The governor has announced that the statewide mandate, that requires masks to be worn in all schools, will be lifted on Feb 28.
That means that school systems will be allowed, but not required, to drop the mask mandate.
What would you like to see Newton do? Keep the masks or lose them?
I expect Newton schools to follow the science and drop the mask requirement on 2/28. Additional delay would be unconscionable.
I think I’m ok with dropping the masks, as long as the vax rates of students and faculty at NPS are high and the cases continue to drop. My family has been very COVID cautious, but I think it’s time. We are coming in on two years of kids not having a normal school experience!
But I’m a little concerned about it being right after February break. I’d rather it start on March 7.
I agree with Mary..the timing would be a bit better if it wasn’t right after Feb break when many families travel. Let everyone come home and test themselves as well.
How much extra paperwork could it have been for one more week of masking for the Governor to write up and sign?
Drop them. They are very disruptive to human communication and not justified anymore.
Apparently my kid isn’t ready to drop her mask…. She can wear it…… so interesting! She said her classmates are all traveling for vacation.
In Newton, this decision should be based on the rate of transmission, as opposed to a fixed date.
Anyone, staff member or student, who chooses to continue wearing a mask should be supported, neither teased or harrassed. There may be some older staff especially who have a good reason to wear the type of mask that offers a degree of protection.
But many other people have simply been traumatized by the past couple years; it could take time for them to recover and let go.
I don’t think we should have been masking the students, at all, especially the younger ones. Not enough benefit, at too heavy a cost. And obviously remote schooling was a panic-induced disaster. Period. We’re supposed to protect our kids, not vice versa.
> And obviously remote schooling was a panic-induced disaster. Period.
Masks are one thing, revisiting the past is another. I’ll take on your use of the word “obviously”.
Any sudden change in teaching methodology, particularly one of this scale, is going to have major negatives. I had two kids in NPS. One actually thrived under remote once it was well-established, but suffered under hybrid. My other kid suffered during both, but has really blossomed when classes returned. I’ve heard many different stories all across the spectrum, but you’d find few if any people who think it was a net win for sure.
However, let’s not lose historical perspective here. Within a month of when schools closed in Massachusetts, the Biogen conference in Boston ballooned the 30 known COVID cases in the US into a superspreader event that, according to a paper in Science, may have led to 245,000 infections worldwide. It ripped through the families and communities of Biogen employees, primarily in the Boston suburbs, in a matter of weeks. In the face of such an unheard of infection, hospitalization, and death, drastic public health action was warranted.
A whole lot of things happened between then and now, in my opinions all well-intentioned. We should learn from them, but to judge them effectively we have to place them in their context.
> We’re supposed to protect our kids, not vice versa.
I’ve heard this line a lot. I disagree. I think we do best when we raise kids as a part of society, where we all have obligations to protect each other, be it our friends, families, or society. The difference between kids and adults is adults nominally have more experience and better judgement to deal with a variety of sometime serious situations. That doesn’t mean we’re perfect or infallible. It isn’t like very many of us could draw from our experience in other pandemics. In general I believe we kind of did the best we can.
At the appropriate time, I support the idea of a “no finger pointing” assessment of Newton’s COVID response for the express purpose of informing future decisions, whether by us or by later generations. For the cost we have paid, we deserve that benefit.
Make face coverings optional.
Requiring face coverings is detrimental to students with disabilities.
Fuller has continually underutilized one of the most expert-laden communities in the world- we have so many people in Newton that are highly qualified to get us to a great answer.
Ideally, all of our COVID policies should be conditions-based, grounded in the best evidence of the time.
From a values standpoint, we should be prioritizing our children to return to normalcy and uninterrupted education as much as feasible. IMHO, that would be generally looser COVID restrictions for school than other activities. The burden should be on the adults, not the kids. We’ve had that one backwards the whole time.
… funny guy. Anyone who had kids in remote will tell you it was a complete disaster.
What grades were your kids in during the remote phase?
Now college aged or high school may have had better experience … but younger kids struggled
@Andy Levin, “And obviously remote schooling was a panic-induced disaster. Period.” It wasn’t. It never was, it never will be, and it is the not so distant future will be the way most students learn, starting with the children of ultra-wealthy, followed by everyone else. Children from much poorer countries will get better educations than those in rich first-world countries like ours if we don’t start investing there.
There has been an ongoing narrative that remote schooling is terrible. There’s actually very little statistical evidence that supports this claim. In fact, the only areas where remote schooling tends to be seen as significantly worse than in-person is in low-income communities where students rely on social services from their schools, such as free breakfast and lunch.
I’m not going to jump into a debate about the benefits and drawbacks of remote learning in our community. Here’s one benefit: METCO students did not have to sit on a bus for 2 hours everyday. Here’s a drawback: Social time between students was limited. The lists go on in either direction. There are even more anecdotal stories.
