The District’s public school system will no longer require students and staff to wear masks indoors, Chancellor Lewis D. Ferebee announced. The optional masking policy will go into effect Wednesday.
The announcement Friday arrives days after the city’s health department changed its guidance for education facilities, giving public and private schools and child care facilities the choice of making masks optional. And it marks the latest rollback of covid protocols in schools as case numbers continue to drop across the country.
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The new guidance could result in more quarantining and virtual learning for unvaccinated students. The school system is stopping detailed contact tracing. The new rules require students and staff who are unvaccinated to quarantine for at least five days if they are a close contact of someone in a classroom who tests positive for the virus, even if they are masked and more than three feet away from the person who tests positive.
D.C. says schools and day cares can lift mask requirements
Just 25 percent of eligible D.C. children between the ages of 5 and 11 are vaccinated, with vast disparities in vaccination rates by ward. The city has not released school-by-school vaccination data, but based on vaccination rates by ward, students who attend school’s in the most low-income wards are the least likely to be vaccinated.
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Since schools do not track who is vaccinated, they will rely on a honor system for quarantines, with parents determining if their children need to remain home if someone in their classroom tests positive.
“It is essential for our students to be fully up to date on their vaccines, including their booster shots, to protect themselves from COVID-19 AND to remain in the classroom if they are identified as a close contact of an individual with COVID-19,” Ferebee wrote in a letter to families Friday.
Ferebee struck an agreement with the Washington Teachers’ Union on how to reopen schools in the fall that states that masks are required inside school buildings. But — now contradicting that — the agreement also says that the school district should align with guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which does not recommend masks inside school buildings in the vast majority of the country.
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Jacqueline Pogue Lyons, president of the Washington Teachers’ Union, said she would support lifting the mask mandate so long as the school system reinstates it if case numbers rise.
Charter schools, which educate more than 40 percent of the city’s public school students, can decide if they want to keep their mask requirements.
KIPP DC, the city’s largest charter school, said it will survey staff and families next week to determine if they want to drop the indoor mask requirement. Raymond Weeden, executive director of Thurgood Marshall Academy — a public charter high school in Southeast Washington — said the school’s mask mandate will remain intact for now. The school will gather feedback from staff, parents and students on its next steps.
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Friendship, the second largest charter network, said it has a high number of “medically fragile” students and staff and is still assessing whether it will change its mask policies.
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In recent weeks, as the CDC loosened its guidance, school officials said they received an uptick in feedback about the mask mandate, both from people who wanted to keep it and those who wanted it lifted.
The D.C. State Board of Education said ahead of Ferebee’s announcement that its members believe that schools should keep the mask mandate in place.
“We believe, that for the near future, the mask mandate should remain in place for indoor spaces in schools to protect our youngest students,” the board’s statement reads. “We strongly support increasing District efforts to promote vaccination of all eligible children, to expand high-quality masks and at-home Covid tests to increase robust outdoor education options for every school to help reach a negligible rate of community spread.”
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D.C.'s youngest learners — 3- and 4-year-olds — are still not eligible for coronavirus vaccines. The school system sends these children home with rapid tests when someone tests positive in the classroom. They can return to school without quarantining with proof of a negative test.
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Most of the District’s neighboring counties have already dropped their mask mandates. The Montgomery County Public Schools Board of Education voted unanimously Tuesday to drop the mask mandate effective immediately for the school system of roughly 160,000 students. Fairfax County, Virginia’s largest district, has also dropped its mandate.
Prince George’s County has said that it would drop its mask mandate once the county’s vaccination rate reaches 80 percent.