Last week, Vermont Gov. Phil Scott announced that the state would no longer recommend that students wear masks in schools.
At a press conference March 3, state officials recommended that masks be made optional everywhere indoors — including schools — by March 14.
In many schools, that was welcome news.
Among about 50 superintendents contacted by VTDigger, more than a dozen said their districts and supervisory unions have already made masking optional, or plan to do so.
“I feel good about (March) 14th,” said David Young, superintendent of the South Burlington School District, which plans to lift its mandate by that date. “I think the important piece here is, it’s mask-optional, right? We aren’t telling people they can’t wear a mask.”
Many schools have already lifted mandates.
“It has been almost exactly two years since the pandemic turned our world upside down, but I am confident that we are truly turning the corner toward normalcy,” Barre Superintendent Chris Hennessey wrote in a letter to parents last week, announcing that masks would be optional as of Monday, March 7.
In a letter to families last week, St. Johnsbury Superintendent Brian Ricca also announced plans to make masks optional by March 7.
“No one should ask anyone else about their mask-wearing choices,” Ricca told parents in a letter last week. “This is a personal decision, a family decision, and we will be respectful of the options that others make.”
It was not immediately clear if any school districts had opted not to follow the governor’s guidance, though one superintendent — Brigid Nease, of the Harwood Union school district — said that school officials were monitoring Covid-19 cases and had not yet decided whether to follow the recommendations.
Brian Hill, interim superintendent of the Mill River Union school district, expressed some reservations about the new guidance.
“We need (to) take steps to move from pandemic to endemic, and the numbers suggest that the timing for one of those steps is near — but it is hard to not be conflicted about that timing and if it is the right step when experts are conflicted,” Hill wrote in an email. “We’re trying to take it all in stride and help all of our folks feel valued, no matter which side of the masking debate they lean toward.”
Although every Vermont district but one — the Canaan School District — appeared to adopt a mask mandate, the rules proved controversial in some areas of the state.
Last month, anti-vaccine groups — including the Children’s Health Defense, a prominent advocacy organization founded by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — sued the North Country Supervisory Union with the goal of striking down its mask mandate.
A hearing in the case is scheduled for next month, even though the supervisory union’s mandate was rescinded as of March 7.
“Rather than have this be an open question — and have it repeat potentially during the next flu season or Covid season — we’re hoping to have some clarity that this should not have taken place in the first place,” said Jennifer Stella, president of Health Choice Vermont, one of the organizations filing the suit.
The state’s new guidance comes two weeks after the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention loosened its recommendations for masking indoors. The federal agency recommends that masks be worn indoors in counties with high levels of Covid-19 transmission, but still advocates for universal masking in schools, according to its website.
Vermont, however, is recommending that masks be made optional statewide — including all counties and schools.
That marks a change from the state’s previous recommendations, in which mask-wearing was pegged to a school’s vaccination rate.
“We’re going to look at this holistically — the entire state of Vermont, instead of by county, because we’re so intertwined with everyone else,” Scott said last week.
The state is following a nationwide trend of lifting mask mandates in schools — a process that has drawn criticism from some public health experts, who see the trend as politically motivated and unscientific.
“Data, not dates or politics, should guide Vermont’s school COVID-19 policy choices,” Anne Sosin, a policy fellow of health equity at Dartmouth College, wrote on Twitter last week.
But the governor’s announcement last week appears to signal a larger shift in the state’s approach to Covid-19 safety guidelines in schools.
In a memo released last week, the state Agency of Education said that it would no longer issue Covid-19 recommendations for schools and previewed upcoming changes in school testing procedures.
By March 14, “there will be no school-specific COVID-19 prevention and mitigation recommendations issued by the State of Vermont,” the memo reads. “School COVID-19 testing programs (response testing and staff assurance testing) will be phased out at some point in favor of students and staff accessing the same testing programs provided to all Vermonters.”
Agency of Education spokesperson Ted Fisher said in an email that details were not immediately available about “when, and how, school testing will transition to a broader statewide approach, but those conversations are ongoing.”
“Conditions have reached the point where special protections in schools are no longer needed, and there is a lot of interest in ending mandates on things like masking, which have posed challenges for some students during the pandemic,” Fisher said.