The COVID-19 pandemic had a lot of lose-lose situations. Going remote in so quickly was never going to work well. But remote learning is not something we should ignore and I hope we at a local level consider making that an option to all students in the not so distant future.
Hi Henry:
We agree there is a role for remote learning… but only as an option for individual students in specific situations.
Also, we agree METCO kids shouldn’t have to sit in a bus so long, but that issue should be addressed independently and shouldn’t be presented as a silver lining. As you mentioned, less-advantaged kids suffered greatly from the schools lockdown.
I’m interested to know why you think uber-wealthy folks would want their children educated on Zoom rather than with their peers in a classroom. Enough so to start a trend. That is a radical take on this.
Good morning Andy,
I reread my comment this morning and think it came across as a bit aggressive – Even though I did not intend for that it and no one has complained I’m sorry if you felt that way.
Back to our off-topic discussion. I don’t think too many ultra-wealthy want their kids taught on Zoom today. But the future is definitely online, or at least a hybrid solution. You can already see it with Elon Musk starting the Ad Astra online school. As immersive technology gets better, there is really no reason I can see why parents will not favor online learning. Online learning will allow for the smartest to attend school with the smartest (from all over their specific region and world), wider breadth of classes available to students (Local ex. Right now if you go to NNHS and want to take German, you can’t, yet it is offered at NSHS)… the list goes on. I just see it as inevitable. Will there still be in person activity between students, such as sports? Of course.
Think of it this way, 50 years ago it would have been impossible for a kid from India to learn about the basics of macroeconomics. Today all the educational information necessary to get a college education is available online for free and can be accessed anywhere. I think we are kidding ourselves when we say Newton offers a world class education. Newton exemplifies the best of the corrupt and dated US education system.
The bottom line is that I think we should not be so quick to go back to all of our old ways, and that extends outside of schooling and education.
@Henry, I agree that online education has opened up new vistas, but as a BU engineering prof, I am now less of a fan of (purely) online ed than I was before Covid. Engineering is hard. Being in the room with the prof helps students stay focused for much longer, and allows profs to change the approach in real time if the students are confused. And we had a terrible time examining students remotely. Online works for first exposure, but much less well for the day-to-day of learning hard-won skills in critical thinking and technical ability.
John, that’s a good point. Certainly some hands-on professions are better suited for in-person at this time, perhaps with VR and other immersive technology not so much in the future, but who knows.
Joyce, thanks. For anyone reading, you can substitute German with Russian, or any other subject offered at other schools, ex. computer science, but not in NPS.
Minor clarification: German isn’t an option at NSHS. World languages offered include: Chinese, French, Latin, Russian, and Spanish.
Remote school for elementary students was not school. It was coloring, watching tv and everything other than learning to read.
It was a disaster. 100%
Make masking optional, immediately, since masks are unnecessary on February 28, then they are unnecessary Now.
https://brownstone.org/articles/more-than-150-comparative-studies-and-articles-on-mask-ineffectiveness-and-harms/
@Henry, a health amount of pre-COVID research on remote learning seems to disagree. Virtual learning and tools will have their role and place, but for students who go fully remote, academic and life outcomes seem to go down rather than up.
Wealthy parents in particularly will be the last to go remote, because of the socialization and networking benefit their children (and they themselves) get in private schools.
What ever happened to data-driven decision making? Studies have failed to find a relation between school mandates and transmission. If someone has found contrary evidence, please point me to it. In light of this, the decision to mask a child should be made by parents and children, not by bureaucrats.
I do have to ask data. Our kids have lost two plus years of normal learning. The pace of normal learning. The social interactions for two years. The learning of independent skills. The last time my child had a normal grade was in 7th grade and she is now a sophomore. Not only were the academics not the same, but she lost the ability to learn how to take the green line into Boston with her friends. Coordinate pick up and drop off with friends to the movies. Sleep overs. She is in 10th grade, and has never had a date. This is a current high school student. Current middle schoolers missed out on two years of normal social interactions. Younger elementary kids have not attended a normal class birthday party of 20 kids hyped up on pizza at an indoor place space. Our kids have LOST so much more than academics.
College kids are about to graduate, and their only normal year was freshman year of college. Four years of college (paid for) and they had three semesters of normal college life.
Society has lost so much. Not just academics.
This is precisely right. I wouldn’t support forced masking even if it did work, but just in case anybody has any remaining misconceptions about this fact, the following passage is from the NY Times article yesterday about masking in schools:
—
Other experts believe that the universal mask mandates are almost worthless. Among the reasons: Medical masks are designed for adults, not children, Michael Osterholm, a University of Minnesota epidemiologist, notes. Even masks designed for children slip off their faces. Children take off their masks to eat. Add in Omicron’s intense contagiousness, and the benefits of the current mandates may be tiny.
—
In addition to being widely respected on the left, Osterholm is known for being very cautious about covid across the board.
