New federal guidelines adjust recommendations for masks, classroom distancing
Posted: July 9, 2021
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Friday issued new federal guidelines that say students who are vaccinated don’t have to wear masks in school this fall unless they are riding the school bus or their school decides otherwise.
Unvaccinated students and staff should continue mask-wearing and schools should offer voluntary routine testing at least once a week, according to the CDC. It also encourages three feet of distancing among unvaccinated kids in the classroom, but says that recommendation shouldn’t prevent classrooms from reopening.
The Hawaii State Teachers Association knows that there is no substitute for in-person learning, and teachers across the state are eager to see their students in classrooms again. We have always said that it’s best to follow the science and we look forward to seeing what guidance our state departments of health and education issue based on today’s recommendations.
While we hope new guidelines will convince everyone who works at or attends schools to get vaccinated, there are still a lot of unanswered questions about how they will be implemented. For instance, if teachers and students who’ve been vaccinated no longer have to wear masks inside school buildings, how will school personnel verify day-to-day who can go without a mask?
Given these unanswered questions, it’s in the best interest of everyone to wear masks when they are indoors until we reach herd immunity. The HSTA believes it’s important for all school personnel to have sufficient access to personal protective equipment, proper ventilation, and cleaning supplies so that classrooms and school facilities are as safe as possible.
We agree with members of the Board of Education and families across the state that students need distance learning options with a dedicated qualified Hawaii teacher. Those options are especially important for those younger students who are not yet eligible to get vaccinated. We learned during the pandemic that attempts to have teachers teach students in the classroom and virtually at the same time did not meet students’ needs.
It is unreasonable to expect families to have to decide between sending their kids to in-person learning or exiting the public school system to home school. It’s also unreasonable for principals to be burdened with the task of figuring out distance learning options on a school-by-school basis without uniform guidance from their complex or the state.
We understand updates about plans for the next school year will be discussed at the next Board of Education meeting on Thursday, July 15. We look forward to the BOE providing guidance to the Hawaii State Department of Education about distance learning options as well as critical health and safety issues.
The following is a transcript of our featured video, a conversation between HSTA President Osa Tui, Jr. and several news reporters on July 9, 2021:
Aloha, everyone. I’m Osa Tui, the new president of the State Teachers Association. We appreciate that the CDC has come up with their guidance this morning. We do have some concerns about the masking guidance for those who are vaccinated, because right now at our schools, our school personnel will have no way to identify who has been or who has not been vaccinated, and so to be able to determine who has to and does not have to wear a mask would become problematic.
We’re also concerned that there are no options for distance learning for our students who are younger than 12 and have no access to vaccinations. We feel that there should be a distance learning option for them, because we don’t want them pulling out of the public school system. And we’ve also seen that if teachers have to teach both online and students in person at the same time, it just doesn’t work. And so we would like to make sure that the Board of (Education) takes this up next week Thursday when they have their meeting. With that, I’ll take any questions.
What do you expect the DOE or the DOH to come out with? I don’t believe they’ve addressed the new CDC guidance as of yet. What kind of response are you expecting from them? How do you think they’re going to either adapt existing guidelines, state guidelines to this or not?
That’s a great question for the Department of Health and Department of Education. We have no idea what they’re going to come up with, and we hope that it aligns with what the CDC says. We’ve seen in the past and times they have metrics that don’t really match with what the CDC has come out, so we are just as anxious to know the answer to that question as you are.
I did talk to (acting state epidemiologist) Dr. Sarah Kemble with the health department, and what she did say was it would just be more practical to recommend for students and teachers to wear masks indoors, and outdoors, they can be without masks unless they’re like in big crowds. So I believe that’s what they’re planning to recommend.
Thank you, Manolo. I know schools are wondering like, what do we do for start-of-the-year assemblies and things like that? Can we have students sitting in the bleachers and things like that? So there’s a lot of questions that we hope that the Department of Health and Department of Education will be able to answer now that this guidance is coming forward from the CDC.
I take it if that is in fact what they recommend, the union is is agreeable to that? And I did talk to somebody from DOE who said — it’s a little vague, but she was saying that there are options for students to have distance learning and they could talk to the school about what options there would be. So what are you thinking as far as what the options are? Have you been given any indication of those?
With regards to your questions about masking, we are supportive of having everyone indoors masked. We’re not at herd immunity, and also if you’ve been vaccinated, it’s not 100 percent yet, so there’s no reason why we shouldn’t continue to keep up these options, especially with the Delta variant really going through our communities and throughout the world. So that’s very important.
As for the distance learning options, what we know and what I’m aware of is that they have contracted with (Stride) K-12 (a private company that offers online curriculum). We’re not sure how they plan to implement that. We don’t want a repeat of last year with the Acellus program. We would love if we could have dedicated teachers from Hawaii teaching. If a school has one or two students at each grade level, if you gather up a whole bunch from different schools, you can have an actual first-grade or third-grade class that is distance learning. And so we would hope that the Board of Ed would consider something like that. We do realize that the school year is right around the corner. For a couple of schools, they’ve already begun. So that is very concerning.
What’s the reaction that you’re getting from the teachers in your union as these new guidelines came out from CDC?
