Tuesday night’s School Committee discussed the recommendations of the Medical Advisory Group to move to an optional mask policy within the schools.
At the meeting the committee took an informal straw vote that was unanimous in accepting the recommendations. Nothing is official until the formal vote at next Monday’s (March 7) School Committee but all signs point to the school mask mandate being dropped on March 8.
The two situations where masks would still be required are:
People returning from COVID infection on days 6-10 (CDC requires 10 days of masking, regardless of vaccination status)
In nursing/health offices
For context, the reason they took the straw vote was to indicate to the NPS administration that the mask mandate was extremely likely to be rescinded effective March 8th, so facilities and building staff would have time to prepare teachers remove masking signs, etc. It’s important to remember that rescinding the mandate does not mean no masks. The district sent, in my view, a clear, well balanced note to all parents which said in part:
“As we move to this mask-optional environment, we will emphasize personal choice and responsibility around masking. There will be many reasons for which students and staff continue to wear masks. There will be reasons students and staff decide not to wear masks. All decisions will be supported and we will ask our school communities to be respectful of others’ individual choices”
Surely the teacher’s union will respond in a measured, collaborative,and perhaps supportive manner. It would not be like them to chicken little this whole thing. Not one bit.
I have no idea what this comment means other than letting us know Elmo’s glass continues to be a quarter full (if that) on just about every issue. Educators will prepare for the end of the mask mandate once an official vote is taken on Monday evening.
I’m pretty sure they have already started going over the new rules. Happened in both my kids classes on Friday!
Preparation for rescinding the mask mandate will officially begin once the SC takes a vote on Monday evening. It’s how school systems work.
One week is all that’s necessary to prepare students. No need to harp on the subject. Kids just need to know that everyone will make his/her own decision about masking and it will be essential to be respectful of the full range of choices.
It has already begun. That is the reality. There were official presentations shown to the kids last week.
There will be no masks on Tuesday, and its the right decision.
The straw vote was taken for the specific reason of allowing the administration to prepare in advance of the Monday meeting.
The state of my glass is a clear reflection of the mediocrity of the Newton public school system which has been enabled by the long term obstructionism of the teachers union. My family has experienced 34.5 student-school-years spread over three children across close to two decades. It has been disappointing relative to expectation. The number of excellent teachers has been roughly equivalent, if not fewer than, the number of truly disappointing teachers in elementary, middle, and high school. The handling of COVID was basically atrocious. The physical plant has been poor at best. College advising has been very meh. I could go on (and on and on), but I am pretty sure the picture is clear. Anyone expecting excellence and knowing what educational excellence looks like cannot help but given the Newton Public School system a solid C.
Elmo keep preaching my friend. I’m with you. The NPS Union and Zilles have been a total joke since day 1 of the pandemic. I’m surprised the teachers even still want to work.
The Mask mandate was purely a political statement. My kids haven’t worn a mask one day outside of school yet forced til now to wear one in school. Thankfully my daughter won’t have to wear one under the big top for the Prom.
And I agree with your evaluation of the teachers. Where do they find some of these people? The cream of the crop must be in Weston, Dover, Wayland etc Bc they aren’t here. Then again Maybe it starts at the top with the minor league administration. Who knows. NPS have certainly fallen since March 2020…onward and upward only way to go but with Fleishman and Fuller leading the charge not sure any changes coming for the better.
Ken Maybe you should be advocating to pay teachers a fair living wage instead of complaining that the best teachers aren’t teaching in Newton. Teachers salaries in Brookline and Newton are a joke when you consider what the cost of living is here.
Elmo, why not limit your comments to actions that the union has taken … rather than comments on what you imagine they will do … but haven’t.
And have no intention of taking.
During their presentation to the school committee and in their written recommendation, the Medical Advisory Group made sure to point out that many places in the US and indeed many countries never masked young children, in school or elsewhere, and these states/districts/countries did NOT see increased transmission of covid in schools.
As hard as it will be for many people in Newton to acknowledge, masking students for two years had profound costs for little to no benefit.