The losses you relate are real and painful. I see it and I feel it and I know my kids feel it (or won’t, which might be even worse). Thank you for talking about it.
The disconnect, though, is when the impact of COVID is directly conflated with mitigation measures. COVID caused these ills. Concern and fear of sickness and death is real. The societal impact of many people being sick, incapacitated, or dying at the same time is real. (And by many people, I don’t mean some exaggerated number. It doesn’t take many people incapacitated to strain everyday life.)
As much as we’d like to give children a “normal life”, there simply hasn’t been a way to insulate them from the societal burdens of dealing with a pandemic. There is risk, of being sick if usually not worse for kids. Our schools are short-staffed. People are cautious about who they come into contact with. They aren’t excited about spending lots of time in a closed space with strangers. The MBTA has never stopped running; if we haven’t used it, it’s because of us and our fears, not the system, but fear is real.
None of that’s the fault of masks or vaccines or mandates, or really has that much to do with them. It’s the fault of a virus that has no concept of us, or politics, or liberties, or a “normal life”. I am so sorry that the childhood of our kids and the lives of the rest of the people of the planet was severed by a pandemic. That includes the impacts of our well-intentioned countermeasures, but it doesn’t equate to them.
Today we know much more about the virus now than we did two years ago, and we can and should keep talking about what we know about risks and pandemic fatigue and unintended impacts. We DO need to use that knowledge. But we also DO need to be agile, relishing our freedoms but being prepared to protect ourselves and our society if things change. We have to reserve emotional capacity to do that, to make hard decisions if we have to. If Omicron had been just as contagious but 100x as deadly, we’d need to react to that, no matter how tired we are. Virus doesn’t care.
I support relaxing protocols when that makes sense, ideally based on objective health criteria. I think there’s a fairly large and growing amount of data based on real-world experience with masks in schools that we should follow.
But if I were a teacher or staff, you better believe I’d have my N95 mask on religiously, because that’s what I would do if I faced any other potential airborne hazard from fiberglas dust to a kid with any sort of respiratory disease and fever. And I’d be vaccinated just like I’m vaccinated against the measles. And I’d want my colleagues to do it too. We simply can’t afford to lose teachers and staff for days, weeks, or longer, for their sake or our sake. If we face a more contagious variant in the future, we really can’t face large number of kids out sick either. It’s crippling to kids, it’s crippling to families, and it’s crippling to society. Downplaying that always been the fallacy of those who have consistently believed that our response should be based on natural immunity.
But most people, in Newton at least, have a more nuanced view of things. Let’s adapt, eyes open, with sensitivity, compassion, intelligence, and agility.
Amen.
@Jeffrey
2x the rate of COVID at school districts without mask policies than those that required masks. This study looks at the first two weeks at school start in 2021, so background community rates are controlled pretty well by this study design.
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7039e3.htm?s_cid=mm7039e3_w
A different take on that CDC study of masking in schools, from Dr. Vinay Prasad of UCSF.
https://vinayprasadmdmph.substack.com/p/two-new-cdc-studies-on-masking-in
@Andy
Underwhelming by Prasad. Generally, his concerns about the study were noted by the CDC scientists in the initial paper as limitations. His desired model of an RCT is certainly better theoretically, but executing properly without introducing bias is extremely hard to do, particularly as masking has become so hyperpoliticized. He criticizes another study, that was randomized, in a different post on his Substack for precisely this problem. Altogether, he is pointing out flaws that are obvious to those of us who do science for a living. I’ll note he’s a Hem-Onc, not an infectious disease doctor, nor one who has run studies on ID interventions. So I really question his judgment, which is really the only novel thing he’s bringing to the table in the piece you cited.
Given that he claims in his most recent post that Biden should cancel the CDC just like Spotify should cancel Joe Rogan, he sounds a bit unhinged and not neutral in his takes.
Not exactly a trustworthy source. I’m open to true expert opinions that have counter takes, but that isn’t one of them.
It’s time. Unmask the kids already. No need to repeat some of the great comments above, other than Newton remains a highly vaxxed, highly boosted community. Getting Covid is a very different (and virtually non-deadly) than it was two years ago. Xmas break, was a ghost town around here. Families were not afraid to travel. So let’s rip the band-aid off and give these kids their lives back. They only get to live once!
(And our child means the absolute WORLD to us. If I thought this was even remotely dangerous, I would not be saying this.)
Drop the masks. If a student wants to continue wearing a mask, that’s his/her choice, and the choice should be respected.
Also, to the people arguing remote school was not bad – please stop. It flies in the face of huge amounts of research into learning loss and student mental health. Not to mention the common sense experience of the parents of children who had to go through that nightmare. Never again.
Newton was in the NY Times today regarding this very issue: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/10/us/school-mask-mandates.html
We need to be a leader, listen to the MAG and stop the nonsense.
Data is crystal clear. Covid never was much a threat to children and our vax rates make the risk even lower.