At the time, Susan Enfield was superintendent of the Highline Public Schools outside Seattle, close to the site of the first U.S. outbreak. Like her counterparts in neighboring districts, she was still in disbelief that sending students home was even an option. 

“I’m not sure, at the end of the day, that that was the right decision,” said Enfield, who recently shared her reflections with �鶹��Ʒ. “I don’t think we’ll know for a long time how that really impacted all of us.” 

As the debate over reopening that fall intensified, Enfield was outspoken about the no-win situation leaders were in as they struggled to balance the needs of students with the demands and fears of parents and employees. To her, the predicament felt like having “an enormous square peg that I’m trying to squeeze into a microscopic round hole.”

Like many families and educators over the months and years that followed, Enfield relocated, leaving Highline in 2022 for the larger Washoe County Public Schools in Nevada, which includes Reno. She described the move then as hitting the “superintendent lottery,” but ultimately, stayed just a year and a half. She to return to the Seattle area.

“I’m really happy to be home,” she said. “I’m taking this moment to breathe and figure out how I can contribute from a different vantage point.”

In an interview, she reflected on the past 48 months and how the pandemic has — and has not — transformed the nation’s education system.

The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

�鶹��Ʒ: The Northshore School District, not far from Highline, was the first in the nation to close because of COVID. What comes to mind now as you recall those frantic early days of the pandemic?

Susan Enfield: I’m really in awe of what educators across the country were able to do under really trying circumstances. I’m proud of how we responded. If memory serves, we deployed over 13,000 devices within the first couple weeks of having to close schools. There’s a real sense of pride in how people came together in a time of serious uncertainty and stress and did what they could to take care of our kids.

For those of us that stayed closed for so long, I don’t know if that was the right thing to do. Thousands of kids were out of school for so long, and we know that’s had an impact on them.

Moving from Highline to Washoe, what differences did you see in how the districts approached the closures?

How districts approached it was tied to local politics. The Puget Sound area is the bluest of the blue, whereas Washoe is really purple, politically. Washoe kids came back a year before Highline kids. That was probably the right thing to do.

What Highline was able to do that Washoe wasn’t was device distribution. We had under 20,000 kids, but Washoe had over 60,000, so there’s a magnitude issue. Washoe is a vast geographical area, so it was a challenge for them to distribute devices. Those differences speak to how every district responded as best they could based on their local political context and just the sheer makeup of their district.

Was there anything you would have done differently?

We would all go back and probably do some things differently, but I also had to recognize what was within my control. Our governor mandated schools be closed. I didn’t know at the time that keeping schools closed would be so detrimental. But there was so much fear and uncertainty around the virus, especially for a district like Highline. We have a lot of multifamily, multigenerational homes. The fears people had were very real, very legitimate.

How did the last four years change you personally as a leader? 

It fortified my values as a leader. I’ve always been a big proponent of health and family first, but that was really amplified — not just preaching it, but modeling it. I had to make sure that I was taking care of my people. 

We have a saying out here when it’s a beautiful clear day: “Mountain’s out.” I remember one Saturday. I just tweeted out a beautiful photo of Mount Rainier and said, “The mountain’s out and it’ll be out again tomorrow.” For those of us in leadership roles, we really had to dig into who we were as people, what our values were. The pandemic had an impact, not just on our children, but our teachers and staff as well. They had to re-learn how to be in community with other people after being in isolation for so long.

What are the biggest lessons we’ve learned from the past four years?

During the pandemic, there was so much talk of “We’re not going back to normal” and I was like, “Well, I don’t want to be the voice of doom and gloom, but the muscle memory of a bureaucracy as large as the public education system in the United States is very strong.” I predicted that we would by and large go back to what we knew. 

We learned some things and continue to do some things differently, like the option for virtual meetings. Family participation in [special education] meetings is up because now parents don’t have to take time off work. On the flip side, we still have a digital divide. We still have too many kids that don’t have access to the internet. There’s been some backsliding there.

One of the key lessons is that we can’t focus on instruction without focusing on the overall well-being of our children. We have to make sure that our kids, and staff frankly, get the resources they need to be physically, emotionally and psychologically healthy. For all of the opportunities that technology brought, being in person matters — seeing that face, being hugged, having someone look you in the eye and sit down with you. 

There are various predictions about the chances of another pandemic in our lifetime. If that bears out, how do you think the system would respond? 

We’ve got some playbooks now. We are better prepared because we actually have some blueprints on the logistical part of it. I don’t think it will be the scramble that it was before. And since many of us blessedly lived through the last one, I’m hoping maybe there won’t be the same level of fear and uncertainty that existed before.

I remember doing virtual happy hours with my family in California and a lot of them were literally wiping down their groceries and they weren’t going anywhere. Those of us in school districts couldn’t do that. I don’t think I ever felt that same level of panic and fear because I just couldn’t afford to. I had to help hand out meals.

Do you think schools would close again? 

That’s a really good question. As much as I think closing schools for the length of time we did wasn’t the right thing to do, I know that officials in Washington state have pointed to the very that we had. I don’t know what the perfect answer is.

I was pretty critical of a lot of our elected leaders during that time, but in hindsight, I have more empathy and compassion. I do believe everyone was doing the best they could with what they knew.

On the one hand, I’m just living another round of the fall parenting ritual—the seasonal cold that one of my three kids brought home. 

But on the other hand, that viral downbeat sure hits differently when—like me—you’re one of . After six months of COVID-induced asthma, which was actually lung scarring, which — shucks — is perhaps a pulmonary embolism, which turned out to possibly be heart damage, but instead might be or the curse of the pharaohs or goodness knows what. We’re all just guessing now. 

Anyway boyo, lemme tell you, it doesn’t feel like a standard-issue head cold. 

