Updated at 8:25 p.m.
Amid rising Covid-19 cases and Delta’s steady spread, Gov. Phil Scott’s administration announced Tuesday that K-12 students, teachers and staff should start the new school year masked.
But the state will recommend schools drop mask mandates for students and employees once 80% of eligible students in a given school have started vaccination. Kids under 12, who are still not eligible for vaccination, should keep masking, officials said, and so should unvaccinated staff and unvaccinated students above 12.
“We’ll have more vaccine clinics in schools, leading up to and after classes start. We hope this inspires parents to do the right thing and sign their kids up,” Scott said during his weekly press conference.
About 65% of 12-15-year-olds are at least partially vaccinated, according to the state’s most recent data, as are 72.5% of all 16-17-year-olds.
The forthcoming guidance, which will be jointly issued by the Agency of Education and Department of Health, is much stricter than the rules school summer programs have operated under since June, when districts were explicitly told not to impose masking requirements. But it is less conservative than recommendations recently put forward by both the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the American Academy of Pediatrics, which simply recommended universal masking in schools.
Administration officials argued Tuesday that Vermont could afford to be more lax, particularly given its nation-leading vaccination rates.
“The Northeast is different than the rest of the country. And these guidelines are written for a country of 50 states,” said Health Commissioner Mark Levine.
But the Vermont chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics has also adopted the national organization’s recommendations, and many Vermont experts told VTDigger last week that they would like to see universal masking. Several said Tuesday they would have preferred the state go further.
The practices contemplated in the state’s guidance will provide a non-negligible layer of protection, said Benjamin Lee, an associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Vermont’s Larner College of Medicine.
But they nevertheless “fall short” of the universal masking Lee said he’d like to see, particularly given how transmissible the now-dominant Delta variant is. Early evidence about the original strain of the virus suggested young children might be less susceptible to catching Covid-19 — but that’s no longer the case, he said.
“So from that standpoint, if the virus does get into this setting, I do worry that it will more easily spread within the school than the scenario we had last year,” said Lee, who has conducted epidemiological research on Covid-19 in K-12 settings.
Rebecca Bell, president of the Vermont-AAP, gave the administration high marks for emphasizing in-person learning, starting the year with universal masking, and encouraging vaccination in its approach. But Bell said she still needed to see more details about what it might look like to drop universal masking once a certain student vaccination rate was achieved before saying whether it was a good idea.
She also expressed concern about dropping masking requirements after 80% of eligible students have started — rather than completed — vaccination.
“You really need two doses plus those two weeks to really feel protected against severe disease with the Delta variant. So I personally would not use the first shot as a benchmark,” said Bell, a pediatric critical care physician at the UVM Children’s Hospital.
Annie Hoen, an associate professor of epidemiology at Dartmouth College’s Geisel School of Medicine, said she generally supports the state’s approach to masking and vaccination.
“A threshold like 80% is not as good as 100%, but it’s a high enough proportion that I think removing mask requirements in a relatively low-incidence state like ours is reasonable,” she wrote in an email. “I would argue that in light of Delta and its higher transmissibility, that threshold is at the lower end.”
But she did fault them for so strongly discouraging virtual learning, which worked well — sometimes even better than traditional in-person instruction — for a small minority of students. And Hoen added that she wished she had heard anything about ventilation.
“There is more and more evidence that ventilation can be a really useful tool and I would like to see standards set at the state level for ventilation in schools if they don’t exist,” she said.
Many questions remain unanswered — including whether students will be able to self-certify their vaccination status, or need to provide proof. Additional details, state officials repeatedly said, would come once the actual guidance is published later this week.
Notably, the forthcoming guidance will also be nonbinding. With Vermont’s emergency order no longer in effect, state officials said Tuesday they did not believe they could themselves impose restrictions like mask mandates.
Some of the guidance might be “operationally challenging” for districts to implement, said Jeff Francis, executive director of the Vermont Superintendents Association, but the written advisories to come might clarify things. And he added that the technically discretionary recommendations from the state could be harder for schools to enforce in communities more reticent to accept pandemic mitigation measures.
“I would be naive and disingenuous to say I didn’t think there was a potential. I hope not. I hope it’s minimal. But there’s potential for it for sure,” he said.
The state is also not recommending that schools impose any distancing requirements, officials said. Last year, schools had to maintain 3 feet of distance between younger children, and 6 feet of distance between other students and all employees. A new voluntary surveillance testing program will be deployed for students and school employees, Education Secretary Dan French added.
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