New school year, looser rules
Districts update polices as kids return to class
On Monday students and teachers in the Lehigh Valley will return to school as the COVID-19 pandemic continues worldwide but for the first time in three years they won’t be facing significant health restrictions.
COVID-19 is no less prevalent in the Lehigh Valley than it was a year ago but times have changed and so has the leading guidance from many experts. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention updated its guidance on Aug. 11 in a way that experts say brings it more in line with the way many average Americans have already been living with COVID-19. This new guidance focuses on decreasing the amount of severe illness rather than preventing spread of COVID outright.
The updated recommendations for schools emphasize vaccination and encourages people to stay home when sick. It has also ended the recommendation that students should stay 3 to 6 feet apart in class. Another major change is the CDC no longer recommends that people should quarantine when exposed to someone who has a COVID-19 infection. However, anyone exposed to COVID should mask for 10 days after the exposure, the CDC suggests.
The health and safety plans school districts adopted as well as recommendations from local advisers such as St. Luke’s University Health Network and Lehigh Valley Health
Network, for the most part, reflect the changes the CDC has embraced.
The updated health and safety plan for Allentown School District was approved by the district’s board of school directors Thursday evening.
“We are definitely confi
dent that we’re providing a safe environment.” Tiffany Polek, ASD’s director of student services, said. “We are continuing with our cleaning protocols, also offering masks to anyone that wants to mask. We’ve also kept in place our guidelines for isolation,”
Under current guidelines students who are COVID positive are required to isolate for at least five days. Any student who displays COVID-like symptoms will be sent to the nurse’s office and school nurses will provide families with the steps of what they need to do. The district will not have tests on site but has a list of resources to help parents or guardians find free or easily accessible testing in the community.
Melissa Reese, district spokesperson, said the district will also continue to offer its expanded virtual campus for K-12 students.
The district is ending some pandemic-era practices including discontinuing the use of its COVID-19 dashboard to show how many COVID cases there are in its schools. Polek said district officials decided to stop sharing the numbers because cases decreased and because many other districts have also discontinued the practice.
She said the district will still be collecting and analyzing the data and may bring the case dashboard back if deemed necessary. The district will continue displaying the community level of COVID spread on its website.
Under standards put in place in March ASD is not contact tracing or requiring physical distancing in schools.
Kim Brannon, supervisor of health services for Bethlehem Area School District, said the district is confident in its ability to provide a safe learning environment given the last few years of experience along with the measures it’s taking under its 2022-2023 health and safety plan.
People with symptoms of infectious diseases such as COVID, influenza, respiratory syncytial virus and gastrointestinal infections should stay home and get tested for COVID. Students who display symptoms for COVID will be sent to the nurses office and given rapid mobile tests to take home. Those who test positive for COVID will be required to stay home for at least six days and have no fever before returning to school. Otherwise, they have to wait out the full 10 days.
The Bethlehem Area School District also discontinued using a dashboard to show COVID cases in its schools. Brannon said this is because the district transitioned to using a Google spreadsheet after it became unmanageable to take the volume of calls they were getting after Christmas break.
With the Google spreadsheet, parents enter if their child is COVID positive and when they tested positive. It then tells parents exactly how long they have to quarantine their children based on the date of the positive test. Though the dashboard is gone parents will be informed if there are multiple infections within their child’s classrooms Brannon said.
Wearing masks is optional for students and staff in Allentown and Bethlehem schools. In most circumstances though masks will be given to those who need or want them. However, both staff and students will be required to wear masks for five days if they return to school after five days of quarantine. Bethlehem district officials are also requiring 10 days of masking for those who are asymptomatic but were a close contact of a person who is COVID positive. The Allentown district has no such requirement.
Dr. Amy Slenker, vice chairperson of quality and patient safety for LVHN’s department of medicine and infectious diseases, said the changes in the CDC’s guidelines and the moves many schools are taking reflect the current state of the pandemic. High levels of vaccination and immunity as well as the availability of effective treatment have reduced the risk for serious complications from a COVID infection, including hospitalization and death she said.
“One of the most important lessons that we learned during the pandemic was that the mitigation strategies of masking and social distancing, although helpful to reduce the incidence of COVID-19 infection, may negatively affect the well-being of the individual and the community,” Slenker said. “It’s important that we find a balance to provide a safe but enriching experience for our children.”
Dr. Jeffrey Jahre, infectious disease expert for St. Luke’s, said in an emailed statement, every school district should make its own decisions based on its own on-the-ground circumstances.
“At this point, when the virus appears to be endemic, we are emphasizing the need for personal responsibility as opposed to mandates and shutdowns,” Jahre said.
Slenker added it is important for schools to monitor infection rates within their communities and adjust their guidance accordingly. Lehigh and Northampton counties have medium levels of COVID spread, according to the CDC, but some pockets within the counties have low-level spread. Slenker said at the medium level, people at high risk for severe infection should consider masking when indoors.
But not all experts agree on whether this move toward fewer preventative measures and greater emphasis on personal accountability is the best move, even if it may be a popular one. Chrysan Cronin, director of the public health program at Muhlenberg College, said she believes more should be done to reduce opportunities for spread, primarily by requiring masks in schools and ensuring there is good ventilation in buildings.
“COVID has not left us even though we feel like we’ve moved on. We still need to be careful, we still need to take precautions to decrease transmission,” Cronin said.
Coronavirus subvariant BA.5 has been the dominant strain in the U.S. and the Lehigh Valley for well over a month and is still prevalent throughout the country. Newer variants of the coronavirus have following a trend of being less likely to cause severe illness than earlier variants while also being more infectious. In fact, BA.5 is one of the most transmissible viruses in modern medicine. But being less deadly isn’t the same as being not deadly at all. About 12,000 people in the United States died from COVID-related illness in July, according to the CDC.
Despite the encouragement of the CDC and many schools, less than half of Pennsylvania’s estimated 1.94 million school-age children have been fully vaccinated. Neither the CDC, the Pennsylvania Department of Health nor the Pennsylvania Department of Education requires the COVID-19 vaccine for children to attend public school.
Brannon said because of this they don’t know exactly how many students are actually fully vaccinated against COVID-19 but she said it is probably around half of the student body. Polek said Allentown has no way of knowing how many children are vaccinated against COVID-19.
Brannon added they are trying to get more students vaccinated. She said 79 students attended a vaccine clinic BASD hosted in mid-August. BASD will hold another clinic Sept. 14 and ASD will hold clinics where the COVID vaccine is available later in the school year.
Cronin said one issue with current guidance is that reporting positive COVID cases among students and staff is basically on an honor system, a concern for some school administrators. Brannon said before home tests became common this wasn’t a problem but now unless a child is symptomatic or the parent informs them there is really no way of knowing, which children have COVID-19.
“It’s very difficult with the home tests,” Brannon said. “When we had the PCRs, the [Bethlehem] Health Bureau would contact us and say, ‘Listen we have five student aged positives. Are they yours?’ So we did find several that were in school and they were positive. But with the home tests, there’s no way to follow that — we’ve lost control.”
Even if a COVID infection doesn’t result in severe illness it can still result in temporary disability or new health problems and it is worth taking some extra minor steps to protect children from these outcomes. She added there are still many unknowns about new COVID, including whether it has potentially decades-longreaching effects like shingles, Epstein-Barr or hepatitis.
“Who knows how many years before we’re going to find the answer to that so why not take precautions now?” Cronin said. “I would much rather not get it over and over again and take the chance that I’m safe. There’s a disconnect between what you’re seeing the public do and what public health wishes the public would do.”