I suppose, as I lay here, flattened by these twin maladies, at least I can take some succor from the fact that Or, erm, that’s how it seems, anyway. Most of you out there — most of us, I suppose — are with avoiding the virus. Masks are optional — and scarce — pretty much everywhere now, what few we had are evaporating in the face of widespread apathy, and the “your kid was exposed to COVID in school notifications” are down to just one every few weeks. Hang on, gotta reset that particular counter, my phone just rang with a new one. 

Sigh. 

This coming will likely fall somewhere between those two hands—pre-2020 normalcy and the past 2.5 years of crisis. On the normalcy side of the ledger: schools are open everywhere, and essentially all COVID mitigation measures have been driven from campuses. Insofar as we’re talking about the pandemic and schools, we’re relitigating school closure from 2020. have gotten the latest COVID booster vaccine. Why bother? The virus is last year’s story, and avoiding it feels inconvenient. 

And yet, have been above a quarter million since April, with a summer wave cresting at nearly one million new weekly cases. Note, of course, that waning public attentiveness to the pandemic has meant that we’re only administering around 15% as many weekly COVID tests as we ran at our mid-January 2022 peak. In other words, the actual case counts are assuredly much higher. 

Meanwhile, long COVID appears more and serious than we’d like to imagine. Hospitals are being by an unprecedented of respiratory infections. suggest that the U.S. is poised for yet another frustrating, deadly COVID winter. 

Many in education have avoided thinking about the potential need for reinvigorated mitigations — widespread masking, serious quarantining rules and so forth — by narrowing the field of COVID consequences. As I wrote in October 2021, when we were about six weeks into our family’s first COVID case, “When humans interpret the world, when we try to make sense of the situations before us, we’re always in danger of misunderstanding them in self-serving ways. … The key to reasoning this way — interpreting the facts so that they almost always confirm what you’d rather do anyhow — is carefully framing the terms of debate up front.”

And so now, as we muddle into another fall with lower-than-hoped vaccine and booster uptake and already overwhelmed pediatric hospital wards, too many in education focus on narrow truths like these: 1) Most kids don’t appear to get particularly ill from the virus; and 2) Virtual school will never be as effective as in-person instruction. Those are facts, and they flatter these folks’ prior convictions about what must be done next — schools must remain open, making scant-to-zero effort to reduce infections. Schools, scarred after years of trying to keep kids and staff safe in the face of sustained pressure to reopen, shorten COVID quarantine rules, and unmask their campuses, are largely unwilling to risk restoring any protections against spreading infection. 

And yes, if only those were the only facts, the pandemic truly would be over, schools’ winter 2022 path to a consequence-free embrace of a spike in pediatric respiratory infections would be crystal clear. But, naturally, the world of schools, families, children and their broader communities is vastly more complex than that deductive two-step. 

Note, for instance, that we’ve done a generally poor job of protecting children from COVID infection—, more than had been infected, . By the end of the summer, had been infected at least once. The consequences of pediatric infection remain mostly unknown, but many kids, including one of mine, aren’t lucky enough to prance through COVID infection with minor, short-term cold symptoms. 

Or, more grimly, as Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor put it in a New Yorker article last month, “By the end of February, 2022, under the age of eighteen—more than one out of every three hundred and sixty—had lost a caregiver to [COVID]. Black and Latino kids lost their caregivers at nearly twice the rate of white children.” 

I know that no one wants to think about the pandemic as a pressing health crisis anymore. Please believe that I don’t want to write this column yet again. I know that we’ve aligned our default COVID approach with our approach to mass shootings: we do nothing to stop the problem and express impotent frustration when it persists. 

But I submit to you that that sort of magical thinking will work no better now than it has throughout the pandemic. We convince ourselves that the pandemic’s health risks are nothing compared to the impacts on student learning or working caregivers’ careers. Then, naturally, we learn that refusing to mitigate against health risks actually produces ample damage to learning and careers anyway. Indeed, COVID stole a Latino father from his two children in my family’s school community several weeks ago. 

But at least masks are now optional in D.C. schools. At least COVID quarantining has become largely voluntary and on the honor system. At least we can console ourselves with the appearance of normalcy — even if propping up that mirage turns out to be unnecessarily deadly for many in our communities. 

It’s simple: if we yet again refuse to face the public health facts this winter and adopt basic mitigations like mask mandates, social distancing, an aggressive push to increase booster rates and similar … COVID will take the lives of more parents and caregivers, disproportionately low-income and/or disproportionately people of color, in communities around the country. That’s a high price to pay to allow the remainder of us to pretend ourselves into a false dawn of pre-pandemic normalcy.

“Please treat this as you would any illness,” said a from Hendry County School District in Florida. 

The district’s rules specify that staff and students experiencing coronavirus symptoms should stay home, while those who are asymptomatic and fever-free for 24 hours may come to school with or without a face covering.

Across the country, over 95% of the 500 largest school systems had no mask requirement as of Aug. 22, according to an from Burbio, a data service that tracks school policy. Several, however, do still to wear face coverings for three to five days when they return to campus after finishing a five-day quarantine.

Those policies come after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in mid-August eased their K-12 COVID guidelines. Rather than recommending anyone exposed to the virus self-isolate, the CDC now calls for only individuals who test positive or experience symptoms to stay home, effectively doing away with the test-to-stay programs many schools used during the previous academic year. The guidelines still recommend universal masking where COVID levels are high, as they are in several regions of the country, including New York City.

Regardless, the nation’s largest district will return to school with face coverings optional after lifting its mandate last March. Los Angeles, the second largest school system, will do the same. New York City will also end its requirement that students and staff undergo for the virus. 

Breaking the trend, and are enforcing universal masking as students return students to classrooms. Philadelphia’s rule, however, will lift after the first 10 days of school.

Benjamin Linas, a professor of medicine at Boston University, advises schools not to put an outright ban on mask requirements, because the policies can be a helpful temporary tool for staving off outbreaks and preventing missed learning.

“Sometimes schools have to close because they have so much COVID that kids aren’t coming [or] there’s not enough staff,” he told �鶹��Ʒ. “When we’re talking about school mitigation and school masking, we’re talking about learning.”

