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School officials must heed experts, remain flexible in planning for fall return

Intelligencer Journal - 6/23/2021

THE ISSUE: As LNP | LancasterOnline’s Alex Geli reported June 5, “Several Lancaster County school districts in recent days have announced expectations for the next school year, signaling a return to school as it once was: five days a week in person without masks or social distancing.” The announcements came as school districts wrapped up “a particularly challenging school year with constantly changing guidance from state and federal health officials, quarantines and intermittent school closures due to COVID-19 exposure, as well as increasing pressure from parent groups fed up with the mask requirement in schools,” Geli noted.

Everyone wants to see a 2021-22 school year that’s uninterrupted by COVID-19 outbreaks and building closures. As more of us get vaccinated, lowering community transmission of that capricious and too-often lethal disease, that kind of school year becomes more and more of a possibility.

And so we share the hopes of Lancaster County school officials that the chaos of the past two academic years may be behind us.

There’s additional promising news on that score. The New York Times reported June 8 that coronavirus vaccines “may be available in the fall for U.S. children as young as 6 months, drugmakers say. Pfizer and Moderna are testing their vaccines in children under 12 years, and are expected to have results in hand for children aged 5 through 11 by September.”

That would be amazing — but only if parents then get their school-age children vaccinated.

But this timing also raises the likelihood that we’ll have to retain school masking requirements a little longer — until these younger students are vaccinated. This could be especially true, given how the more contagious, more severe delta variant of COVID-19 is now manifesting in the United Kingdom and could similarly manifest in the United States.

“In England, we saw this variant spread first among school-age children, and then to other age groups,” Deepti Gurdasani, a British epidemiologist at Queen Mary University of London, told NBC News last week. “It is clear that schools are a major area of spread, when robust mitigations aren’t present.”

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about 8.2 million adolescents ages 12 through 17 had received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine as of Sunday. But that is just a fraction of U.S. adolescents in that age group.

All of this is why we’re concerned by the assertions of local school officials that masks no longer will be required for staff members and students this fall.

Manheim Township School District Superintendent Robin Felty said in a letter to families in early June that staff and students will not be required to wear masks this fall, nor will they be required to be vaccinated against COVID-19 in order to attend school. Both in-person and online learning options will be available, Felty added.

As Geli reported on June 5, “Similar letters were sent over the last week to families in Cocalico, Eastern Lancaster County and Penn Manor school districts.”

Because we’ve seen how drastically trends can change with COVID-19, we think it’s premature to announce decisions now about whether masks will be required this fall.

A June 8 column in The New York Times should be required reading for school administrators. It was co-authored by Dr. Tracy Beth Hoeg, a physician and an epidemiologist at the University of California, Davis; Dr. Monica Gandhi, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco; and Dr. Daniel Johnson, a professor of pediatrics and the chief of pediatric infectious diseases at the University of Chicago Medicine.

They wrote that research in “Wisconsin, North Carolina, Utah and New York City has shown that children can be welcomed back to classrooms without substantial viral outbreaks.” But for this to happen, these physicians wrote, certain things must happen:

— The adults — teachers, staff and parents — throughout a school must be vaccinated.

— School staff should frequently clean high-touch surfaces, though the physicians added that schools can decrease their use of antimicrobial cleaning products and can ditch the ineffective plexiglass barriers between student desks. Likewise, schools can cease student temperature checks.

— They wrote that testing people without symptoms isn’t necessary in K-12 schools “unless infection rates in a community exceed 200 cases per 100,000 residents in the previous seven days.” Tests should be required only for people who have been exposed to COVID-19 or exhibit symptoms of the disease.

— Mask-wearing in schools should continue, these physicians wrote. Masking requirements may be revisited as COVID-19 cases continue to drop, but, the physicians wrote: “We believe that for now, children ages 5 and older should keep wearing face masks indoors.”

Children do not have to wear masks when they play outside, they added.

— The physicians advised keeping desks at least 3 feet apart “until hospitalization rates in the community fall below five per 100,000 people.”

— And this is important, but too rarely mentioned: “Schools should make certain that ventilation systems are working properly and that doors and windows are kept open where possible to ensure sufficient air circulation,” they wrote.

The Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security at the Bloomberg School of Public Health released a report in late May urging schools to use federal COVID-19 relief funds to address ventilation issues in facilities.

“Many kindergarten through 12th grade (K-12) schools in the United States do not have good ventilation,” the report stated. “This is a longstanding problem with demonstrably negative effects on student learning. We can and should act to fix this to ensure good indoor air quality for all students, educators, and school staff. During the COVID-19 pandemic, it is even more important that ventilation problems in K-12 schools be addressed now.”

While ventilation improvements are complicated and expensive investment for schools, the Johns Hopkins report asserts that they are, ultimately, “a cost-effective public health measure. … Improvements to ventilation are a good use of the COVID-19 relief funds provided to K-12 schools.”

In March, the U.S. Department of Education echoed this sentiment when it wrote that the $122 billion from the American Rescue Plan designated for helping schools reopen could be used, in part, to address ventilation and/or increase available space in schools.

There is never a true summer vacation for school administrators and those we elect to oversee our local schools. In the coming weeks, they must heed the ongoing guidance from experts, build flexibility into their fall plans and determine the most effective use of American Rescue Plan funds.

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Crédito: THE LNP | LANCASTERONLINE EDITORIAL BOARD