groups. They don’t think that means the high-dosage models that have received a lot of attention.

It’s both and. 

I was struck by how David Turner [manager of ] challenged you on the issue of school police. He said he was disappointed to see the under your tenure in Miami. What is your position on that, considering the Los Angeles district took a last year on redirecting funding from school police officers to improving school climate and the achievement of Black students?

I have inherited a policy position that has reduced the budget and implemented a different methodology of protective actions around schools. Rather than the presence of a school resource officer on campus, it’s more of a mobile unit that provides someone support for safe passage to and from school and is able to rapidly respond to emergencies. That is a decision made by the board, supported by a significant sector of this community. 

Now that we’ve moved in that direction, have we stood up the appropriate personnel, with the appropriate training in schools from a prevention perspective? Have we identified restorative justice practices, been effective at avoiding, preventing and or resolving and managing a crisis that would have otherwise been addressed by a police officer? We’re not there yet.

My concern is that [police] have been removed, and the element that will in a more systemic and more preventive way benefit our kids has not fully been fleshed out. That, too, is part of the 100-day plan.

Alicia Montgomery, executive director of the , watched your presentation and reviewed the plan. She mentioned to me that the school system’s six local districts and all the smaller communities of schools each have their own goals and objectives. She said she has been struck in the past by the “sheer resistance to consistency across the district.” You talked a lot about alignment in your plan. Where would you like to see a more universal approach and where should there be room for autonomy?

I’m a huge believer in the concept of earned autonomy, implementing a model that strikes the appropriate balance, that sweet spot. The board’s equity-driven agenda should be ubiquitous. That requires clear communication, continuous monitoring of student performance, attendance data, critical incidents of absenteeism and a universal guarantee of the appropriate resources. That cannot be left singularly in the hands of local leaders. That said, there is room on the other side of the balance for leadership that works best closer to the school. I do have some concerns where it’s working well versus where it’s not working well.

Can you give an example?

I would rather not. There are many different areas in Los Angeles where local leadership has navigated this balance fairly well. In other areas, it is not as clear to me that the coherence is where it needs to be. 

Your plan mentions creating a collective bargaining strategy, and I know some would like to see a lot more transparency in negotiations with the union. Should that be a more open process?

I’m a huge believer in transparency, so let’s begin there. There is no way that we’re going to maximize opportunities for students through the existing collaboration with labor partners. [We need to be] developing and executing a sound, reasonable strategy that’s based on compensation philosophies that support recruitment and retention of a highly qualified workforce. That’s huge for me. It’s needed for the school system right now. We’re having a difficult time recruiting teachers. Fifty percent of teachers across the country are leaving the profession before retirement. That is shocking and that’s the first time that has happened in the history of our country.

The typical negotiation process begins with management declaring that there is no money and labor providing a list of demands. Sometimes lost in that chasm is the answer to the simple question: What do the kids need and can we rally around a common set of goals? 

I’ve been here about a week now and I’ve had conversations with every single labor president, and I did that in advance of the 100-day plan because I don’t believe in surprises. This work is too complex, too difficult and too important, particularly as we continue to navigate the tail end of this pandemic. That’s going to be my approach to the labor negotiation process that we are rapidly going into.

The U.S. Department of Education recently that they are responsible for providing students with disabilities the services they did not receive during remote learning. Are you evaluating what the district is required to do and have a plan for providing those services?

During the pandemic, students with disabilities were among the most impacted, the most fragile communities of students, and have lost the most ground. We need to start from that perspective. By what means shall we accelerate and where have we fallen short in terms of providing the best educational environments? Where do we need to increase inclusion rates across the district? Where must we contemplate additional improvements for parents of students with disabilities who have maintained them in a virtual environment? Are there opportunities for us to speak with the parents and demonstrate that perhaps the option they selected is not adequately addressing the needs of their children?

This is an ongoing process with the federal government. I am aware of the issue and I’m currently engaged in discussions with federal entities regarding this topic. At the end of the day, this is a fragile community of students and I think we recognize two years into this pandemic some of the detrimental impacts that these students have suffered.

How often will you teach? Do you want to run your own school like you did in Miami?

I have now taught two high school biology classes since I’ve arrived. That’s as much fun as anybody in my position can ask for. I need to remain connected to what happens in schools, at a leadership level, in a supportive role. But if I am to remain real, I need to have access to students through meaningful instructional opportunities. That’s what sustains me. This can be a difficult role, and I don’t know how to do it from the comfort of the ivory tower, or the safety of backstage. I need to be on the edge of that stage, feeling the warmth and the social interaction from students and schools. I’m going to be very active and engaged with school principals, with teachers and in the classroom. It’s actually a topic of negotiation and conversation with my own team, how we make that feasible on a very regular basis.

Finally, when the news hit that you were coming to Los Angeles, I spoke to a long-time parent advocate who said even the most talented leaders have been driven away from this job. I know you said you’re here for the long haul, but what is your reaction to that statement?

Why would anybody want to do this? Because we cannot abandon two elements of America — the importance of public education and the viability of cities and urban education, where the needs are heightened. Are there easier ways of impacting children? You can go be a superintendent of a very affluent, small district where you don’t have that diversity, you don’t have kids who are children of immigrants. 

I think we need to paint a picture of hope. I’m very optimistic about the possibility in Los Angeles. If I wasn’t, I wouldn’t be here. I chose L.A. as much as L.A. chose me. I have never failed. I’ve made mistakes. I’ve erred. I’ve tripped. I’ve fallen, but failure is not in my DNA. When we decide to accept failure for ourselves, we are condemning kids to the same fate, and that’s not me.

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. ​​Of 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. “T��� 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. 

“T��� 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.”

Over the past 700 days, as the pandemic swept the globe disrupting education for millions of children, the district of just 14 schools and 7,109 children regularly provided parents and the community with photos and videos on its social media feeds — determined to capture a range of moments, from the anxiety of those first few days at school to the joy of being with friends and supportive educators.

Tupelo has an “open campus policy,” said district marketing and communications director Gregg Ellis, with parents once freely walking through the schools, showing up to have lunch with their children or meet with teachers. 

Once COVID hit all that changed. Parents were barred from school buildings. Determined to provide parents with some access, Ellis and his team got to work.

“We didn’t want our parents to not know what’s going on at the schools. We still wanted them to get a feel for what was happening,” Ellis said. “We felt we had to amp up our game so that while they were not able to go into the schools … they could still see what their children were doing.

Sometimes that included photos that portrayed anxiety and uncertainty in children. “We didn’t purposely capture them, but there were some tense moments,” said Ellis, “because of the unknown … My philosophy has just been to capture everyday life in the moment of children and teachers interacting.”

Prospective families, and parents with children newly enrolled in Tupelo schools were particularly disadvantaged, unable to attend in-person tours or back-to-school nights.

“Some parents were never inside our buildings for the first two years … They had no idea what their child’s [class]room looks like, what the gyms look like … the music halls, so we wanted them to see and experience that,” Ellis explained.

The city of Tupelo likes to tout itself as the birthplace of Elvis Presley. Fair enough. But the Tupelo school district has had its share of recognition: named Tupelo the best-in-class for photography and web design among school districts in 2020.