Indeed, an Albuquerque, New Mexico, charter school on Aug. 16 for a week when over 3% of students and staff tested positive for the virus. And Mannsville Schools, a tiny 95-student Oklahoma district, announced a week-long closure starting Aug. 14.

“Due to an increasingly high number of positive covid tests for both students and staff, we are forced to close for this week to allow time for everyone to get better and not continue to spread the virus,” Mannsville Superintendent Brandi Price-Kelty. “We will make up these days with virtual learning days after Labor Day.”

Other areas have set a higher threshold at which school COVID positivity levels trigger policy changes: 10% in Kansas City means until levels drop, according to the district, and 20% in South Carolina ushers a brief pivot to remote learning, according to the .

“There might be a situation in which you put on masks for 10 days in order to break an in-class cluster and get back to school,” said Linas. “I think people could have more in-person learning and more educational opportunities if we acknowledge sometimes you have to put on a mask in response to an outbreak situation in your own building.”

Thanks to vaccines, COVID hospitalizations and death rates are much lower than they were at the height of the pandemic. But because case rates continue to follow patterns of surges and troughs, infections will still be an issue classrooms must deal with for the foreseeable future, he said. 

“This disease is not yet a common cold, it still does major damage… there’s still a lot of morbidity. [Masking in classrooms when cases spike] is the least invasive policy one could have other than just doing nothing. And I think it would be foolish to do nothing at this point.”

The Federal Food and Drug Administration on Friday authorized both Moderna’s and Pfizer-BioNTech’s vaccines for children as young as 6 months old — meaning COVID shots for the last age group of Americans without access may be just days away.

The vaccines now await sign-off from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the final step before children under 5 can begin rolling up their sleeves. The White House expects providers to begin administering doses on Tuesday, immediately after the federal Juneteenth holiday.

On Wednesday, an FDA panel of experts — made up of pediatricians, infectious disease experts and vaccine researchers — voted 21-0 in favor of both vaccine options.

“There are so many parents who are absolutely desperate to get this vaccine, and I think we owe it to them to give them the choice,” said committee member Jay Portnoy, a professor of pediatrics at Children’s Mercy Hospital in Kansas City, Missouri.

Philip Chan, medical director for the Rhode Island Department of Health, called the panel’s unanimous vote a “major milestone in COVID prevention.” His state is ready to distribute the shots as soon as they receive the all clear, he said.

“We’ve pre-ordered thousands of [doses], and we expect them to ship within 24 or 48 hours after the FDA issues the EUA” (emergency use authorization), he told �鶹��Ʒ Wednesday. With EUA now granted, the COVID shots should soon be on their way.

Parents who are eager to finally vaccinate their young children took advantage of the public comment period at the FDA’s Wednesday committee meeting to urge advisors to recommend authorization. Michael Baker, the father of a 1 and a 3 year old, described the tough choices he has had to make to protect his children from the virus. He shared a slide of all the events they have missed out on during the pandemic, including weddings, holidays and funerals.

“All I am asking is now that … I have the choice to vaccinate my children, [that] I have the choice to do it in the most timely fashion possible,” he said to the committee.

Parents like Baker awaiting vaccines for their little ones have been on a months-long rollercoaster that has repeatedly raised their hopes only to later send them crashing down. In late February, Pfizer-BioNTech first submitted a request asking the FDA to grant emergency authorization for a two-dose regimen of their vaccine for children 6 months to 4 years old, only to then withdraw the application just five days later. Then in April, when Moderna was on the verge of submitting its EUA application for the age group, the FDA postponed the committee review process until Pfizer’s shots were also ready.

Just 29% of children 5 to 11 years old and 59% of youth 12 to 17 years old have so far received two vaccine doses, according to data from the American Academy of Pediatrics. 

However, Katelyn Jetelina, creator of Your Local Epidemiologist, wrote in her hyper-popular newsletter that parents of young kids should still take COVID seriously and vaccinate their children.

“The rate of severe disease is lower compared to adults, but this is an inherently flawed comparison because kids don’t die as often as adults. Since the beginning of the pandemic, 442 children aged 0-4 years old have died from COVID-19. If we compare to other vaccine preventable diseases among children, deaths due to COVID19 are highest. We cannot become numb to these deaths,” she explained.

COVID cases across the U.S. are finally leveling off after a springtime surge fueled by an Omicron subvariant spurred bumps in pediatric infections and hospitalizations through the final weeks of the school year.

You can view the FDA’s and watch the full recording of its June 15 vaccine advisory committee’s virtual meeting:

It’s a major boost in efficacy compared to data from Moderna, which announced in March that its two-dose regimen is 51% protective in toddlers 6 months to 2 years old and 37% protective in youngsters 3 to 6 years old.��

Researchers believe both vaccines offer a strong defense against severe illness and hospitalization in the age group.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration on Monday its vaccine advisory committee will meet June 15 to review Moderna’s and Pfizer-BioNTech’s emergency use authorization requests for kids ages 6 months to 5 years old and 6 months to 4 years old, respectively. Pfizer and BioNTech have not yet submitted an EUA request, but plan to do so by the end of the week, BioNTech CEO Ugur Sahin said in a .

The agency’s advisory committee will make a recommendation on whether to approve the shots at the end of the meeting, which the FDA typically follows. Many experts hope the agency will greenlight shots soon after the mid-June meeting.

“I have some optimism that this will go well at [the] FDA advisory meeting and we might begin immunizing under 5 beginning next month,” Peter Hotez, co-director of Texas Children’s Hospital’s Center for Vaccine Development, wrote on .

Children under 5 years old remain the last Americans without access to COVID vaccines, and parents are eager to protect their children, especially as cases once again rise, said Atlanta-based pediatrician Jennifer Shu.��

On Monday, as the Pfizer news was announced, multiple parents of young children asked whether they could get their kids on a waiting list for the forthcoming vaccines.