Teachers, even with these guidelines and before these guidelines, our teachers want to be back in the classroom with their students. That is the best way to educate our students. So we want to make sure that they can do that safely, and masks are one way that we’re seeing. And so, part of the other thing with the CDC guidance is that three feet, you know, (it says) try to do three feet, but if you can’t, make sure you’re doing masking. We’re a little concerned about that, but if everyone has what they need, if teachers have masks to give out if students come without masks, or teachers have all the supplies they need, if the DOE addresses ventilation, that’s some of the issues that we definitely see a need to be addressed. The ventilation one is not being addressed, I think, quite as well as could be at this point in time.
Do you have any indication of how these guidelines or safety protocols were successfully implemented during summer school this year? I know that many kids are still going to classes this summer in person.
Yes, but our understanding is the classes during summer school were very small and minimal, you know, not very many kids. So it’s easy to be socially distant when you have smaller classes like that, and we’d love to have smaller classes year round, but that’s not a reality for the upcoming school year.
Do we have any data on how many students — I know you talk about 11,000 teachers being vaccinated — but what about students in the DOE? Any idea whether the DOE’s collecting that kind of info? I mean they’re having these clinics on campuses, but what do we know about vaccination rates among students?
Correct, that part, we don’t have that information. That would be the Department of Health. I did volunteer for a vaccination clinic at McKinley High School, and you know, basically the school is the location, but we’re not taking the data necessarily on who exactly is (getting vaccinated), especially when there’s walkups and things like that. So we’re not the ones that are able to collect that data at school site vaccinations, so the Department of Health would, I would hope, have better information on that.
Do you have any concerns with the physical distancing aspect? I know that the CDC guidelines doesn’t even require it. The health department talked about saying if it could be implemented to do it, but if not, then there are other mitigations. What are your thoughts on the distancing part?
Some of our classrooms are very tiny and some of our class sizes are very large, so it’s going to be extremely difficult to implement those kinds of social distancing. I think we’ve seen over the past year that making sure that kids are washing their hands and that they’re wearing their masks can help alleviate a lot of issues. So our teachers are going to do everything they can to make sure that their students are safe. The safety of our students is of utmost priority.
Going back to one of the concerns, which was ventilation. If it’s not addressed by the time the school year starts, do you guys have any plans as far as just addressing your concerns to the state? Because I know, I mean, I graduated from a public school. There’s some classrooms that didn’t have AC. Are you guys still planning to use those classrooms? It does get hot, it’s still hot in the fall. So what’s the plan then?
So some of the classes where they have AC, they don’t have windows for ventilation, so that’s problematic. Some of the guidance is that if you do have like a building air conditioning unit, that you should turn on the air conditioning unit a couple of hours before school and leave it on to flush out a couple hours after school. From what we’ve heard from the department, they don’t have personnel to stay two hours before and after school to turn it on and off. So there are definitely concerns with regards to the effects of ventilation, and we’ll continue to push. I know that they’ve been sending out box fans to a lot of the classrooms, and sometimes they’ll send two units of a certain device that’s supposed to help, but how do you deploy two units in a school with dozens or more classrooms? Some of it’s like they’re just going through the motions, but I don’t know if it’s really an effective way.
Can you comment generally on sort of the DOE’s level of preparedness at this point in the school year? We have three weeks left until the start of the school year. Can you comment just broadly speaking about whether they’re providing enough communication to families and students and staff? That was a big sticking point last year. Where are we from your point of view?
Last summer, they made a concerted effort to survey parents and what the parents wanted to do with their children. This summer, it’s like well, you know, we can’t do that. It’s kind of ridiculous that they are not able to do something like this and then they’re saying, if you want to distance learning option, call your school. Well the schools at the same time are saying, we would love to offer a distance learning option, but everything that we asked the Department that we want, they say that it’s not an evaluated program or anything like that, so they’re running into roadblocks at the school level. I’ve went to schools and the principals are asking, ‘Do you know anything more? Do you have any guidance?’ Because we are not hearing anything. So they’re continuing to have to scramble to make things up themselves and address those issues unfortunately. So we wish the department would have made some type of concerted effort. We hope that the Board of Ed next week will basically mandate that the department do something to figure this out. But you’re right, there is no time, and these two schools that have started already yesterday, they’re just having to make do with what they have.
Who are those two schools?
The multitrack schools that began yesterday are Holomua Elementary and Mililani Middle. Those are our two multitrack schools that are not, they don’t have enough classroom capacity to have everybody on campus all at once so they staggered the beginning times for all the students.
It sounds like it’s a lot of back and forth between the DOE and the teachers. There’s no fine line or anyone giving you guys clear answers.
Yeah, so it is a little difficult, and thrown into the mix is the fact that the superintendent won’t be here. At the end of this month is the end of her term. So then you have Keith Hayashi, who’s going to be thrown into things starting in August. There’s going to be a lot of questions put upon him as to what we’re doing. But we do have hope that the fact that he is from the school level. He has seen that there’s been guidance or no guidance from the state level and how that affects the school, that you will be able to make decisions at the state level that will assist and allow schools to make proper decisions that we can do as a whole. We have a statewide system for a reason, so let’s try to make the most of that.