“Each high-quality image is full of life and school pride and ensures that the colors in the photos compliment that of the website,” Finalsite’s Mia Major.

During the pandemic, the qualities Finalsite recognized in how Tupelo portrayed school life became a necessity. Soon the district’s social media accounts were filled with posts and photos of school life going on despite the challenges, of tentative students welcomed back by comforting teachers, and unique graduations.

“We decided early on we weren’t going to hide that we’re going to go in and capture kids still engaged, still learning, to show parents who were relying on these images more than ever,” said a Tupelo district’s photographer, Ryan Coon.

New school year begins — With some changes and challenges  

At the start of the 2021-22 school year, with parents barred from entering schools, teachers met their young students outside, taking on the role of comforting first-day nerves.

Parents learn to say goodbye outside schools. 

“I just didn’t want the parents to lose complete sight of what our schools are like,” Gregg said. 

Preparing to go back to class

On the first day of school, teachers from a Tupelo elementary school wore T-shirts that read “Dedicated teacher even from a distance.” “T���y were so positive and uplifting,” said Ellis. 

Teachers were trained to take temperatures with handheld thermometers and social-distance reminders were posted around school buildings. 

“I tell people all the time: The two safest places in Tupelo were the hospital and our school district,” Ellis said. “Because, one, we required masks. We required social distancing. We were cleaning and spraying and fogging after every class.”

To avoid big groups from gathering in the cafeteria, free breakfast was served outside to each student at Milam Elementary School.

Life and learning continues through COVID

Once inside, learning commenced with the addition of a few modifications that took some getting used to.

Even behind masks, body language and eyes can say a lot about the “tense moments … because of the unknown” Ellis referred to.

In the past, Coon said he mainly aimed his camera toward students with big, bright smiles. He said beaming faces were “an obvious statement to the community that said ‘hey, we’re happy, we love it at school.’”

Soon, he realized the importance of zooming in on students’ eyes to capture “Smize” — smiling with eyes. He also relied way more on a classic thumbs-up.

While making his rounds snapping shots of masked-up learners, Coon never heard students complain about wearing them. Other than not seeing their smiles, it was as if they “weren’t even wearing them.”

“I was in classrooms on a daily basis. I never heard kids arguing about masks or upset by them. They just did it” as evident in this photo of two young boys peacefully reading, Coon said.

On picture day, the high school’s therapy dog, Wavely, showed off his protective school spiritwear.

“Wavely has been there to provide an extra boost and extra love for students and staff,” Coon said. “She was training to become [a therapy dog] before COVID … but has been such an added part of helping some students with the anxiety of such a different couple of years.”

During the two years of the pandemic, there were times when it was just teachers in the classroom working remotely. 

Even outside the classroom, school life went on

Although COVID didn’t allow for some of years’ past celebrations, Coon continued to capture other aspects of school life outside of the classroom, from spelling bees to band practice, football games, pre-exam parades, homecoming of a military dad, Halloween, recess and more.

Rather than always telling students to pose for a shot, Coon preferred capturing them engaged with their surroundings.

“It’s just telling a story, and capturing the moments that are happening. I like to show parents photos of their students engaged,” said Coon.

Out with a bang, and a mask

For the class of 2020, graduation was split into four different locations and families were brought in one at a time “basically to have their moment with their child, and then had to leave for the next family and student to come in,” Coon said.

“And then we had a big firework show downtown that could drive by afterwards,” he added.

Ellis recalled receiving many grateful responses from parents for how the district handled graduation for a class that missed out on many other senior year experiences. “T���y said, ‘hey, this is not what we wanted, but you gave my child something special.’”

One mom joked with Ellis about how “cool it was to get that close to the stage and get great pictures.” She couldn’t do that at her older children’s graduation. 

A year later, the Class of 2021 graduated together in one space, with a new addition to the cap and gown outfit — royal blue Tupelo High School masks.

Despite a challenging year, Coon said he was determined to “show people how much goes on in the building and all that the staff and teachers do for these kids.”

Photos by Ryan Coon / Tupelo School District

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.

“T���re’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.”

Conducted by researchers at Yale University, the study — involving more than 6,600 center- and home-based child care providers — showed that masks on children were associated with a 13- to 14 percent reduction in closures, while social distancing of 6 feet reduced the chances of closure by just 7 percent.�� 

With for vaccinations — and shots for those under 5 possibly still —  the study supports experts’ recommendations that children 2 and up wear masks, especially with Omicron still causing frequent outbreaks, the authors wrote in an American Medical Association journal.

At a time when masking continues to incite protests, the findings, they said, “have important public health policy implications for families that rely on child care to sustain employment.” While the spike in cases due to Omicron has led to in centers, masking, the researchers added, can keep programs from having to close.

COVID-19’s impact on child care has had serious ramifications for the nation’s economy and families with young children. Thousands of mothers left the when their children’s programs shut down. About 3 percent of child care centers after lockdowns, according to one analysis, and many lost an important source of playtime and language development.

But requiring young children over 2 to wear masks, as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention currently , is arguably even more controversial than such mandates are for kids in kindergarten and beyond. Opponents argue the masks make it hard for young children to recognize facial expressions and develop language skills, while others say those concerns are unfounded. 

“We know children as young as 2 can safely and consistently wear masks if adults make that a routine expectation,” said Dr. Dean Blumberg, a pediatric infectious disease specialist at the University of California, Davis. He said masks may soon become optional as spring and summer approach, but added it’s important to remember why masks were recommended in the first place. “This was a completely novel virus that nobody had any immunity to,” he said.

The Yale study is different from most because it asked teachers about their masking practices in the spring of 2020 and followed up with the same teachers a year later, said Walter Gilliam, a child psychiatry and psychology professor at Yale and co-author of the paper.

It was also “a much larger study than most and takes into account many different types of programs in a wide variety of communities,” he said. 

Policing mask use

The results, however, come as the COVID-related restrictions of the past two years have started to ease. Some states, for example, no longer recommend contact tracing.

In a Tuesday Washington Post , three physicians wrote that schools should begin to phase out mask mandates. The CDC’s latest guidance, which describes the benefits of  , such as N95s, they wrote, offers a “pathway to compromise” in which those who are at higher risk protect themselves.

“Time and energy that staff spend policing mask use is far better spent on teaching and supporting children,” they wrote, also citing research that of masks on young children’s development, particularly those that might have hearing loss.

The Yale paper addresses concerns that masks may inhibit children’s social and speech skills. The data is “very mixed and any negative impacts on children reading social cues is very small,” Gilliam said. “It’s COVID-19 that’s harmful, not the masks that prevent its spread.”

Blumberg at the University of California added that young children are not with masked adults all of the time and have “plenty of opportunities to develop these language skills and look at people’s lips moving.”

Even so, mask opponents are unlikely to be persuaded to drop their objections, noting that the generally recommends against mask use for children under 5. 

“T��� harmful effects are amplified with young children,” said Sharon McKeeman, founder of Let Them Breathe, a California advocacy group that sued the state over its mask requirement in schools and is backing that defy the state’s indoor mask requirement. “Child care providers are starting to stand up for their rights and Let Them Breathe is here to support them.”