“I assure them that we will make availability for everyone who wants [the shots],” said Shu, explaining that her practice has received ample pediatric vaccine supply every time they have placed an order. “I don’t think that access is going to be an issue.”

The news from Pfizer and BioNTech comes on the heels of a months-long saga that has repeatedly raised the hopes of parents anxious to vaccinate their toddlers against COVID only to later send them crashing down. In late February, Pfizer-BioNTech first submitted a request asking the FDA to grant emergency authorization for a two-dose regimen of their vaccine for children 6 months to 4 years old, only to then withdraw the application just five days later.��

Then in April, when Moderna was on the verge of submitting its EUA application for the age group, that the FDA might postpone the review process until Pfizer’s shots were also ready, a reveal that angered many parents and spurred a congressional letter asking the agency to explain the reported delay. The announcement of the June 15 committee meeting appears to confirm those speculations of a simultaneous review.

The trial results released Monday clarified what experts have hinted at since February — that Pfizer’s two-dose regimen never offered the full intended protectiveness for young children.

“It was always a three-dose vaccine,” said Hotez.

The news comes as reported U.S. coronavirus cases are up 53% since two weeks ago and youth infections are also rising, though less steeply. With the increased prevalence of at-home testing, those numbers may fail to capture the full scope of new case totals, said Shu.

During the winter’s massive Omicron surge, children under 5 were hospitalized with the virus at five times the rate they were during the Delta surge, a from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently found. And in February, the agency’s data revealed that kids under 18 had been infected by the virus.

Still, repeat infections remain a threat, and can happen of each other. Children who have not yet been vaccinated are more likely to get sick and, in turn, more likely to experience severe outcomes than immunized peers, said Shu.

“The kids who are ending up in the hospital are more likely not to be vaccinated,” she told �鶹��Ʒ.

Just 28% of children 5 to 11 years old and 58% of youth 12 to 17 years old have received two vaccine doses, rates that have remained nearly stagnant for months.

Aside from recommending that kids roll up their sleeves as soon as they’re eligible, the pediatrician believes schools should consider reinstating universal face-covering rules while infections multiply. While a few schools and districts have made that jump, the vast majority continue to keep masks optional, though some have upped their language recommending masks.��

Shu, however, knows of some children who have chosen to mask up at school as they’ve watched their peers get sick. It’s prom and graduation season, the pediatrician noted, and young people don’t want to miss out.

“If you miss some of these things, you can’t make them up,” said Shu.

Nationwide, reported infections are up 57% since two weeks ago and 4 percent of counties, including large clusters in the Northeast, are categorized as high risk by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s . Another 14 percent are at the medium risk level.

Still, only are requiring students and staff to wear face coverings, according to the latest analysis from Burbio, a data service that has surveyed K-12 policies through the pandemic. 

An outlier, Pittsburgh Public Schools in Pennsylvania recently opted to less than two weeks after having made masks optional districtwide. And Portland, Maine on May 12 also , but clarified that it would not enforce the rule at end-of-year events like graduation and prom.

Much more common, school and health officials are announcing guidance that residents wear masks indoors as case counts rise, but have fallen short of issuing mandates. New York City leaders are residents to wear masks indoors, but the nation’s largest school district has made no changes to its face-covering policy thus far. The Cambridge, Massachusetts superintendent put forward a May 9, “​​encouraging our entire school community to mask, particularly when we are indoors,” but added that “we are NOT reinstating a requirement.”

“While a small number of districts are reinstating mask mandates, what we are seeing more often is district superintendents more forcefully recommending use of masks while not requiring them,” Burbio co-founder Dennis Roche told �鶹��Ʒ.

Mia Miron, 13, is weeks from graduating middle school in Pomona, California. Recently, she’s noticed far more students and staff catching the virus, she said. 

Her friend in science class got infected. And the school called her to the cafeteria last week to notify her of a possible exposure in history class, though she has since tested negative for the virus. Los Angeles County, where Pomona Unified School District is located, has seen a 48% increase in cases over the last two weeks.

“This shot up out of nowhere,” she told �鶹��Ʒ.

Though the district does not require students or staff to wear face coverings, teachers in most classes now remind Miron and her peers that COVID is spreading and that they should mask up and frequently wash their hands, she said.

The eighth grader has worn a mask in school all year long and continues to now, but few of her classmates have heeded educators’ warnings, she said. 

“It’s kinda like 50-50” in terms of who wears face coverings in the classroom, she said.

Ameera Eshtewi, a Portland, Oregon high schooler who attends the Oregon Islamic Academy, a private school, said her school never dropped its universal face-covering requirement. She’s glad: mask-wearing gives her a “level of safety and security,” she told �鶹��Ʒ.

Across the country, reported pediatric COVID infection counts have steadily increased over the past month, but remain far below levels from the worst of the first Omicron surge. For the seven-day period ending May 12, the country reported about 94,000 youth cases compared to over 1.1 million over the same time span in late January, according to data from the .

On Tuesday, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to Pfizer-BioNTech’s booster shots for children aged 5 to 11. The agency has hearings to review Moderna’s vaccines for children 5 and younger.

Meanwhile, as the U.S. surpasses the grim milestone of 1 million lives claimed by COVID, just of youth aged 12 to 17 and 28% of children 5 to 11 have received two vaccine doses. The latest wave of infection includes many people who have been both fully immunized and boosted, leading to a belief that schools cannot realistically take a zero-COVID approach to virus mitigation.

Still, masking requirements should return on a short-term basis in school districts where virus risk is high, believes Benjamin Linas, professor of medicine at Boston University. He serves on an advisory panel for his children’s Brookline, Massachusetts school system and advocated for a temporary reimplementation of universal masking, though on May 11 officials instead opted to “,” but not require, face coverings.

“Unless we’re willing to say, ‘That’s it, we’re 100% done, there’s absolutely nothing we can do to mitigate [COVID spread],’ — and I’m not ready to say that — … then we’re at a point where we should be using masks,” he told �鶹��Ʒ.

