The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Friday that schools can reopen safely even without teachers being vaccinated as long as other stringent guidelines are observed, such as mask-wearing and social distancing.
The updated guidelines represent only a modest step toward having children return to schools full time and in person and appear to stop short of CDC Director Rochelle Walensky’s previous statements that schools can reopen safely.
“It’s so important we bring K-12 students back to in-person learning,” Walensky said.
Yet Republicans argued that the guidelines were overly cautious.
“The Biden Administration has watered down their ‘reopen’ school plans to an inadequate goal of ’50 percent of classrooms, one day a week,'” House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy said in a statement. “Families and students deserve better.”
The guidelines separate schools into four color-coded zones: blue, yellow, orange, and red. The determining factor in each zone is the level of community transmission in the surrounding county, with blue being the lowest rate of transmission and red being the highest.
In blue and yellow zones, schools would be able to open for in-person learning as long as they practiced certain mitigation strategies, such as social distancing and mask-wearing. Orange and red zone schools would move to a hybrid of in-person and online instruction, with red zones having no in-person instruction for middle and high schools. They would also have to follow mitigation strategies strictly.
But most schools, Walensky suggested, are in orange or red zones.
“At low levels of community transmission, levels that currently are only in less than 5% of our nation’s counties, CDC recommends that schools can provide full in-person instruction,” Walensky said during a Friday press conference. “However, as levels of community transmission rise into high levels, as is currently the case in over 90% of our counties, schools should require physical distancing of 6 feet and reduce sports and other physical activities.”
The Biden administration has been torn between following the science, which generally says schools are safe to reopen, and placating its allies in the teachers unions, some of which have refused to return to class.
Local teacher unions have recently insisted that teachers won’t be returning to in-person teaching until educators are vaccinated. Recently, most teachers in Chicago refused to return to school. The Chicago Teachers Union is demanding that teachers be immunized first.