‘Always trying to catch up’ 

California still has a strict indoor mask mandate that includes child care centers. New York, where a judge this week, is another. But in most cases, “parents likely choose programs that align with their beliefs with respect to mask wearing,” because child care centers are generally private businesses and not run by public boards like schools, said Lynette Fraga, CEO of Child Care Aware, a nonprofit that advocates for child care policies and supports local efforts to help families find care.

She noted that while opinions on masking in child care settings are as varied as they are in K-12, requiring masks is relatively inexpensive compared to other mitigation strategies like upgrading ventilation systems or social distancing, which can require more staff and smaller class sizes.

The Yale study showed that in the early months of the pandemic, only 9 percent of centers and child care homes in the sample required children to wear masks, likely representing “highly vigilant programs.” the authors wrote. A year later, about a third of the programs had a mask policy for children. 

One factor that contributes to the pushback against masking children — whether it’s in child care or K-12 — is that families rarely know when the requirement will be lifted, said Benjamin Linas, a Boston University epidemiologist,

With Omicron still prevalent, he agrees that both schools and child care centers should currently require masks as much as possible. Dr. Thomas Murray, the lead author of the Yale study, the increased rate of child hospitalizations associated with Omicron. At the beginning of January, an average of were being admitted to the hospital each day — a pandemic record.

But Linas said families need to know upfront what’s triggering masking rules and what conditions would allow such requirements to lapse. He co-authored last year that includes a tool to guide districts in making such calls. The same process could be used in programs for young children, he said. 

Public health and district officials “typically do not make the goals of masking policy clear,” he said, “and so the policies are inherently stagnant and always trying to catch up.”

Mere weeks ago — though it may feel like a lifetime — K-12 operations seemed to be moving toward something of a pandemic equilibrium. Studies had confirmed that COVID than the surrounding community, children as young as 5 had gained access to vaccinations and, according to the White House, of schools were open for in-person learning.

Then came the Omicron variant, sweeping over the country like a tsunami and plunging nearly all aspects of everyday life back into deep uncertainty.

In the weeks since, daily reported COVID cases in the U.S. have exploded, . More children are being with the virus than ever before. And positivity rates among school communities have reached levels that were previously unheard of: in Chicago, in Yonkers, in Detroit.

While most districts reopened as planned after the holidays, nearly closed their buildings for all or part of the first week of January, according to the data service Burbio. 

Even where classrooms did reopen, many parents chose not to return their children. In New York City, for example, nearly a third of students did not show up on the first day back from break and on Friday when parents were also dealing with a morning snowfall, attendance plummeted to

The unprecedented case numbers usher in a “new math,” in the words of Harvard University infectious disease specialist Jacob Lemieux, for understanding and navigating life as the variant circulates.

“It’s likely that Omicron COVID is going to be so ubiquitous that every child will be exposed repeatedly at school and elsewhere,” Rebecca Wurtz, professor of health policy at the University of Minnesota, told ����Ӱ��.

For many parents, that may be an unnerving reality.

The questions swirl: Do vaccines work against Omicron? How much protection does my child get from a cloth mask? What about an N95? What should I do if my kid tests positive?

The risk calculus can quickly become overwhelming.

Amid the widespread anxiety, and as pandemic fatigue continues to creep, ����Ӱ�� spoke directly to health experts for clarity on how to understand the virus during this latest stage — with many of their takeaways offering reassurance.

Experts also weighed in on hot topics like what masks to wear in school, how to handle positive cases and the recent, controversial move from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to cut its recommended quarantine time for infected individuals from 10 to five days.

Here’s what they had to say:

1 Are schools safe for children right now?

Yes, under the right circumstances, doctors agreed.

“I think for school districts that have a high vaccination rate, I think for school districts that have mandated indoor masking and I think for school districts that have appropriate ventilation and distancing … they’re going to be OK,” Philip Chan, medical director for the Rhode Island Department of Health, told ����Ӱ��.

Numerous academic studies underscore that when schools employ multiple mitigation strategies together — like masks, distancing and ventilation — transmission of the virus happens less frequently in classrooms than in the surrounding community.

“Teachers and students are far more likely to be infected at social gatherings, restaurants, etc. than at school,” George Washington University Professor of Public Health Leana Wen wrote on .

Even as thousands of schools across the country announced closures in the early days of the new year, President Biden implored K-12 leaders to continue in-person learning.

“T��� president couldn’t be clearer: Schools in this country should remain open,” said White House advisor Jeff Zients during a Jan. 5 press briefing.

But school leaders are running into a roadblock: not enough staff due to high shares of K-12 workers testing positive for the virus. Where COVID spread is especially rampant, it may be the right call to take a brief pause on in-person learning, said Kristina Deeter, a physician at Renown Children’s Hospital in Reno, Nevada. Teachers, she added, should not be coming into school if they’re sick.

In Chan’s Rhode Island, the majority of schools are open, though a handful had to close due to positive cases. The father of a 10-year old and a 14-year old, Chan said he felt confident sending his children back to their public school classrooms after the winter break. Both are fully vaccinated and wear surgical masks inside the building.

“I’m reassured that they’re protected, even against the Omicron variant,” he said.

2 Do vaccines work against Omicron?

The unanimous response from health professionals came in the form of a three-letter word: Y-E-S!

(Doctors, often technical and somewhat restrained in their email responses, answered this question using more exclamation than any other.)

Omicron has caused more breakthrough infections than other strains, they acknowledged, but emphasized that the immunizations have overwhelmingly succeeded at their key functions.

“T��� vaccines are still doing what they are intended to do: preventing severe infection and death,” said Peyton Thompson, assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. 

“Deaths are declining despite the rapid rise in cases, thanks to vaccination,” she added.

And while it remains possible to catch the virus if you have received two, or even three shots, each dose of the vaccine provides an added layer of protection. Such cases tend to be mild, explained Wurtz.

“Breakthrough infections are almost always asymptomatic or trivial. Occasionally flu-like. So, yes, we can count on our vaccinations to keep us from getting really sick,” the Minnesota professor wrote in an email to ����Ӱ��.

Children under the age of 5 are not yet eligible for shots, and are not expected to gain access until this spring at the earliest, Pfizer on Wednesday.

In the meantime, “the best way to protect kids under 5 is to vaccinate all of the people around them – their older siblings, other family members, day care providers [and] teachers,” said Wurtz.

3 Boosters for kids — yay or nay?

The Food and Drug Administration on Monday and, on Tuesday, the CDC recommended an extra shot for as young as 5, five months after the initial two-dose series.

Deeter recommends that those who are now eligible receive their third doses.

“Many of our vaccines are actually three-shot series,” she told ����Ӱ��, citing the Hepatitis B immunizations, for example. 

“My message to teenagers is this: you got your first shot, you got your second shot, you’ve got to finish the series.”

4 Why are so many children being hospitalized with COVID?

The answer, doctors say, boils down to two factors: vaccination rates and community spread.

Nationwide, pediatric COVID and are at a pandemic high, the latter surging 66 percent in the last full week of December to an average of 378 daily admissions.