The doctor, who was among the first in his liberal suburb to advocate for off-ramps from mask mandates earlier in the spring, added that “once-in-a-lifetime, big events, where interacting with humans and walking around and seeing each other smiling is mission critical to what the event is,” such as prom, should not enforce face-covering rules.

His stance on classroom masking comes less out of concern for curbing community spread, he explained, and more for a desire to keep students from missing school. Face coverings reduce virus transmission in K-12 settings, multiple academic studies have demonstrated, which can prevent young people from quarantine. 

“The reason we want people to wear masks is to protect our own education, now” while cases are up, said Linas.

In early March, a pandemic celebrity best known for advocating that schools should move toward a pre-COVID normal wielded her weapon of choice, arguing in The Atlantic that lifting mask mandates for all but the youngest students is “.”

Emily Oster laid out what she, and many others, understood to be the situation at hand in her opening paragraph: “Although the CDC recently moved to relax COVID guidelines, it continues to recommend universal indoor masking in early-childhood-education programs for those ages 2 and older.” 

The CDC’s coronavirus for child care providers, last updated Jan. 28, lists a number of “key takeaways,” including that the agency “recommends universal indoor masking in [early childhood education] programs for those ages 2 years and older, regardless of vaccination status.”

But in a surprising twist, about a week later, the Brown University economist posted an update on her Instagram story.

“After my piece in @theatlantic last week, the CDC emailed me to let me know they DO NOT recommend masking for toddlers in areas with low or moderate transmission. Toddlers’ masking recommended to align with everyone else,” she wrote. “They are struggling to get the message out so maybe this will help!”

“I realize that seems a little crazy, but I am telling you that is the email I received from a senior person at the CDC.”

The federal agency has a yellow banner at the top of its that says the CDC’s latest recommendations “align precautions for educational settings with those for other community settings.”

“That banner … is intended to replace all of the information that is below it in the bullets that say that kids should still be masking,” Oster said in an Instagram video.

In late February, the CDC made major news when it replaced its previous recommendation that all schools require universal masking, stipulating instead that classrooms could now go mask-optional when community COVID rates were low or moderate, the current virus level across most of the country.

But without a vaccine available for those younger than 5, Oster and many others understood the guidance to apply only to K-12 schools, not early child care and pre-K programs. The CDC is “easing its recommendations for wearing masks in indoor K-12 settings,” the Los Angeles Times .

But in fact, the guidance was meant to apply to all educational levels, including those under 5.

In a Thursday email to �鶹��Ʒ, the CDC confirmed that “recommendations for masks in K-12 schools and early care and education (ECE) programs are consistent with recommendations for other community settings.” 

“Children ages 2-4 have a lower risk of severe disease from COVID-19 and parents of children in ECE programs as well as ECE staff can make appropriate choices about mask wearing in school settings based on local requirements and their personal levels of risk,” wrote spokesperson Jade Fulce.

She did not explain why it has taken the agency several weeks to update its website, but said they would make the information available “as soon as possible.”

To New York City parent Daniela Jampel, whose 4-year-old daughter has continued masking while her older sister goes to school face exposed, the delay is unacceptable.

“It’s ridiculous,” she said. “The CDC is having trouble updating its website so they reach out to Emily Oster?”

“Their website on this issue should not be left to interpretation. It should be very clear,” said Jampel, an early advocate for amid remote learning and now an outspoken critic of the city’s decision to leave masking in place for preschoolers.

Oster agreed that the unconventional communication method underscores the widespread confusion on the issue, but clarified that the CDC did not contact her asking her to spread the word about their policy. Rather, they were correcting what they said was inaccurate information in her Atlantic piece.

“They weren’t like, ‘Oh, by the way, it would be great if you could share with people this information,’” Oster told �鶹��Ʒ. “They just said, ‘Everybody should already know this.’ But I think it’s pretty clear looking at … how people responded that they have not managed to make that clear.”

Several parents, mostly in blue states like New Jersey, Connecticut and Illinois, responded to Oster’s update saying that their child care provider was still requiring masks, said the professor.

“I showed this (post) to my provider,” many parents wrote, and in response were told, “Well, if the website still says that masks are required, that’s not our interpretation of what that banner is.”

“There is a fair amount of people looking to this guidance and trying to interpret it and the way that it is currently stated is extremely difficult to interpret clearly,” said Oster.

The confusion extended to The Atlantic itself, which did not immediately update Oster’s original column to reflect the CDC’s clarified guidance after Oster received the agency’s email. In a follow-up interview with �鶹��Ʒ, Oster said she corresponded with her editor, but because the CDC had made no official announcement on how to interpret the vague website, the outlet decided not to alter its story at that time.

“[The fact-checker] read the banner at the top, but then everything below it still said there should be masking,” she said. “It went under the radar.”

However, after this story first published and �鶹��Ʒ requested comment from The Atlantic, Oster’s piece was updated Thursday night to reflect the disconnect in the CDC’s guidance between the banner and the information below it.

Many early childhood education providers nationwide continue to require universal masking for 2- to 4-year olds.

Head Start, a federal school readiness program serving over 800,000 children from low-income families each year, 2-year-olds and up to wear face masks indoors, although in a Jan. 1 ruling, a U.S. district judge on the program’s rule in 24 states, mostly Republican. In the remaining 26 states, even those that long ago lifted their school mask mandates, participating toddlers are still required to cover up.

New York City Mayor Eric Adams cited hospitalization data when announcing earlier this month that the country’s largest school district was lifting its K-12 mask mandate but keeping the rule for 2- to 4-year-olds.

“When you look at those under 5, they were more likely to be hospitalized,” Adams . “People wanted to say, ‘Let’s lift it across the board,’ but that’s not what the science was showing us.”