It is vitally important that people in our community recognize that covid cases in schools go up and down along with broader community spread, and that places that “did everything right” got covid along with everybody else. No doubt everybody reading this knows dozens of vaccinated, boosted, careful Newton residents who got Omicron over Christmas.
There was no justification for masks in school in September, there was no justification for masks in school in January, and there will be no justification for masks in school next fall when we get another seasonal wave.
I’m happy for the kids. I’ve been a big proponent of masking but I think the science is there. After two years of disrupted learning and socialization, they really deserve a great last few months of the school year.
Three quick points. I hope and suspect that the City has a plan in place to expeditiously reinstate whatever mask mandates are needed if a new variant hits in the coming months. It should be easier this time around since they can generally draw on what worked and didn’t work from the beginning of the pandemic to Omicron. I also wish there was a more general push for N 95 masks instead of the flimsy blue colored coverings I still see most people still wearing. A national effort to stock up on N 95 masks would seem to be a prudent move during the interim between variants.
Still, we don’t know if another variant is in the offing, how deadly it will be, how well existing vaccines will contain it and a range of other possibilities and probabilities before the fact. And it takes time for the scientific community to determine the peculiar effects of each variant once it arrives. I just want to shake my head in disgust when people condemn the experts for changing their assessment of what each variant will do as it progresses through the population. I’m not a scientist, but I learned in my government career that the mark of good and morally robust science is the ability to change preliminary assessments as new data and research come in.
And the variant doesn’t care what any of us think. It’s got its own agenda.
Cloth masks on school kids never “worked.” There is a reason that blue state America is a global outlier in doing it.
Forced masking is not coming back without lawsuits, I can promise you that.
Are you referring to cloth masks or all masks? If you are referring to all masks, you are flat out wrong. You might want to check out these CDC studies:
https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2021/p0924-school-masking.html
No one has ever said that masks are 100% full-proof. Surgical masks were deemed less effective against Omicron than other variants. N95 masks were more effective against all variants. The key word here is “reduce” not eliminate. Appropriate masks reduce the likelihood of transmitting Covid-19 during an outbreak. They don’t eliminate the risk. T say that they do nothing is a gross misrepresentation.
Well put Bob. One undercurrent of the pandemic has been the misunderstanding and misinterpretation of science, by the public but also to a certain extent by scientists. Science is not about being right or being smart. It is the process of discovery, rational thought, and constant learning. We started the pandemic with an urgent threat and a huge number of unknowns. We learned as we went along, in the face of changing circumstances. We will doubtless have to do so again. Agility, humidity, and curiosity are such important parts of being a good scientist.
We need to do a far better job making realistic science, medicine, and engineering, with their principles and strengths and limitations, better integrated with regular human society.
Yes, “humidity” is key ;-)
And, yes, the “humidity” to admit when we make mistakes.
Masks are coming off. No need for a victory lap from either side of the issue. The past few years have caused enough damage on multiple fronts. It’s time to move on, and focus on living our best lives. We close a rough chapter in our history, and look forward to brighter days living with the endemic. That may sound scary, but we’ve been living with other pandemics long before this one hit us. There’s something symbolic about doing this as spring starts to peek it’s beautiful head up. Save your barbs and jabs for Putin. While we’re rightfully focused on creating the best possible learning and living environment for our children, parents in Ukraine have to wonder every night if it’s their last few moments alive with their children. I don’t say this to detract from advocating for our own children, but perspective tends to be a great equalizer.
Amen
Randy: Ten Strike. Thanks
Anyone running for public office better be damn well prepared to make critical decisions in a time of crisis. It’s not an easy gig, and [as we all know] crazy sh!t happens. In my opinion, both Mayor Fuller and the School Committee did an outstanding job dealing with COVID under the most trying circumstances possible. That doesn’t make them immune to criticism. But I personally have only thanks and appreciation for the things they did to keep the Newton community safe during this pandemic.
Yea, I applaud them for keeping kids out of school buildings far more than any district around our over the past two years. Were our kids any more or less safe than kids in Wellesley? Needham? No. Stop with the undying loyalty to the political bullsh!t, please.