But at the same time, vaccination rates among young people remain much lower than adults. Less than a quarter of children ages 5 to 11 have received a single dose of the COVID vaccine, and just over half of adolescents ages 12 to 17 have been fully immunized, according to data published by the . By comparison, of U.S. adults have received both shots.

The overwhelming majority of hospitalized pediatric COVID patients are unvaccinated, . “This is tragic, as the vaccine could have kept these children out of the hospital,” said UNC-Chapel Hill’s Thompson. 

And regardless of vaccination status, the ballooning pediatric hospitalization levels do not mean that the Omicron strain is more severe to kids than previous variants.

“​​In large part, this is a numbers game,” said Kanecia Zimmerman, a study lead on Duke University’s , which guides school leaders on how to navigate COVID policy. 

Even though surging caseloads nationwide have meant that more children have tested positive for the virus in recent weeks, “the proportion of hospitalized children remains small among the number of infected children,” the pediatrician explained.

5 What kind of masks are “good enough?”

The extreme transmissibility of the Omicron variant has spurred , some in red states, to reinstate mandatory masking rules — and has also reignited debates over which face coverings are most effective at protecting against infection.

There’s no doubt that the N95 and KN95 models do a better job of filtering out viral particles from the air, doctors agreed. They have a layer of polypropylene, a type of plastic, that can . Compared to a cloth mask, they can extend the time it takes to transmit an infectious dose of COVID by over seven times. If both the infected and exposed individuals are wearing N95s or KN95s, compared to both wearing cloth masks, transmission can take up to 50 times longer.

That said, Chan admits that the N95 and KN95 masks can be uncomfortable, and some may find it harder to breathe while wearing them.

“With my kids, I send them to school with surgical masks,” he said, noting that he himself will slip on an N95 before walking into crammed indoor spaces like the grocery store. 

But whether you opt for a simple surgical mask, or something beefier, here’s his bottom line: “T��� cloth masks just aren’t quite as good as other types of masks,” said the Rhode Island doctor.

6 How should my child’s school be testing students and staff for the virus?

In December, the CDC endorsed “test-to-stay” guidance that allows students and teachers who may have been exposed to the virus to take rapid tests and return to the classroom if their results are negative.

It’s a helpful approach, Duke’s Zimmerman believes. Through the Delta variant wave, 98 percent of people who were exposed to the virus were never ultimately infected, she said — meaning that without test-to-stay, the vast majority of quarantines are forced to miss class without ever having gotten sick.

But testing can be costly and a heavy logistical lift. Furthermore, COVID tests are in nationwide. To cut down on the total number of noses to swab, schools in her state of North Carolina target resources to lunchtime exposures, where children drop their masks, she explained, eliminating the possibility of quarantine among less-likely cases where both students are masked.

Also important, according to Zimmerman: testing location. If students need to travel to an off-site area to receive their tests, it can exclude youth without access to transportation from participating in the program, forcing them to miss class for quarantine and creating further setbacks for the students already most affected by the pandemic. 

“Offering testing at individual schools (not centralized locations) is critical for [the] success of this program because it is more likely to provide equal opportunity to all eligible staff and students within the district,” said the Duke pediatrician.

7 How should I navigate quarantine if my child or I test positive?

In late December the CDC reduced its quarantine guidelines for those who test positive for the virus from 10 days to five, a move that divided many in the medical community.

The takeaway, according to the doctors we spoke to? “Yes, returning to school or work five days after a known infection when someone is no longer symptomatic is fine,” said Wurtz.

Emphasis, they noted, is on no longer being symptomatic. Many individuals will continue having symptoms well beyond the five-day quarantine recommendation. If that’s the case for you or your child, you should continue to isolate until symptoms subside, or test results come back negative, as you may continue to be infectious, doctors said.

“Come back symptom-free,” said Deeter.

8 How long will the Omicron surge last?

A bit of good news here. 

Though epidemiologists don’t know for sure how long the Omicron surge will last in the U.S., cases have in South Africa, where the variant was first identified in late November. Some believe the peak in many American communities will arrive of January.

“In most countries that saw Omicron, it went up sharply, which is happening now in the U.S., and it came down sharply,” said Chan. “T���re should be a steep decrease in the near future for us.”

Schools Should Do Away With Mask Mandates By the End of the Year: .

• “It’s time to set firm dates for ending masking in schools. The risk of COVID-19 to kids is already very low. And with the expected arrival of vaccines for 5- to- 11-year-olds in early November, schools should be able to lift their mask mandates by the end of the year at the latest.”
• “Data from all over the world affirms that the risk of severe outcomes from COVID-19 is extremely low for kids. In highly vaccinated New England, the hospitalization rate right now for kids under 17 is about 7 per 10 million. That is not a typo.”
• “Here are four things we should do to prioritize the health of children:”
  • “Mandate vaccines for all adults in schools, as Los Angeles and New York City have done.”
  • “Host at-school vaccination clinics for 5- to 11-year-olds in every school in the country.”
  • “Expand use of rapid antigen tests so we can end the unnecessary quarantining of kids.”
  • “Improve ventilation and filtration. This helps reduce the amount of virus anyone in a classroom will inhale, which lowers the likelihood of infection and likely lowers severity if infected. This is not hard or expensive. The stimulus money is there, and solutions such as installing portable air cleaners with HEPA filters are evidence-based and easy to implement. Size them right, and plug them in. That’s it.”

October 22, 2021 — The Big Three

Pediatricians Declare a National Emergency in Child and Adolescent Mental Health: . Their recommendations include:

• “Increase federal funding dedicated to ensuring all families and children, from infancy through adolescence, can access evidence-based mental health screening, diagnosis and treatment to appropriately address their mental health needs, with particular emphasis on meeting the needs of under-resourced populations.”
• “Address regulatory challenges and improve access to technology to assure continued availability of telemedicine to provide mental health care to all populations.”
• “Increase implementation and sustainable funding of effective models of school-based mental health care, including clinical strategies and models for payment.”
• “Fully fund comprehensive, community-based systems of care that connect families in need of behavioral health services and supports for their child with evidence-based interventions in their home, community or school.”
• Related: U.S. Education Department released a new report, “.”

‘Still Not Equitable’: How COVID-19 Closures and Differing Safety Policies Are Disrupting School for Many Children: A shows that hidden behind the large number of schools that are open for in-person learning are thousands of students at home because of quarantine rules.

• 1 in 5 parents said their kids have had to quarantine or miss school because of a possible COVID-19 exposure.
• 1 in 10 said their kids have missed school or quarantined because they got COVID-19.
• Nearly 3 in 5 parents said masking is required at their children’s schools, the only safety precaution that polled at over 50 percent.