Masking in early child care settings is associated with a in program closures due to virus outbreaks, according to a recent study from doctors at Yale University. But the data were collected during the early months of the pandemic before vaccines were available to staff.

And while federal data show that hospitalizations for children under 5 did spike during the Omicron surge, an outsized share of that uptick was driven by newborns not yet 6 months old, who the masking guidance does not apply to anyway.

Meanwhile, COVID cases in Europe are , fueled by a more transmissible Omicron subvariant. Even as infections continue to , many experts warn that the increases across the pond could foreshadow a coming wave in America.

Jampel, despite frustration with the CDC’s haphazard rollout of its guidance for toddlers, doubts whether more clarity would impact the rules affecting her family. 

“New York City schools have done many things that go far beyond what the CDC recommends,” she said. “I’m not convinced that it’s the CDC holding us up, and I’m not convinced that a CDC change will mean that our political leaders will take notice and change their policies.”

Neither the Department of Education nor the Department of Health immediately responded to requests for comment.

Steven Barnett, co-director of the National Institute for Early Education Research, said the two key questions on the issue are “What are the health benefits from masking young children?” and “What are the developmental consequences?”

“The problem with trying to be an expert on this issue is that there is very limited science on which to base conclusions,” he told �鶹��Ʒ in an email. “With respect to the health benefits, the known risks to young children from infection are quite small but this is a novel virus with unknown long-term risks.”

“All this leads me to think,” he continued, “that masks for young children may be prudent when there is a high rate of community transmission” — a conclusion that lands him in alignment with the now clarified CDC guidance.

But with all the CDC’s communication glitches along the way, Oster worries it will impact the public’s faith in the agency, which has been shaken several times throughout the two-year pandemic.

“This erodes trust,” she said. “If people are trying to trust the CDC, they’re trying to listen to them, when the messaging is confused in this way, or incomplete in this way, it makes people less likely to pay attention to the CDC.” 

Like all other public school parents, Plowden faced a choice: On the day New York City’s school mask mandate was lifted, should his son keep his on or take it off in the classroom. 

“I’m going to send him with it, but he can take it off if he wants to,” said the father, explaining that the family has taken COVID seriously, but feels that K-12 masking can’t go on forever. His son contracted the virus and recovered, which gives Plowden a level of confidence that Zayin will be OK, even if he chooses to bare his face.

“I just want him to have a normal school experience again,” said the Brooklyn dad.

On Friday, in an address held in Times Square, Mayor Eric Adams declared that the nation’s largest district would officially be doing away with its face-covering requirement and also rolling back proof-of-vaccination requirements in restaurants, gyms and movie theaters. 

It’s a move that comes on the heels of a tremendous shift away from school mask mandates nationwide in recent weeks, with only of the largest 500 districts now requiring that students cover up compared to 60 percent a month ago, according to data from Burbio, which has tracked school policy through the pandemic. 

In late February, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention changed its guidance, now allowing schools to go mask-optional in areas where transmission is moderate or low.

New York City’s quick pivot — done with the support of the teachers union — breaks from the pattern of other top districts, which have been slower to adjust. Chicago Public Schools will wait another week before going mask-optional March 14, the district Monday, in a move the Chicago Teachers Union said violates a safety agreement requiring masking through the end of the school year. A similar agreement to appears to still be in effect in Los Angeles Unified School District, even as the state plans to lift its mandate March 11.

The change in policy is dividing New Yorkers, many of whom believe it’s too early to roll back pandemic precautions while others are embracing the change.

“I don’t think anyone is comfortable with it,” said Ebonee Smith, a special education teacher at Restoration Academy in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. She entered school on Monday clad with her mask. “It hasn’t been a gradual release.”

Justin Spiro, a social worker in a Queens high school, chose to drop his mask on Monday. “I feel very protected by my three shots,” he said, adding that at times, masks have made his job more difficult.

“Counseling behind a mask is definitely challenging,” he told �鶹��Ʒ. “We rely, subconsciously, on so many facial expressions for showing empathy and showing understanding and expressing emotion.”

Similarly, Park Slope dad Dan Kurfist, whose daughter is in kindergarten, said he was “thrilled” when the city lifted its mandate. 

As for his daughter, she ran into school screaming, “No mask today,” when he dropped her off Monday morning, Kurfist said, estimating that about three-quarters of students were unmasked.

Face coverings will still be required for NYC kids younger than 5 in pre-K and child care, the mayor stipulated on Friday. That age group is not yet eligible for vaccination and has been overrepresented among all pediatric hospitalizations, according to a from the New York State Department of Health. 

About 75 people  gathered in City Hall Park Monday demanding that the mask rules be lifted for 2- to 4-year-olds, holding signs that read “#UnmaskOurToddlers.” One parent, attorney Michael Chessa, said he planned to sue and to seek an injunction lifting the ongoing mask mandate for preschoolers.

“I’m done with the mayor forcing my kid to wear a mask while he spends all day in preschool chewing on it anyway,” said Renana Teplitsky.

“Mask mandates have been lifted everywhere else, so it doesn’t make sense to punish kids 2 to 4,” said Liz Bernstein. “We’re super pro-mask,” the mother-of-two added, but because her 12-year-old child will now be exposed at school, she doesn’t see the use of continuing to mask her toddler. “Kids have siblings,” she pointed out.

Meanwhile, a group rallying under the hashtag #MaskingForAFriend gathered last week, imploring Adams pre-emptively to reconsider his plan to scrap the school mandate.

To Lupe Hernandez, a Tribeca parent of two who is immunocompromised, the mask-optional policy makes her fear for her family’s safety. She herself had COVID twice and is still suffering from long-term side effects, she said. She’s concerned that NYC schools serving low-income students of color than whiter, more affluent schools. Citywide, just over half of students are fully vaccinated.

“I think this is way too early” to drop masks, she told �鶹��Ʒ. If it weren’t for the fact that her 8-year-old has a paraeducator who works with him at school, she would have considered keeping him home on Monday to avoid sitting next to unmasked classmates. The Department of Education reported that attendance was Monday.

