Ensuring Safe In-Person Education Remains an Afterthought in US Covid Plan

As the fourth pandemic school year approaches, the US has converged on a single goal: schools must return to normal. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona hailed the arrival of new CDC guidance for "minimizing the impact of COVID-19" which, he wrote, "should give students, parents and educators the confidence they need to head back to school with a sense of joy & optimism."

We've unmasked American children, but in doing so we may also unmask our political failures.

Yet the new guidance, like the US's approach to schools from the onset of the pandemic, is designed not to minimize impacts on schools but rather around the perennial goal of reducing strains on health systems. Once again, ensuring safe and stable in-person education remains an afterthought, rather than a primary goal of the US COVID response.

Since the no-longer-novel coronavirus shuttered schools in March 2020, the choices of political leaders across the country consistently put the goal of in-person education and child care behind other goals. As surge after surge set the country further from the goal of reopening schools in late 2020, few leaders took measures to impose other restrictions, including closing restaurants and bars and limiting other non-essential activities. School sports prevailed over school academics, even as sports drove outbreaks that sidelined students from the classroom. Many states did not prioritize K-12 educators for vaccination in early 2021, amidst a protracted battle on the minimum conditions for reopening schools.

As schools finally reopened for full in-person education in Fall 2021 amid a Delta-driven surge, only 16 states adopted school mask mandates and several banned them outright. Lack of leadership on school COVID policies from US and state leaders created a political vacuum that has been filled by groups spreading misinformation, seeding discord, and unleashing angry parents on educators, school boards and leaders.

The result was significant and sustained disruption that left educators and families grasping for resolve. Families endured relentless quarantines and days of work without paid leave. Children faced a revolving door of substitute teachers and caregivers that highly-publicized substitute teaching gigs by governors could not fix. The effects may reach beyond the pandemic. Some schools are suffering an exodus of educators, and protracted battles over school mitigation have frayed relationships between schools and communities.

Perhaps most tellingly, as part of its effort to put the pandemic behind us, the CDC abandoned school-specific guidance in Spring 2022 for community levels designed to limit strains on hospitals-and not schools. The new CDC guidance set a threshold for masking that is far higher than what outside experts estimated is necessary to lift masking in schools with limited disruption even before the arrival of Omicron.

However, policies designed to keep ICU beds empty are not policies that keep classrooms full, let alone productive. The Los Angeles Union School District was long held up as a model for its cautious approach to reopening schools. Yet, it reported growing outbreaks when its schools went mask optional, even as the CDC reported low community levels of spread. Schools across heavily vaccinated Vermont and New Hampshire reported growing disruption, with some closing for several days due to staffing shortages. Brookline, one of the most vaccinated communities in the US, saw an uptick in cases that forced it to reinstate masks.

As schools prepare to open, the BA5 subvariant is once again driving cases upward as political will to act falls ever lower. Already BA5 has closed summer camps, and England reported a six-month high of COVID-19 absences in July even after stripping isolation requirements. Hospital admissions in children-now largely vaccine-preventable- surpassed the peak seen during the summer Delta wave.

Yet, US leaders have done little to set the stage for a normal school year. Policymakers have dispensed with masks and testing, but we haven't invested in real off-ramps for these school mitigation strategies. Newton, MA boasts a ventilation action plan informed by the nation's top experts and a ventilation dashboard that shows improvement in indoor air quality; however, the US has yet to establish national standards for ventilation and efforts to improve ventilation in schools elsewhere have lagged far behind. The Omicron surge hospitalized children at record rates and one in five child deaths occurred during the surge. However, the US never mounted an all hands on deck vaccination campaign even as it has rolled back mitigation strategies in schools or childcares. To date, less than one in three children ages 5-11 are fully vaccinated, and available data shows disparities by race and income.

We've unmasked American children, but in doing so we may also unmask our political failures. Political leaders could hide their unwillingness to invest in the conditions for safe and stable education, including better ventilation, behind face coverings. Now lifted, we may see that neither masks nor the embattled educators or exhausted families held hostage by a virus and the willingness of our political leaders to act to control it are the problem. The problem is the failure of US leaders across the political spectrum to put our nation's children and families first.