Scott: New CDC school distancing guidelines a ‘game changer’ for Vermont

By Lola Duffort/VTDigger

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released new guidelines for distancing in K-12 schools on Friday, March 19, likely paving the way for much more full-time, in-person instruction in Vermont.

For now, the state recommends that schools keep children in K-5 grades 3 feet apart, and older students 6 feet apart. Until recently, CDC guidelines were even more conservative, arguing that even the youngest children should be kept 6 feet apart where transmission rates in the wider community were substantial.

But that changed Friday when the federal agency announced that 3 feet would suffice across all grade levels, at least in most circumstances.

There have been two key obstacles to getting kids back to school in-person full-time: a lack of vaccination for school staff, and the 6-foot requirement, which many school officials argued made it often logistically impossible to fit all students back into buildings at once.

But teachers across the country, including Vermont, are now eligible to get their Covid-19 vaccine shots.

“If the CDC comes out and decides to go from 6 feet to 3 feet, that’s a game-changer,” Gov. Phil Scott said Friday during his regular Covid-19 press conference. “I see no reason why we wouldn’t be back in in-person instruction before long.”

Dr. Mark Levine, Vermont’s commissioner of health, was more circumspect but implied Vermont’s own guidelines may indeed soon follow suit.

The CDC had only just made its announcement, Levine said at the press conference, and he hadn’t had the chance to fully review the new guidelines. He also noted that 6 feet was still the recommended distance in the upper grades where community transmission was “high” and said it wasn’t yet clear to state officials what metric the CDC believed states should use.

Still, Levine said he was “pretty comfortable” with the CDC’s new approach.

“We have been looking for this kind of guidance for quite some time now,” he said. “You’ve heard all the compelling discussions regarding how our children and adolescents are not doing so well, and the better and quicker we can get them back into their in-person learning environment, the better.”

There are other caveats with the CDC’s guidelines. Adults in schools must still remain 6 feet apart, as should students when they are unmasked to eat. The new recommendations also place additional importance on ventilation, which experts have long criticized the CDC for not adequately emphasizing.

The Scott administration has been telegraphing for months that it wants kids back in person after the April school break, and Dave Younce, president of the Vermont Superintendents Association, said this does largely clear the way for most kids to return to full-time, in-person instruction. Now, about 30% of students are already back in school four or five days a week, according to data from the Agency of Education.

“My hunch is that most people in most places are going to do their absolute best to figure out how to make this happen,” Younce said.

But the CDC’s new guidelines are “no panacea,” Younce said, and some families may want to stick to remote learning. Some local officials have also argued it makes little sense to redesign everything so late in the school year, and it’s possible some communities will opt to stick to a mix of remote and in-person learning.

Further reopening schools will be complicated work, Younce said. If state officials really want all kids back in full-time sometime in April, they should aim to get updated recommendations that spell out the rules of the road to schools no later than the end of this month.

“The ability to pivot overnight, it doesn’t exist,” he said.