“Masks haven’t prevented my child from developing,” she added, saying her son learned to read while attending school wearing one.

Adams on Friday acknowledged the wide-ranging viewpoints on how to navigate this current stage of the pandemic, joking that the city has “8.8 million people, 30 million opinions.”

“It’s reasonable to consider removing masks at this time,” said researcher John Giardina, who emphasized that vaccination continues to be an effective way to stave off severe coronavirus outcomes. 

In mid-February, the Harvard University Ph.D. student was the lead author on a peer-reviewed study spelling out exactly how many cases unmasking in school might trigger depending on factors like vaccine coverage and local transmission.

“There is no one-size-fits-all policy for a city as big as New York City,” he cautioned, emphasizing that individual school leaders may want to look at the vaccination levels of their own community to determine the best public health decision.

The breakdown of parent opinions tends to fall along racial lines, Farah Despeignes has noticed. Despeignes is a Bronx mother of two and president of the Community Education Council in District 8. Herself a former educator, she decided to homeschool her children in September rather than send them back to the classroom amid a pandemic. In her experience, Black and Hispanic families, who were more likely to have lost loved ones to the virus, seem to be more cautious in their approach to school COVID mitigation measures.

“I understand that whiter populations may see it more as a question of freedom. But I can tell you, here, it’s not a question of freedom. It’s a question of safety,” she told �鶹��Ʒ. “A lot of these parents and children live in multi-generational homes. They have comorbidities that can be fatal.”

Still, many families fall somewhere in the middle.

On Monday morning, Sonia Maynard dropped off her grandchildren — all masked — at P.S. 093 in Brooklyn. 

“We’re waiting to see how everything goes,” she told �鶹��Ʒ.

Some of her grandchildren’s classmates, Maynard knows, might not be covering up, and that doesn’t bother her. After some days or weeks, it’s possible her grandchildren may join them — “We’ve got to get back to some kind of normalcy,” she said — but not today.

It’s a major departure from the agency’s prior stance, which held that schools should enforce universal masking regardless of virus levels.

“Since July 2021, CDC recommended universal masking in schools no matter what level of impact COVID-19 was having on the community. With this update, CDC will now only recommend universal school masking in communities at the high level,” said CDC epidemiologist Greta Massetti in a media call.

The change comes as part of a wider reconfiguration in COVID policy now recommended by the CDC, easing masking guidelines for most Americans. Rather than using community case rates as the sole metric to determine risk levels, the agency will now use a new formula that also takes COVID hospitalizations and hospital capacity into account. 

Only in counties where COVID risk is high does the agency now recommend universal masking indoors, though individuals may continue to choose to wear face coverings at lower levels depending on their own personal risk and comfort, officials said. 

While only about of U.S. counties were considered low or moderate risk under the old framework, nearly 60 percent now fall into that categorization, accounting for about 70 percent of Americans. Individuals may check the updated risk level for their county on the CDC’s .

The change in school masking guidance comes after weeks of movement at the state and local level to scrap face-covering policies. In early February, several states including New Jersey, Connecticut and Massachusetts announced the end of their school mask mandates, and on Tuesday, the Maryland State Board of Education voted to , though the change needs legislative approval before it will go into effect. ​​Of the 500 largest U.S. school districts, currently require students to wear masks, down from 60 percent at the beginning of February, according to data collected by Burbio, which has tracked school policy through the pandemic.

States such as California and New York have yet to announce an end to their school masking rules. But in a small step toward loosening restrictions, New York City students will on school grounds starting Monday, officials announced Friday morning. California Gov. Gavin Newsom said he will announce an end date for school masking in his state Monday.

The CDC’s move to ease masking guidance represents a broader effort to help Americans return to a “new normal,” even as the virus continues to circulate.

Over 200 million Americans have received their primary vaccine series, pointed out CDC Director Rochelle Walensky, half of whom have been boosted. Many more have a level of immunity due to prior infection.

“With widespread population immunity, the overall risk of severe disease is now generally lower,” said Walensky. “Now as the virus continues to circulate in our community, we must focus our metrics beyond just cases in the community and direct our efforts toward protecting people at high risk for severe ailments and preventing COVID-19 from overwhelming our hospitals and our health care system.”

President Biden and the CDC have previously speculated the end of the pandemic, even giving the summer of 2021 the hopeful title “summer of freedom,” before the Delta surge quickly proved that COVID would continue to disrupt daily life.

Perhaps with awareness of that history, Massetti emphasized that schools — and the wider community, too — should adjust virus mitigation rules based on changing conditions.

“Public health prevention strategies can be dialed up when our communities are experiencing more severe disease and dialed down when things are more stable.”

Walensky added, “We need to be able to dial them up again should we have a new variant or a new surge.”

Still, some have critiqued the choice to ease masking guidelines as motivated by politics and pandemic weariness. As the CDC prepared to announce updated recommendations, several disability advocates the plan on Twitter.

The new metrics do not take community or school vaccination rates into account, though officials emphasized that vaccination greatly decreases the likelihood of severe illness and hospitalization and thus is indirectly reflected in the new thresholds.

Nationwide, a quarter of children aged 5 to 11 and 57 percent of youth aged 12 to 17 are fully vaccinated against COVID-19, according to data from the .��Shots for children under 5 will not be available for over a month.

The most recent vaccine timelines say your child , but with shots widely available to adolescents, teens and adults, it seemed the country was returning to something resembling normalcy: Restaurants are full, movie theaters are open and professional sports are back in full swing.

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At the same time, however, rampant spread of the more infectious Delta variant spurred the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Tuesday to reverse course on masking recommendations in schools, now whether vaccinated or not.With COVID cases , and with especially rapid transmission in under-vaccinated areas, the risks of the pandemic to kids has not faded.

