New school guidelines released Friday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention largely reflect practices already in place in Vermont, but they could complicate efforts to bring students back for more in-person education.
The updated guidance comes as President Joe Biden seeks to reopen K-8 schools within his first 100 days in office and as state leaders across the country — including in Vermont — pressure school districts to offer more in-person learning. But while the document rhetorically encourages reopening and states that some in-person instruction is possible “at any level of community transmission” of Covid-19, many of the recommendations would make a full-time return functionally impossible in much of the country.
Gov. Phil Scott has said he hopes to see a full-time return to in-person instruction sometime this year — ideally in April — and state officials have been planning to revisit Vermont’s school pandemic protocols. The CDC recommendations are non-binding, and it will ultimately be the Scott administration’s call whether Vermont’s own guidelines follow suit.
“We just received these this afternoon,” Agency of Education spokesperson Ted Fisher wrote in an email Friday. “Both agencies (Education and Health) are still reviewing the new guidance. We won’t be able to comment until that review is done.”
The federal guidelines tie recommended mitigation measures to community spread and offer a color-coded chart that divides reopening options into four zones: blue (low transmission), yellow (moderate), orange (substantial) and red (high). Transmission is measured using two indicators: the number of new cases per 100,000 people in the past 7 days, and test positivity rate over the past 7 days.
About 90% of all counties in the U.S. fall into red or orange zones, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky told reporters Friday.
By one metric (per capita infection rates), all of Vermont’s counties are currently red or orange. By the other (positivity rates), the entire state is blue or yellow. When the two metrics do not align in a community, the CDC says to use the more aggressive mitigation measures.
“I think that this new guidance points to caution in decision-making,” said Anne Sosin, policy fellow at Dartmouth College’s Nelson A. Rockefeller Center. But she also thinks local decision makers shouldn’t necessarily be bound by either metric, neither of which she believes to be a particularly accurate indicator of the pandemic’s pervasiveness in Vermont.
The state’s positivity rate is consistently low — despite high case counts — because it tests on such a massive scale, she said. But local infection rates can overstate the severity of the situation because, with such small population numbers, a handful of cases can create statistical flukes.
“If you have two households that go to Connecticut for Thanksgiving and end up with Covid, it may look like you have a real outbreak,” she said.
Vermont, as elsewhere in the country, has been debating where educators should fall in the line for vaccines. The new federal guidelines say state leaders should “consider giving high priority to teachers in early phases of vaccine distribution,” but the guidelines also make clear that vaccinating educators “should not be considered a condition for reopening schools for in-person instruction.”
To Jeanne Collins, a Rutland County superintendent speaking on behalf of the Vermont Superintendents Association, the new federal guidelines are largely a vindication of what schools in the state have already been doing. The federal guidelines, for example, emphasize universal masking, distancing and creating static cohorts of students and teachers that only interact within pods.
But the CDC guidelines are also more conservative than Vermont’s in certain respects, and Collins said that could “increase some of the anxieties and pressures that educators are feeling.”
School officials have said that a full-time return to in-person schooling this year would require distancing to be relaxed in the upper grades. But the new guidelines, according to Collins, would make that impossible.
“This confirms that we cannot relax our mitigation strategies,” she said.
Existing practices in Vermont schools only substantially depart from the new CDC guidelines in three ways: on distancing requirements in the lower grades, testing and athletics.
Vermont currently recommends that in the elementary grades, students be kept a minimum of 3 feet apart, not 6. It has also allowed interscholastic competition to restart, including for indoor sports, and it offers monthly testing to teachers and staff.
In communities with “substantial” or “high” community transmission, the CDC instead recommends that younger children also be spaced 6 feet apart, and suggests schools adopt a hybrid schedule to do so. At that level of viral spread, federal guidelines also recommend that all athletics take place outdoors and distanced, or virtually.
“In-person instruction should be prioritized over extracurricular activities including sports and school events, to minimize risk of transmission in schools and protect in-person learning,” the CDC guidelines state.
At all levels of transmission, the federal guidelines recommend offering weekly testing to teachers and staff, and suggests extending this to students during periods of higher spread.