Children COVID Vaccine Rollout Plan: to get kids ages 5 to 11 vaccinated, pending FDA eligibility. (More from ����Ӱ��)

• It secured enough vaccine supply to equip more than 25,000 pediatric and primary-care offices, school and community health clinics, as well as thousands of pharmacies.
• The Department of Health and Human Services will “conduct a national public education campaign to reach parents and guardians with accurate and culturally responsive information about the vaccine and the risks that COVID-19 poses to children.”
• “The administration … is providing full funding to states to support [school and community-based] vaccination operations and outreach — including setting up sites, procuring equipment and supplies to store and administer the vaccine, providing transportation to and from vaccination sites and communicating with the public, such as through in-person community engagement, call center support, public service announcements and translation services.”
• A tidbit from ABC News: “Vaccinators must now also juggle two different COVID vaccine formulas: a full dose for older adolescents and adults — and one-third of that dose one for younger children.To troubleshoot any ensuing confusion, , though [it is] still ‘preliminary.’ Purple-capped vials will contain doses for adult and older adolescents, a chart offered to states said; orange-capped vials will contain doses for kids aged 5 to 11.”
• Related:

Federal Updates

Census: from 2019 to 2020.

• “The percentage of kids ages 3 and 4 enrolled in school fell from 54% in 2019 to 40% in 2020, the first time since 1996 that fewer than half of the children in this age group were enrolled.”
• College enrollment fell to the lowest level since 2007. Most of the decline took place in two-year colleges, which had their lowest enrollment levels in 20 years.

Child Tax Credit:

• “Our survey results show that some parents changed their employment because of the [child tax credit] payments. Even though the vast majority of parents said the new payments have not affected their employment (or the employment of someone else in their household), more than 10% of respondents reported that it did, with some reporting that it helped them work more and others reporting it helped them work less.”

Nation’s Report Card: . More via ����Ӱ��.

• “13-year-olds saw unprecedented declines in both reading and math between 2012 and 2020.”
• “NCES Commissioner Peggy Carr told reporters that 13-year-olds had never before seen declines on the assessment, and the results were so startling that she had her staff double-check the results.”
• “The data showed declines among the lowest-performing students, but not those at the top, , not smaller.”
• “Scores have fallen for Black and Hispanic students since 2012 and remain flat for white children, .”

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: Released some dashboards and charts.

City & State News

Arkansas: “Gov. Asa Hutchinson said Tuesday that , instead of 6 feet, to determine who needs to quarantine after a student or employee tests positive for COVID-19.”

California: A state found that California if the state’s Department of Education “continues to disburse and monitor federal funds used by K-12 schools the way it is doing it now.”

• “The state auditor said that California’s education department needed more supervision over how school districts report spending and that the department is not monitoring enough of the recipients,” .
• “An in the report cited Hayward Unified School District’s use of $4 million in stimulus money that did not have any supporting documents to verify the money went toward COVID-19-related expenses.”

Hawaii: “” offers families $1,000 microgrants for STEM learning kits, art materials and tutoring.

Pennsylvania: Philadelphia School District braces for a .

Tennessee: via The Tennessean.

West Virginia: West Virginia Education Association .

COVID-19 Research

FDA Approvals: The Food and Drug Administration Moderna and Johnson & Johnson booster shots as well as mix-and-matching among different vaccine providers.

• The agency approved the use of a single booster dose of the Moderna that may be administered at least six months after completion of the primary series to individuals:
  • 65 years of age and older
  • 18 through 64 years of age at high risk of severe COVID-19
  • 18 through 64 years of age with frequent institutional or occupational exposure to COVID-19
• It also approved the use of a single booster dose of J&J at least two months after completion of the single-dose primary regimen to individuals 18 years of age and older.

Pfizer COVID-19 Vaccine Highly Protective for 12- to 18-Year-Olds: New ()

• The vaccine “was 93% effective in preventing hospitalizations among those aged 12 to 18.”

CDC Considering Test-to-Stay: The CDC “said it is a coronavirus ‘test-to-stay’ program in schools instead of quarantine.” Via :

• “‘In Marietta, we have been tracking students who are testing positive through test-to-stay, and it’s 3%,’ Grant Rivera, superintendent of Marietta City Schools in Georgia, told CNN on Monday.”
• That “means we can keep 97% of them in class,” Rivera said. “That is a measure of success.”
• “In an email to CNN, CDC said it views test-to-stay as a ‘promising practice’ and said it’s ‘working with multiple jurisdictions implementing test-to-stay to evaluate the effectiveness of this strategy.’ But it’s not clear when that test-to-stay guidance could be available.”

COVID-19 Testing in Schools Works: Science News asks, ? Long piece but worth the read.

Some Workers Want COVID-19 Recovery Accepted as Evidence of Immunity: Via . “Previous infection should be recognized as proof of protection and exempt employees from vaccine mandates, some workers say.”

SCOTUS and Vaccine Mandate: “T��� U.S. Supreme Court declined Tuesday to block a vaccine requirement imposed on Maine health care workers, the latest defeat for opponents of vaccine mandates,” the More via .

• “Justice [Stephen] Breyer did not ask for a response to the workers’ application or refer it to the full Supreme Court. or if that court does not issue a decision by Oct. 29. That is the date on which the state has said it will start enforcing the requirement.”

UK Study: New finds that COVID-19 infections in children in England rose in September after schools reopened.

• “ found that prevalence in 13- to 17-year-olds was 2.55% between Sept 9 and 27, with prevalence in those aged 5 to 12 at 2.32%. Prevalence for every adult age group was estimated below 1%.”

COVID-19 Continues to Be a Leading Cause of Death: Via . Really powerful visualization by age:

The Unvaccinated May Not Be Who You Think: Great piece by

• “The unvaccinated, overall, don’t have much trust in institutions and authorities, and even those they trust, they trust less: 71% of the vaccinated trust hospitals and doctors ‘a lot,’ for example, while only 39% of the unvaccinated do.”
• “It’s easy to say that all these people should have been more informed or sought advice from a medical provider, except that many have no health care provider. As of 2015, one-quarter of the population in the United States had no primary health care provider to turn to for trusted advice.”
• “It may well be that some of the unvaccinated are a bit like cats stuck in a tree. They’ve made bad decisions earlier and now may be frozen, part in fear, and unable to admit their initial hesitancy wasn’t a good idea, so they may come back with a version of how they are just doing ‘more research.’”

Viewpoints

A Cautionary Tale From Kenya: Designing Educational Pandemic Recovery Programs to Minimize Unintended Consequences: .

• “T��� bottom line: A small amount of supplemental remote instruction may not be enough to meaningfully improve student learning, and worse, it may cause unintended consequences, such as reducing the amount of time students devote to other educational activities.”
• The authors offer for designing successful programs.

Why So Many Teachers Are Thinking of Quitting: The interviews seven educators.

VELA’s Fall 2021 Microgrant Application Is Open: “Everyday entrepreneurs are encouraged to for a microgrant of $2,500 or $10,000 to support innovative, nontraditional education programs.”

How SEL Extends K-12 Education’s Reach Into Students’ Lives and Expands Teachers’ Roles: Via

If Not Now, When?: , via Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce

Broadband Affordability Resources: Via

What Education’s Unequal, K-Shaped Recovery Really Looks Like: Via

Taking Stock With Teens:

• 87% of U.S. teenagers have iPhones
• Teens spend 32% of their daily video consumption on Netflix, followed by YouTube at 30%
• Snapchat is the favorite social media platform (35% share), followed by TikTok (30%) and Instagram (22%)
• Teens self-reported spending about $2,274 per year, implying total teen spending of about $63 billion

Honoring Gen. Colin Powell: Who .

