CDC revises school advice, ushering in full reopenings

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention revised its guidelines for schools Friday, saying 3 feet of distance between students is sufficient for all elementary and most middle and high schools — a change that lays the groundwork for many districts to reopen full time for inperson classes.

The announcement came as the CDC published new research that found limited coronavirus transmission in schools that require masks but not always 6 feet of distance, which had been the standard. That was true even in areas with high community spread of the virus.

However, the Pittsburgh Public Schools district, which plans to reopen its buildings next month for the first time since March 2020, said it will maintain the 6-foot distance between students.

Spokeswoman Ebony Pugh said PPS staff has already done a lot of workon classroom layouts, and the district wants to focus on reopening instead of reassembling.

“We’ll review [the new guidance],” she said. “At this point right now, we’re going to stay where we’re at.”

The new guidelines represent a significant reversal from CDC guidance issued last month that schools maintain 6 feet of distance between people. To achieve that, the CDC said, schools in most of the country should hold off on fully reopening.

That put the CDC at odds with President Joe Biden, who has called on schools to fully reopen.

The February recommendation

also came under fire from many experts as overly cautious, particularly as more evidence emerged that schools were safely operating with people closer to one another. Nonetheless, with the guidance in place, many districts adopted hybrid systems, where students are in school buildings part of the time and learning from home the rest.

CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said Friday that new evidence prompted the change.

“CDC is committed to leading with science and updating our guidance as new evidence emerges,” she said in a statement. “These updated recommendations provide the evidence-based roadmap to help schools reopen safely, and remain open, for inperson instruction.”

Until recently, the debate over distancing in schools has been complicated by a lack of research directly comparing the risks of various distances between people. Most researchers say the research behind the 6-foot parameter is outdated, but they also agree that more distance is better.

A growing number of scientists have called for smaller distances in schools, saying the risk must be weighed against growing examples of safe reopening and mounting evidence of mental health and academic harms to students who have been learning remotely for more than a year.

“Look, 100 feet is safer than 6 feet, which is safer than 3 feet,” former CDC Director Tom Frieden said during a Washington Post Live interview this week. “Is 3 feet OK for most schools? Absolutely, if they mask, if they rapidly identify cases and isolate and quarantine.”

That case was bolstered last week with a study, published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases, that found similar rates of spread in Massachusetts school districts that used a 3-foot minimum and those that used 6.

Some said the new rules would speed a return to more normal school.

“Like everyone else, we’re waiting for the CDC to change its social distancing guidelines so we can go to 3 feet,” said Roberto Padilla, superintendent of the Newburgh, N.Y., city schools. He said he hopes to ramp up from a hybrid system to full time this spring.

New York City schools welcomed the news and tweeted that it would allow the district to “bring even more students back into buildings!” The district said it would offer a new opt-in opportunity for families next week.

In Philadelphia, Superintendent William Hite also hopes the recommendations will help ramp up in-person teaching, but the district has a long way to go. Currently, an agreement with the teachers union allows only for children in pre-K through second grade in buildings, and only part time.

“We’re going to quickly pivot to reanalyzing distancing for the classrooms and schools so that we can open those rooms and schools to more children,” Superintendent Hite said Friday.

But the change is opposed by the country’s two large teachers unions, and it’s far from clear that teachers will go along. Ahead of the announcement, the unions argued that there is scant research about the impact of closer contact in urban schools, where buildings are older and classrooms more crowded.

“We are concerned that the CDC has changed one of the basic rules for how to ensure school safety without demonstrating certainty that the change is justified by the science,” said Becky Pringle, president of the National Education Association.

The CDC said Friday that most of the schoolbased infections have been among adults or between students and staff. Therefore, it recommended 6 feet of distance between students and their teachers and among teachers and staff. But the agency said the rules can be relaxed for student-to-student interactions.

For elementary schools, it said, 3 feet of distance among students is sufficient no matter what the infection rates are in the surrounding community. Young children are much less likely to have severe cases of COVID-19, and some research suggests they spread the coronavirus less efficiently than adolescents and teens.

The recommendations are more complex for middle and high schools and depend on which of four levels of community transmission a represent in the surrounding area. At the three lowest levels, the CDC says 3 feet of distance is sufficient for all schools. But at the highest tier, the agency recommends 6 feet — meaning schools would probably have to rotate students in a hybrid system. As of Sunday, CDC data showed that 40% of U.S. counties were in that highest tier, defined as a seven-day average of 100 or more daily cases per 100,000 people.

The agency says that even then, secondary schools can drop the standard to 3 feet, but only if they are able to keep students in cohorts, which limit interactions to a small group. That is difficult to do in middle and high school, where students typically break into different groups depending on the course.