“The Delta variant resets the COVID clock back to March 2020 for people who are not yet vaccinated, including children,” Rebecca Wurtz, professor of health policy at the University of Minnesota, told �鶹��Ʒ via email.

That leaves many parents wondering how to safely navigate the fast approaching back-to-school season. With in wide circulation, we spoke directly to health experts to offer some clarity.

Here’s what they had to say:

1 Is the Delta variant more dangerous to my child than previous strains of COVID-19?

Short answer: yes and no.

The level of danger to kids includes two important dimensions: 1) how likely is it that a child will contract the virus, and 2) how likely is it that, once testing positive, a child will suffer a serious outcome like hospitalization or long-term symptoms.

On the first front, the Delta variant is significantly more transmissible than other COVID strains. With the mutation now the predominant strain in the U.S., there is an elevated risk that anyone unvaccinated, including kids, will catch the virus, doctors told �鶹��Ʒ.

But on the second front, there is no indication, says UCLA professor of pediatrics Ishminder Kaur, that when young people test positive, even for the Delta variant, they are getting sicker than they would with previous strains.

“We might see an increase in number [of cases], but we’re not seeing an increase in severity,” the infectious disease expert told �鶹��Ʒ.

That’s extremely good news, says Janet Englund, professor of pediatrics at the University of Washington School of Medicine.

Consistent across all strains, the COVID expert told �鶹��Ʒ, “children who get infected with the virus, even a variant, are less likely to get very sick than an adult.”

A rare but severe condition, multisystem inflammatory syndrome, does appear to be , and between also include months of “long COVID” symptoms like brain fog and tiredness. But recent numbers from the United Kingdom put the absolute risk of death from the coronavirus in children at approximately .

2 Is in-person learning safe this fall?

While of course there are exceptions, droves of academic studies show that, for the majority of students, learning in the classroom is linked to positive academic and socio-emotional outcomes.

Last school year, a collection of 130 studies found that schools were not the locus of community spread, and could safely reopen as long as safety measures like ventilation, masking and distancing were in place and infection rates in the surrounding area were not raging.

“Children should return to school in person this fall to make avail of all the benefits of in-person learning,” encouraged Amruta Padhye, pediatric infectious disease specialist at the University of Missouri. On Friday, the White House officials said .

But a safe reopening is predicated on schools implementing measures to mitigate spread of the virus. So what combinations of protocols actually makes a school “safe?” Read on.

3 What if my child’s school doesn’t require masks?

On Tuesday, the CDC changed its K-12 guidance to say that all students, faculty and visitors in schools should wear masks, in alignment with previous recommendations from the American Academy of Pediatrics and the World Health Organization. But that hasn’t made the question of masks in school any less political.

Seven states still bar school districts from requiring face coverings in the classroom, while another six mandate that all schools enforce universal masking, according to Burbio’s . Most other states leave the decision up to individual school systems.

In light of super-heated debates, and quickly changing guidance that represents just how rapidly the Delta variant has changed the COVID safety landscape, parental uncertainty on how to navigate face coverings in school is extremely valid.

The research, however, is clear: “Masks have been proven to reduce transmission of virus and protect those who are still unvaccinated,” Padhye wrote in an email to �鶹��Ʒ.

Even if your school does not require masks or your state bans face-covering mandates, you should still put one on your child when they go back to school, said Kaur.

“It’s still an extra barrier in place,” the UCLA health expert advised.

4 Beyond face coverings, what other strategies stop the spread in school?

In addition to masking, the California pediatrician points to the importance of “layered” virus mitigation strategies — or “using multiple strategies together and using them consistently,” she says.

Three-foot distancing is one key measure, she says, but staying apart can be tricky in classrooms cramped for space.

When masking is not required and proper distancing is not an option, parents can advocate for an array of other approaches, experts say, including:

• Smaller groups of students working together: Kaur recommends parents ask their district, “What is the expected class size for my child?”
• Outdoor activities, whenever possible: “You want to have a school that, for example, has outdoor recess as opposed to indoor recess,” said Englund.
• Avoiding large functions held inside: “I would discourage ‘all-school’ indoor events, like pep rallies and assemblies,” advises Wurtz.
• Maximizing airflow: “Urge your child’s school to improve ventilation in classrooms by opening windows (as long as the weather allows) and providing in-classroom HEPA filters,” Wurtz added.

5 How useful are symptom checks?

Containing the coronavirus in classrooms also means making sure the most virulent spreaders don’t walk through the schoolhouse door.

Of course, there will always be asymptomatic cases among children, but according to a recent study co-authored by Englund, .

“If you’re symptomatic, if you’re sick, you have more virus,” said the Seattle infectious disease expert. “One could infer that you’re more infectious.”

In other words, using screens such as temperature checks to aggressively keep students and staff who are experiencing COVID symptoms out of the school building could go a long way toward reducing transmission, even if a few asymptomatic carriers slip through the cracks.

“Screening sick kids to keep (them) out of school makes sense,” Englund said.

6 What else can I do to protect my child?

Vaccination has proven to be a strong defense against the Delta variant, even with the now-likely possibility that a as a booster for the elderly and immunocompromised.

While children under 12 years old still lack access to even the initial COVID shots, parents can work to ensure that those in their immediate circle are immunized, limiting kids’ exposure.

It’s a tried and true public health technique known as “cocooning” — often used for infants — Wurtz explained, where caretakers of those too young for immunization make sure their own shots are up to date to provide a level of buffer to protect the vulnerable child.

“Since children below 12 years old are not yet eligible for vaccination, it makes it even more imperative that family members who are eligible get fully vaccinated,” said University of Missouri’s Padhye.

Beyond family members, Wurtz says, the cocooning technique can include “encouraging your school district to encourage or require all of its personnel … to be vaccinated, as well as encouraging other children’s activity providers … and extended family members to be vaccinated.”

Combining available safety strategies, Kaur hopes, can allow families seeking to return their children to classrooms to feel comfortable with the move. After all, she says, “the best learning environment for a child is in person.”