• Tributes: ; ; .
• And here’s a with Arne Duncan and Colin Powell, moderated by Deborah Quazzo, managing partner, GSV Ventures.

… And on a Reflective Note

Ted Lasso IRL: Los Angeles Chargers head coach Brandon Staley: “I just think that kindness and lifting people up and respecting people you don’t know — I just think that’s a big part of our thing here is listening to people and learning about people because .”

“I think what you’ll discover is that we have so much more in common than not”

— Los Angeles Chargers (@chargers)

ICYMI @The74

Weekend Reads: In case you missed them, our top five stories of the week:

• Data: CDC COVID Youth Vaccination Figures Clash — Sometimes By Double-Digits — With Locally Reported Rates
• Vaccines: Amid U.S. Anti-Vaccine Movements, Puerto Rico Vaccinates 89% of Eligible Youth and 98% of School Staff
• Enrollment: Kids Left Schools Last Year Because of the Switch to Remote Classes; Early Numbers Suggest They May Not Be Coming Back Soon
• Podcast: Class Disrupted S3 E4: Standards and Curriculum Aren’t the Same — And That Matters
• Teaching: How to Build Culturally Affirming Schools, According to Over 100 Black Educators

Disclosure: John Bailey is an adviser to the Walton Family Foundation, which provides financial support to .

But on Aug. 30, the 2,800-student district began requiring students to wear masks outside as well as in the building — and hasn’t had to send a whole classroom home since. The new policy was prompted by the state’s revised for unvaccinated students, which allow asymptomatic students to stay in school if they meet several conditions, including wearing masks both inside and outside.

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“We are optimistic it is working,” said Kristie Towne, manager of board and superintendent operations for the Solana district, part of San Diego County. “T��� policy is meant to keep as many children in school [and] in class as much as possible.”

With the recent rise in positive cases due to the more transmissible Delta variant, districts like Solana Beach are now enforcing additional measures — policies that go beyond recommendations from most state health departments and the which says masks aren’t needed during recess. The Los Angeles Unified School District was among the first to institute the practice and several other California districts have followed suit. Others as far as Vermont and North Carolina have instituted similar measures but are targeting them to younger students or athletes. One problem: The research behind such moves is pretty thin.

“Outside, there’s an infinite volume of air to dilute the virus,” said Dr. Dean Blumberg, a pediatric infectious disease expert at the University of California, Davis.

Dr. Benjamin Linas, a Boston University epidemiologist, warns that outdoor masking could even be counterproductive.

“If there is any hope of successfully implementing masks when we need them — indoors during Delta surge — then we cannot insist on masks when we do not need them, and we should not routinely ‘round up’ when not certain,” he said. “Too much masking is real.”

Advocacy groups that were already fighting the state’s mandate that students wear masks indoors argue that requiring them outdoors further hinders children’s social development.

“Outdoors our kids need to be breathing fresh air. They need to have social interaction and share smiles,” said Sharon McKeeman, who founded and in July filed , with Reopen California Schools, against California Gov. Gavin Newsom, the state health department and other officials. “T���se restrictions are arbitrary, and they are infringing our kids’ rights.”

The measures came as some districts faced criticism for quarantining too many students without symptoms.

In August, in Los Angeles and other districts missed class and did not always have access to remote learning. Other California districts requiring masks outside include the 12,000-student Palo Alto Unified School District, where the most shows two cases districtwide, and the 9,600-student , which had 27 cases in August and seven so far in September.

‘The benefits are uncertain’

Some opponents of mask requirements note that the , which President Joe Biden as soon as he became president, doesn’t recommend masks at all for children 5 and under.

A growing body of research on transmission of the virus shows that the proportion of cases originating outside are well below 10 percent and could be even less than 1 percent, according to a in the Journal of Infectious Diseases.

International studies provide further evidence of significantly low risk. A found that out of 7,300 cases, one outbreak resulting in two cases was linked to an outdoor conversation between two people. An showed that about one in 1,000 cases was due to outdoor transmission.

Most outdoor cases are linked to lengthy interactions between people or crowded events, studies show.

“I am having a very hard time thinking of when a school would generate such an opportunity for transmission,” Linas said. “It is not recess or outdoor classwork. Perhaps if a school had an outdoor pep rally in a relatively small stadium with full bleachers and kids on the field, too. I am struggling to come up with a realistic scenario.”

Experts stress that with the Delta variant, local vaccination rates of those 12 and above should guide decisions about whether additional caution is needed.

That’s why Andrew Hayes, a school board member in the Lakeside Union Elementary School District in San Diego County, questions the governor’s inside mask mandate to begin with.

“T��� about being at an 80 percent vaccination rate, but we are still having all these mitigation strategies everywhere,” Hayes said. “I understand that people want to follow the experts, but they aren’t allowing the experts in education to make decisions.”

His district has not yet required masks outside, but surrounding districts have.

Hayes is among in California who want to loosen local mask requirements in violation of the statewide mandate requiring students to wear them indoors. The California Department of Public Health on Aug. 23 sent districts stating they could face fines and civil lawsuits if they don’t enforce masking.

The dynamic is the opposite of that in Florida, where districts mandating masks are locked in a protracted legal battle with a Republican governor who says parents should choose.

California isn’t the only state where some districts are going above and beyond CDC guidelines, which state: “In general, people do not need to wear masks when outdoors” for play, recess and physical education. But other examples are more targeted.

The , near Burlington, Vermont, requires masks outdoors for students in K-5 if they can’t socially distance. The district is requiring masks outside for elementary and middle school students, and the district in North Carolina requires athletes to wear masks outside when they’re not actively participating in a game or practice.

In California, McKeeman, with Let Them Breathe, said even in districts that don’t require students to wear masks outside, “there’s still a lot of enforcement to keep it on anyway.”

Some experts recognize the challenges teachers and other school staff members face when children are constantly taking masks on and off. Blumberg, who said he still wears a mask when he goes to the farmer’s market, noted that many classroom buildings in the state’s schools are connected by outside hallways.

For the sake of consistency, he said, “It’s easier to just say, ‘Mask while at school and don’t think about it.’”

They pride themselves on their allegiance to a moral code, a firm compass that distinguishes them from progressives who are always — allegedly — trying to erode the core principles that make America great.

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Which is why it’s so tragicomic to witness conservative state leaders in , , , , and beyond search for some shred of principled moral reasoning to justify their mandates forbidding school districts from requiring masks on their campuses.

It’s a tough task, since most of conservatives’ usual lines just don’t fit. They certainly can’t justify their actions in the name of American federalism and local control of schools. It’s hard to squash local school boards’ abilities to determine whether or not students and staff must wear masks … in the name of local control. determining the masking rules for every locale in his state, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott explained that “Texans, not government, should decide their best health practices.”

Nor can conservatives shield themselves in the name of protecting personal responsibility. If the last 18 months have taught Americans anything, it’s that the cautious also suffer when their feckless, carefree neighbors ignore the pandemic’s risks. Which, by the way, is also why they’ve shelved their “pro-life” rhetoric for this particular debate.

