With their limited force through state law banning mask needs in schools in November, Palm Beach County School District officials have gotten rid of nearly all COVID-19 protocols for this school year.
Face masks and vaccinations are optional for students and staff, and the district also removed maximum reporting mechanisms when a student or instructor is positive: Schools will not report positive tests to the district, and parents will not be notified if at their child’s school. elegance is positive.
The district also got rid of its online COVID-19 dashboard, leaving parents and network members unaware of the number of cases in schools.
“It’s great to be in the endemic stage, you know? I’m knocking on wood,” Palm Beach County Superintendent of Schools Mike Burke said Aug. 1 at the district’s back-to-school news conference.
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The beginning of last school year, when students and teachers resumed full in-person instruction, arguable when district chiefs tried to find a way to slow the spread of COVID.
The needs for face masks were met with the retrospective of parents with a variety of complaints. They filled hours of public meetings to say that masks were working and that school leaders could impose mask mandates on students.
During the first 3 months of school, district policies changed as the severity of the community’s spread passed through peaks and valleys, but also in reaction to the changing legal landscape created by the state governor and legislators.
Palm Beach County schools had a mask policy that allowed parents to opt out by writing a note at their child’s school and about 10% did. The district then moved to a full face mask mandate in October when the number of cases began to rise in classrooms.
It all came to a head in November, when Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a law banning schools from requiring face masks for students and allowing vaccination requirements for students and staff. The law went into effect on November 18.
The next day, Palm Beach County eliminated the mask requirement. Schools in Miami-Dade and Broward County did the same.
But Palm Beach County’s new policies go beyond vaccination and mask mandates and necessarily avoid all case reports: Schools will no longer report cases to the district and will no longer notify parents when a child takes their children’s elegance testsArray
“You may not know until your child tells you that other people don’t go to school,” said Dr. Kitonga Kiminyo, an infectious disease specialist in Boynton Beach, a father of two teenagers. fair about whether they are positive or negative. “
School district officials stopped updating the online COVID case dashboard in May after the school year ended. Now it was deleted.
“The dashboard voluntarily submitted through the district for the launch of the 2020-2021 school year when parents had the choice for their students: distance or in-person education,” the district said in an emailed statement. “We also continued with the board for the next school year, even though the students returned to training on campus. “
While parents like Kiminyo used the dashboard to make decisions about schools, others criticized the board and the district’s ability to accurately say how many positive cases there were in a school.
For example, last year’s dashboard incorrectly reported the number of positive instances among workers on the first day of school.
Eight of the 19 positive cases among workers were counting errors involving conflicting or unconfirmed tests, other people who no longer had health problems or workers absent from assets when the campuses opened, said Don Noel, the district’s threat and advantage manager, over time.
“I wish this never happened, but we need other people to know. We all try to be transparent. It was just human error. That may not happen in the future,” Noel said.
Burke and other district officials were quick to claim that COVID-19 is an endemic virus, or one that Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health defines as “consistently providing but limited to a specific region,” making rates of disease and illness “predictable. “. . “
But national fitness experts and local doctors are very safe.
“We just haven’t arrived yet,” Kiminyo said. I would say we’ve probably lowered the momentum of BA. 5, but I don’t think we’ve gotten to the point where it’s endemic. We’re still in the middle of this pandemic in Palm Beach County. “
The oscillations between large epidemics and periods of relative calm and the rest of the public physical security measures have made the pandemic difficult to wait and difficult to overcome.
In April, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, expressed optimism that the country is emerging from the darkest days of the pandemic.
“Definitely, right now in this country, we’re out of the pandemic phase,” Fauci said in an interview at the time with PBS NewsHour. “To know, we don’t have 900,000 new infections per day and tens and tens and tens of thousands of hospitalizations and thousands of deaths. Lately we are at a low level. “
Fauci’s comments came as the U. S. The U. S. Food and Drug Administration reported an average of 50,000 new cases each day. At the height of the wave of omicron variants in January, the country reported an average of 800,000 new cases each day, according to CDC data.
But in July, the country plunged into a summer of infections fueled by BA. 5, a highly infectious subvariant of the omicron strain.
In the two weeks between July 15 and 29, the number of deaths in Florida rose to an average of 452 in a week, according to figures from the Florida Department of Health. This is the largest cumulative number of deaths since the end of March.
(BA. 5) is “something we will surely have to take seriously,” Fauci told MSNBC in July. “Everyone should put this pandemic on us and feel and hope that it doesn’t exist. It is. “
Since then, the number of COVID-19-like hospitalizations has stabilized and the concentration of viruses in wastewater has tended to decline.
But the threat of contracting the virus remains “primary” in Florida’s 67 counties, the CDC said Thursday, as the recent number of COVID cases and infection rates remain above 16. 2 percent.
Now, the U. S. The U. S. Census Bureau reports about 90,000 new cases each day, according to CDC data.
Students will need to be tested for COVID at school with parental permission.
Still, if a child is tested at school, they will be sent home for five days on the recommendation of the Florida Department of Health and the CDC.
Palm Beach County pediatrician Shannon Fox-Levine recommends in her office that students wear masks in class, though they are not required to do so.
Her practice also advocates for all eligible children to be vaccinated against COVID.
Children older than 6 months are eligible for vaccinations, and parents can schedule an appointment with their child’s pediatrician or locate a vaccination site on Palm Beach County’s online locator tool.
Katherine Kokal is an education reporter at the Palm Beach Post. You can register for it at kkokal@pbpost. com. Help our work, subscribe today!