Once again with masks Newton is among the last to act, in the state and country. We should be a leader, not a follower. We act like we are scared and unwilling to take risks and do what is right. I call bullsh!t on your comments and wish you would look around the state and world before making such an incorrect and completely out of touch comment.
The state school mask mandate lifted a week ago. The city consulted with some of the world’s foremost public health experts, who are also Newton residents and parents, and lifted the mandate about a week later (with a week’s notice it was going to happen). Definitely not the last community to act.
95% of communities lifted with the state, so yea, we are 9 days behind. We could have voted BEFORE Feb 28, but again, why would we ever want to be a leader.
Many more applied for an exception prior to Feb 28 given their vaccination rates. God forbid we would do that, despite our >95% citywide vax rate.
And you didnt mention that absolute failure of the prior SC to not have high school students enter a building once from March 2020 to Jan 2021. What a joke. Many cities in Mass, other states and countries proved we were the outlier and we were wrong. I stand by my disdain for the administration and while I appreciate today we are in a better place, the right place, the path to get here was horrific.
Frank D – The job of the city’s public health effort isn’t to “take risks” and “what is right” is not as clear as you’re portraying.
From the start of this two years ago its been a constantly changing landscape, with multiple waves of infection waxing and waning, multiple strains, and slow steady learning as we went.
Like Mike Striar I think the mayor and the city did a pretty good navigating these uncharted waters. I’d say the school department at times did quite a good job and at others …not so much.
As a father of a (then) high school kid I thought the schools did a pretty good job initially with shifting the whole system on-line very quickly. I think they did less well once they got on-line. There didn’t seem to be much in the way of improvements in the months that followed.
Likewise when it came to the school building issues it was a mixed bag. Over that first summer when there was opportunity to get ahead on some of the ventilation issues the school department seemed to drop the ball. Once it became a public priority in the autumn I thought they did a good job of getting a lot of work done in a lot of schools in a pretty compressed time frame.
I think the teachers, at least my daughters, did a very impressive job shifting to a totally untested or trained for on-line model of teaching. In my occasional eavesdropping on her on-line classes I was impressed with the work they were doing under very trying circumstances.
From the start to this moment all public health decisions had to take into account wildly opposite personal situations and public attitudes. Yes, kids were at no where near the level of risks from Covid as adults, but kids/schools are also a powerful vector for spreading the virus. If you’re making public health decisions its not just the kids that have to be taken into account its the entire population.
As a parent of a school kid I was very anxious to have schools return to in-person classes. As the husband of someone with a number of serious Covid risk factors I was anxious for the school to NOT return to in-person classes.
None of this is cut and dry and unambiguous.
I run a local theater and we are dealing with all these issues on a much smaller scale. There is no one-size-fits-all policy for our audience. Our audience members have a wide variety of personal circumstances, appetite for risk, and personal attitudes and situations. Some folks are ready willing and able to pick up right where we left off pre-Covid and others won’t be sitting in a theater seat for some time to come. Neither of them are right or wrong.
It’s two years later. We are all very very weary of this whole Covid thing at this point but that doesn’t make it go away. Our job is to month by month, as the situation changes, change how we deal with it as best we can – balancing all the competing interests and goals.
I do agree its time to drop the masks in schools now that the Omicron wave has nearly died out. That’s not to say that masks were wrong at other times.
Even though we’re all tired of it, its unfortunately something we still have to pay attention to. I say this as someone who’s wife just went through a very, very bad case of Covid only in the past month. (She’s fine now).
Between vaccinations, boosters, new treatment protocols and a fair amount of natural immunity due to previous infections we are in a much better and different situation than we were two years ago. From here going forward I’m hoping Covid’s grip continues to loosen and it joins the endemic diseases that are always with us but we learn to live with. I think that’s already begun to happen.
While much of what you say is fair, we have to disagree on pace of reopening. First, hindsight is only 20/20 for those who were wrong. Many thought that our pace was too slow from the start, evidenced by the far faster and better (and correct) pace of opening both in about half the states in the US and Europe. Trust me when I tell you I celebrated trump being booted just like you, but the blue states really messed up schools and Covid measures. It was overly politicized and the people payed the price. Find me a red state/city with higher Covid rates than California or other blues states and I’ll find you one with less. The point, there was no correlation. None.