So conservative leaders have made a desperate grab for the banner of individual freedom. For instance, in his executive order limiting districts’ pandemic mitigation efforts, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis insisted he was acting to “protect parents’ freedom to choose whether their children wear masks.” That is, masks can’t be required at school during a still-raging pandemic because that would disempower families from choosing what’s best for their children and, presumably, teachers from managing their own tolerance for risking infection.

But this is a profound distortion of America’s traditional approach to freedom. about how virtuous behavior and personal responsibility were fundamental to sustaining individual liberty. It was obvious to them that the stability of America’s limited, representative government rested upon individuals behaving responsibly. “Virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government,” George Washington wrote in his Farewell Address. And, when it’s politically convenient, modern conservatives know this. “Freedom relies on virtue for its survival,” announced . Its authors continued: “It is virtuous citizens taking personal responsibility for their actions and exercising mutual responsibility for the welfare of others who make ordered liberty possible.”

In his towering 1859 essay, “On Liberty,” English philosopher John Stuart Mill, articulated his “harm principle,” one of that tradition’s famous definitions of individual freedom. “T��� only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will,” Mill wrote, “is to prevent harm to others.” The gist of the principle should be intuitive — indeed, to most Americans. It’s the intellectual ancestor of : my freedom to swing my fist ends precisely at the point where it hits your nose.

In that vein, then, the case for curtailing families’ liberty to send their children unmasked hinges upon whether or not this will cause harm to others. This is not a complicated calculation.

To be sure, throughout the pandemic, it has been both tempting and fashionable to claim that the coronavirus is not particularly threatening for children. Further, advocates from across the political spectrum have made a series of cavalier claims about the relative safety of school settings. Last March, Brown University economist and prominent school reopening advocate Emily Oster , “Your Unvaccinated Kid Is Like a Vaccinated Grandma.” In his executive order as proof that school masking was unnecessary.

However, much of the confident talk about the safety of school reopening comes from earlier moments in the pandemic when fewer children were being tested and attending in-person schooling. As in-person school reopening launches across the country, there is that children are to catching the Delta variant than previous strains of the coronavirus. It’s driving , perhaps because those under the age of 12 are still not yet eligible to receive any of the coronavirus vaccines. it increases the risk of hospitalization for people of all ages.

Data on the latest pandemic spike suggest that these concerns are warranted. Pediatric hospitals — — . Test positivity rates for school-aged children . That is, more of the kids being tested for COVID are testing positive. an overall as the baseline threshold for when it is safe for governments to reopen in general. Perhaps we might tolerate a slightly higher rate for school reopenings, but Florida’s positivity rate for kids is four times the WHO’s benchmark: in that state, . Meanwhile, over 98 percent of Americans live in counties .

Finally, in elementary schools with universal masking and widespread COVID testing, that nearly one-quarter of students will be infected in the first three months of school. Remove students’ masks, and their models suggest that nearly 80 percent of an elementary school’s students will be infected in the same time frame. These CDC models are looking gloomily prescient: as Georgia schools near the end of their first month since reopening, the state’s Department of Public Health reports that . Gwinnett County Public Schools, just outside Atlanta, by the end of the school year, and possibly more if case rates increase with colder weather — despite requiring masks at all times on campus.

In such an environment, at such a precarious moment for public health, the application of Mill’s harm principle is relatively straightforward. The new variant of the virus is already threatening the health of children and families, and it will threaten more if schools reopen without mitigation measures in place. Universal masking is just the simplest, easiest and cheapest of these. Political and education leaders are absolutely justified in taking all of the standard approaches to slowing the spread of the coronavirus — including mandatory masking, vaccine mandates and strict quarantine protocols for schools with new COVID cases.

Notably, as the Delta variant began taking hold of campuses around the country, even Prof. Oster and Brown University took touting Gov. DeSantis’ citation of her research .

That conservatives are abandoning their prior moral convictions to explain their behavior makes clear that the whole effort to “protect the freedom” of the recklessly unmasked is really about scoring political points in a moment of enormous peril for children, families and the country. Indeed, in the face of school districts’ opposition to his executive order, to families determined to send their children to schools unmasked. Note, of course, that this extension of freedom, in the form of “empowering families,” doesn’t isolate the risks only to the private schools willing to tolerate these unmasked families’ choice. It simply provides the virus with more vectors to transmit, threatening everyone in Florida — and the rest of the country.

Worst of all, it’s not even the first time that conservatives have tried to use the virus as leverage for attacking public schools and educators. Last summer, then-Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos that would allow parents to enroll in private schools willing to open into the teeth of .

To be fair, modern conservatives’ brand of radical individualism is taken into account elsewhere in the Western intellectual canon. English philosopher Thomas Hobbes argued that this rugged freedom was something like humans’ natural state … each of us fending for ourselves and charting our own life courses. Famously, however, he warned that this was incompatible with civil society, for in this state of nature, life was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

Dr. Conor P. Williams is a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, a progressive think tank. Find him on Twitter . The views expressed here are his alone. 

And then came the Delta variant.

Pediatric coronavirus cases have now surged above 250,000 for the first time since the start of the pandemic, according to . Hospitalizations of children stricken by the highly transmissible strain are reaching and some of students across the country last week were quarantining away from schools that had just barely begun. With a swiftness that surprised even health experts, the virus has across some 278 districts in 35 states, according to the website Burbio, a data service that tracks school calendars.

As for the adults in schools, at least have died of the virus since mid-August and shut down all its schools earlier this month after two teachers perished in the same week.

The Delta drumbeat of distress is one of the main reasons that President Joe Biden came out Thursday with a new plan of attack, including mandatory vaccinations for some 300,000 school staff members working for federal programs, such as Head Start or schools operated by the Bureau of Indian Education, and grants for districts confronting loss of funding for implementing mask mandates.

It will take some time to tell if Biden’s new strategy will be successful in beating back this latest surge. Right now, many parents and school officials are in a state of anxiety about how to keep their K-12 communities safe and perhaps questioning whether they miscalculated the strength of the COVID-19 enemy.

Complicating the matter further, decisions to implement basic virus mitigation measures in school have in some cases exploded into or even .

Amid the uncertainty and high tensions, and with , ����Ӱ�� spoke directly to health experts for clarity on how to understand the virus in this critical stage and tips on how to safely navigate the back-to-school season.

Here’s what they had to say:

1 We’ve seen a surge in pediatric coronavirus cases. Should we abandon the prior wisdom that kids rarely catch COVID, and when they do, it’s not too serious?

Not exactly.

“[The Delta variant] is more infectious, but it’s not a whole new game,” explained Benjamin Linas, professor of medicine at Boston University.

The variant’s high transmissibility has pushed up case counts, including among children, he told ����Ӱ��. But serious illness among young people remains “vanishingly rare,” he said — citing a case fatality rate of .00003 for those under 20.

“This underlying reality that kids are at far less risk of severe COVID-19 than adults remains true, even with Delta.”

Young people do represent a larger share of infections nationwide now than they did at the outset of the pandemic. But that’s likely because far fewer minors than adults are vaccinated, and many remain ineligible for shots, said Kristina Deeter, professor of pediatric medicine at University of Nevada, Reno School of Medicine.

