State College Area School District officials are hoping to make masking in schools optional on March 28 as new COVID-19 cases continue to decline in the district and around the region.
Superintendent Bob O’Donnell stressed during Monday night’s school board meeting that no final decision has been made on lifting the mask mandate. The matter will be further discussed during a board work session with the district’s health safety team on March 14.
“We haven’t made that decision yet to do any change to the masking,” O’Donnell said. “From our perspective if the team believes we can safely give kids and faculty an option to have a break from masks then we think we should do that. We’ve said all along that we would be responsive to the pandemic and that’s all we’re trying to do here.”
The district did begin to ease COVID-19 mitigation measures on Monday with the reinstatement of water fountains.
District administrators are hopeful that the current downward trend in new cases will continue over the next month. In the last seven days, State College schools had three cases among employees and nine among students. By comparison, SCASD had 31 employee cases and 110 student cases a month earlier during the week of Jan. 14-20.
Among the general population countywide, the current moving seven-day average for new cases is 37, a precipitous drop from the average of 250 a month ago.
SCASD’s attendance rate of 94% last week was on par with at least two other local school districts that have mask-optional policies, Director of Student Services Jeanne Knouse said. Bald Eagle Area’s attendance rate was 94% and Penns Valley’s was 93.5%. Data from Bellefonte, the only other county district with a mask-optional policy, was not available on Monday.
Matt Ferrari, director of Penn State’s Center for Infectious Disease Dynamics and a member of the district’s health and safety team since its inception in 2020, said factors that can be measured within the school district are the primary consideration looking forward.
County case reporting is “an increasingly challenging metric for us to evaluate,” because of the abundance of at-home testing that is not reported through the Pennsylvania Department of Health as well as the high rates of testing at Penn State that are not comparable to surrounding counties.
Low case numbers in schools and high attendance rates are positive trends. He added that while the school district does not require families to report student vaccination status, available information suggests about 80% or more of students are vaccinated against the virus.
“That’s a quite remarkable vaccination rate,” Ferrari said. “That’s demonstrably higher than the surrounding county.”
Several school board members said they appreciated the focus on school data.
“I actually really like what I’m hearing with respect to a greater reliance on the factors that deal with cases in our schools and attendance in our schools,” board member Deborah Anderson said. “It seems to me to make sense, and I would trust the health and safety team for their advice, … to focus on actual cases in our schools and whether there is transmission in our schools and are we losing kids’ educational time when making this decision.”
If masking is made optional, other mitigation measures would remain in place, Knouse said. They include reporting COVID positive cases; contact tracing, isolation and quarantine processes; 6-feet physical distancing at lunch and 3 to 6 feet in classrooms; and airflow, cleaning and sanitizing procedures.
Mandatory masking would remain on all district transportation, per a federal order. In-district preschool programs would remain masked as well, since children 4 and younger are not yet eligible to be vaccinated.
KN95 masks would be made available to high-risk employees and students, and surgical masks will continue to be made available to all employees and students.
A recent Centers for Disease Control study found that N95 or KN95 masks reduce risk of infection for the wearer by 83% and surgical procedure masks reduce the risk by 66%.
Knouse said beginning the discussion now with an eye on the March 28 date gives the district time to work with families of high-risk students.
“We know from past experience that our high risk population can’t move on a dime and we need to plan with them,” Knouse said. “So we feel that regardless of when this mask optional becomes something we can do we need to be planning now for that… We felt five weeks gives us time to meet with those families talk about what’s important to them, what do they need to know, what do we need to do and be planful about that process.”
O’Donnell said he knows masking is “a divided issue,” and that the district wants to make the decision in consultation with its health and safety experts and the board.
Board members Gretchen Brandt and Peter Buck said that in the end everyone has the same goal.
“All of us and every single email we’ve received, no matter what the stance is, have the same goal: that we all want our kids in school and we want to be safe…,” Brandt said. “We really do all have the same goal. It’s just how we’re going to get there.”