Newton is far to caring about feeling safe and feeling comfortable and it clouded our ability to look at data and facts. School should have been full time not in spring 2020 but in Sep 2020. Masks should have come off not in school year 20/21 but in sep 2021, the start of this year.
In fact the European cdc, a continent wide health agency, thus less prone to politicization, never once called for masks under 12. Trump made it political and the dems, mostly cnn/msnbc, rolled with the opposite stance.
Our leaders failed us. I didn’t mean take risks with public health, i meant go against the mainstream bullish!t narrative and do the right thing. We were too late every step of the way. And again, it wasn’t hindsight when many were making this argument every step along the way.
Clarifying facts first: Frank is absolutely wrong on COVID rates by blue and red states. Sure there are outliers on both sides, but when you look at the data on case counts, hospitalization and deaths relative to population size, there are clear clusters and differences between blue and red states. Its indisputable. Just look at the data.
With that out of the way, I completely agree with Frank’s overall point. Schools should have been in person sooner, and masks should have been removed sooner. The costs of maintaining both virtual schooling and masking were not considered in the calculus, and there were many arguing it at the time. Jerry’s post does not consider that while decisions were hard, no doubt, school districts across the state and country all had to make the same decisions. On a comparative basis within the state, we were among the worst performers. One of the last back to school last year. It was inexcusable and shouldn’t be forgotten. Fuller disregarded help from many- including Wallensky– and performed worse. You can excuse it, but the metrics were clear.
Bless you, Jerry, for providing a fair, sensible summation. Hindsight is always 20/20, as the adage has it. Second-guessing the city’s pace of lifting Covid measures is a game everyone plays, but it isn’t always meaningful- too much ambiguity.
Overall, from my vantage point, the city has handled the Pandemic fairly well, with the greatest controversy attached to the schools. I admire the teachers who labored valiantly to carry out their mission in extremely difficult circumstances. Before I retired,I utterly believed that the work I assigned and the things we did in class advanced my students’ abilities to think, to write, to read, and to communicate, not that I succeeded with every student. But so much of my approach depended on our time in class that I wonder just how much my classes would have accomplished during the last two years on Zoom. Therefore, I am unwilling to cast stones.
BTW … As expected, the School Committee did vote unanimously on Monday night to make school masks optional. The new policy went into effect yesterday, March 8
Masks are optional, and that is the second most impactful news of the week for NPS. NPS is projecting a need to cut 70+ jobs this summer, 50-60 of which are because of budget shortfalls. (and before anyone blames such shortfalls on the new teachers union contract, they were paid 70th in the state before hand, you can’t expect top outcomes paying middling salaries)
While I’ve been sounding the alarm bells of NPS’ decline over the last 5 years, it seems to have fallen on deaf ears – hopefully this is a wakeup call to reverse the decline.
Jim, after two years of living in a pandemic, when there is evidence that our students need MORE help and more specialized help, NPS is going to cut 70 staff. And while I say NPS, it is really our mayor. IMHO she doesn’t like to give money to NPS. Whatever the politics are, there are kids who have suffered alot in the past two years – losing loved ones, coping with long term illnesses, isolation, loss of socialization (which leads to loss of social skills) and a loss of learning. Our mayor appears to be okay with losing up o 70 staff when the students NEED more social workers, therapists and classroom learning with fewer kids in each classroom. I haven’t ever felt that Mayor Fuller values the schools, unless it is something she was responsible for (funding full day kindergarten).
Our teachers (most of them) have worked harder than they ever have, dealing with more individual student issues and trying to figure out hybrid learning, online learning, etc. My child over the last two years had a dud or two in the high school that barely taught/interacted with the class of students. However, in my experience, 90% of the teachers have given it their all.
And they will be rewarded with larger class sizes, less therapists in the schools and maybe not having a job next year. Way to go Mayor Fuller in supporting the students on Newton Public Schools.