In most cases, “[kids] are not as sick as the adults,” she agreed.

Still, Rebecca Wurtz, professor of health policy at the University of Minnesota, cautions that the risk of infection remains high, particularly for the unvaccinated. The idea that young people couldn’t catch or spread COVID was always silly, she told ����Ӱ��, and the Delta variant means that transmission is now easier than ever before.

“Delta will find you if you are not thoughtfully masking and social distancing,” she said.

2 Does the Delta variant make kids sicker than previous strains?

There is no conclusive evidence that it does, according to the experts.

“T��� jury’s still out,” said Deeter.

Studies from Canada and Scotland have found that than those infected with previous mutations of the virus.

And while those papers don’t examine virulence specifically among young people, Wurtz believes it could still be “reasonable to extrapolate that to kids.”

Evidence from the U.S., however, seems to contradict the idea that Delta causes more severe infections among youth. Even as pediatric COVID cases have surged, the proportion of children and adolescents hospitalized with severe disease has , points out Amruta Padhye, pediatric infectious disease specialist at the University of Missouri.

The hospitalization rate among unvaccinated adolescents was , recent CDC data reveal.

3 After the Pfizer vaccine’s full approval from the FDA, parents may now theoretically seek “off-label” vaccines for children under 12. Should they do so?

In short, no.

Although the FDA’s full approval of the Pfizer vaccine for those 16 and up means that doctors now have the power to prescribe the shot “” to any individual regardless of age, it would be irresponsible to do so, said Deeter.

The biggest unknown, she explained, is dosage. She prescribes drugs off label every day as a pediatrician, but explained that the COVID vaccine is different because it’s still so new.

“I don’t feel safe even deciding on what dose I might want to prescribe for a child. I have no idea what’s going to work,” she said, explaining that too much vaccine could elevate risks such as myocarditis, already more prevalent in young vaccine recipients than adults, and too little vaccine might not provide adequate protection against the coronavirus.

“T���re’s a reason that we have the approval process, even in the middle of a crisis,” added Linas. “I don’t recommend going out to get your child vaccinated before the vaccine has actually been approved or emergency authorized for kids.”

Youngsters aged 5 to 11 are expected to become eligible for coronavirus shots , experts say. The process has stretched out over months in part due to federal health regulators efforts to bolster confidence in the shots by in clinical trials.

Once shots are approved for that age group, they will be the most effective way to keep children healthy, said Linas.

“With the vaccine, you’re very well protected from the bad outcomes.”

4 Should schools implement vaccine mandates for staff?

Immunization requirements for school staff have multiplied since the FDA issued full approval for the Pfizer vaccine. ​, , and multiple other states have enacted rules requiring educators to receive the COVID shot or be regularly tested for the virus.

In his Thursday address, which unveiled new vaccination rules covering two-thirds of all U.S. workers, President Biden to help move the needle on teacher immunization from its reported 90 percent level up to 100 percent.

“Vaccination requirements in schools are nothing new,” said the president.

Expecting teachers to be immunized against COVID represents a sound public health policy, says Linas.

“It’s reasonable for school districts … to say to their educators and staff… ‘We have an expectation that if you’re going to come into our buildings where we have our unvaccinated children, we expect you to be vaccinated. And if you won’t do that, then I’m sorry, you can’t teach.’”

That strategy also minimizes learning disruptions, pointed out Janet Englund, professor of pediatrics at the University of Washington School of Medicine.

“When a teacher gets sick, he or she is unable to perform his or her job,” she told ����Ӱ��.

5 What about vaccine mandates for students?

Very few school districts have extended vaccine mandates to students, as 12- to 15-year-olds remain eligible for shots only on an emergency authorization basis, and those under 12 are still ineligible.

On Thursday, however, Los Angeles Unified School District, which serves 600,000 students, became the first major U.S. school district to require that eligible students attending school in person be fully vaccinated against the coronavirus. Students 12 and older in the nation’s second-largest school system will have to receive their second dose of the shot by Dec. 19, officials announced.

Culver City, California and also instituted similar requirements for students in late August. Experts told ����Ӱ�� that they expect the vaccination rules to face legal challenges.

Although Englund said she is a believer in many student vaccine mandates — they helped control diseases such as measles and polio, she pointed out — requiring a vaccine that is approved only on an emergency use authorization may be premature.

“It’s not quite time,” she said.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, however, expressed his while speaking on CNN in late August, and the University of Minnesota’s Wurtz told ����Ӱ�� that she is “absolutely in favor of mandatory vaccinations for students,” due to the high safety and efficacy of COVID shots.

6 How effective are masks and other safety mitigation measures at slowing the spread of COVID in school?

Experts agree that safety measures to slow the spread of COVID are more effective when implemented in tandem with multiple others than on their own.

“[Masking] has to be a part of a layered protection strategy,” UCLA professor of pediatrics Ishminder Kaur told ����Ӱ��.

That means that classrooms should employ all strategies available to them, she said: universal masking, ventilation, distancing, outdoor activities and rigorous testing to keep infected students out of the classroom.

Doing so can result in schools effectively containing the virus and keeping case rates below those of surrounding communities, academic studies show.

Although quarantining students exposed to the virus can disrupt academics, experts said it is a necessary step to contain transmission. They pointed out that with widespread access to testing, a negative result after five days may allow students to return to the classroom more quickly. On Thursday, Biden announced that the White House will move to make 280 million rapid and at-home tests available using the Defense Production Act and lower the cost of over-the-counter tests from Walmart, Kroger and Amazon.

Some districts’ quarantine protocols are more stringent than those recommended by the CDC, according to a recent survey of 100 districts from the University of Washington’s Center for Reinventing Public Education.

Some observers have recently made the case that the , but Kaur points out that a recent study from Bangladesh with a randomized design — considered the “gold standard” in causal research — finds that , though it cautions that cloth masks may be less effective.

And while masking controversy has turned many school board meetings ugly, including in Broward County, Florida where the board chair said “all hell broke loose” when they required face coverings in defiance of Gov. Ron DeSantis’s order, kids don’t actually seem to mind wearing masks, said Kaur.

“T���y’re not fidgeting, they’re not touching it,” she said of the youngsters who come into her clinic. “It’s the new normal for them.”

Deeter, who works in a sedation clinic and has to ask kids to remove their masks, has observed the same.

“T���y get so upset when I try to take it off of them. It’s their buddy,” she said.

7 Outside of school, what’s the best way to navigate playdates and other social activities?

The number one tip, experts say, is to stay outside as much as possible.

“Outdoor activities were not the ones that were spreading these infections, which remains true even for Delta,” said Kaur, although she recommended avoiding overcrowded locations even outside. For example, coaches calling players into a huddle might ask everyone to momentarily mask up.

Even when the weather gets cold, Wurtz recommends limiting indoor hangouts. She suggests some compromises: building a snowman outside then coming indoors for hot chocolate at the end, perhaps.

8 What’s the COVID end-game for schools?

Once all students have had the opportunity to receive COVID vaccinations, it could be time to consider rolling back virus mitigation protocols, Linas said, and beginning the conversation about how to live with a virus that within the global population. But that’s still a long way out.

“We’re not there yet,” he said.