Four years after the COVID-19 pandemic closed schools and upended child care, the CDC says parents can start treating the virus like other respiratory illnesses.
Gone are mandated isolation periods and masking. But will schools and child care centers agree?
In case you’ve lost track: Before Friday, all Americans, including school children, were supposed to stay home for at least five days if they had COVID-19 and then mask for a set period of time, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Now, with COVID deaths and hospitalizations dropping, the CDC says children can go back to school when their overall symptoms improve and they’re fever-free for 24 hours without taking medication. Students are “encouraged” to wear a mask when they return.
Still, the change may not affect how individual schools urge parents to react when their children fall sick. Schools and child care providers have a mixed record on following CDC recommendations and often look to local authorities for the ultimate word. And sometimes other goals, such as reducing absences, can influence a state or district’s decisions.
The result can be a confusing array of policies among states and districts, not to mention workplaces — confounding parents whose lives have long been upended by the virus.
“This is so confusing,” said Gloria Cunningham, a single mom in the Boston area. “I just don’t know what I should think of COVID now. Is it still a monster?”
Cunningham, who manages a local store for a national restaurant chain, said her company requires her to take off 10 days if she gets COVID-19. And the school system where her son is in second grade has still been sending home COVID test kits for kids to use before returning to school after long breaks.
“I feel like we should just do away with anything that treats COVID differently or keep all of the precautions,” she said.
The public education system has long held varying policies on COVID. During the 2021-22 school year, 18 states followed CDC recommendations for mask-wearing in class. When the CDC lifted its masking guidelines in February 2022, states such as Massachusetts followed suit, but California kept the mask requirement for schools.
And in the child care world, some providers have long used more stringent testing and isolation protocols than the CDC has recommended. Reasons have ranged from trying to prevent outbreaks to keeping staff healthy — both for their personal safety and to keep the day care open.
Some states moved to more lenient guidelines ahead of the CDC. California and Oregon recently rescinded COVID-19 isolation requirements, and many districts followed their advice.
In an attempt to minimize school absences and address an epidemic of chronic absenteeism, California has encouraged kids to come to school when mildly sick and said that students who test positive for coronavirus but are asymptomatic can attend school. Los Angeles and San Diego’s school systems, among others, have adopted that policy.
But the majority of big-city districts around the country still have asked parents to isolate children for at least five days before returning to school. Some, including Boston and Atlanta, have required students to mask for another five days and report positive COVID-19 test results to the school.
Some school leaders suggest the CDC’s previous five-day isolation requirement was already only loosely followed.
Official policy in Burlington, Massachusetts, has been to have students stay home for five days if they test positive. But Superintendent Eric Conti said the real policy, in effect, is: “It’s a virus. Deal with it.”
That’s because COVID is managed at home, using the honor system.
“Without school-based testing, no one can enforce a five-day COVID policy,” he said via text message.
Ridley School District in the Philadelphia suburbs was already using a policy similar to the new CDC guidelines, said Superintendent Lee Ann Wentzel. Students who test positive for COVID must be fever-free without medication for at least 24 hours before returning to school. When they come back, they must mask for five days. Wentzel said the district is now considering dropping the masking requirement because of the new CDC guidance.
A school or day care’s specific guidelines are consequential for working parents who must miss work if their child can’t go to school or child care. In October 2023, during simultaneous surges of COVID, respiratory syncytial virus and influenza, 104,000 adults reported missing work because of child care issues, the highest number in at least a decade. That number has fallen: Last month, child care problems meant 41,000 adults missed work, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Melissa Colagrosso’s child care center in West Virginia dropped special guidelines for COVID about a year ago, she said. Now, they’re the same as other illnesses: A child must be free of severe symptoms such as fever for at least 24 hours before returning to the center.
“We certainly are treating COVID just like we would treat flu or hand, foot and mouth” disease, said Colagrosso, CEO of A Place To Grow Children’s Center in Oak Hill.
As for kids without symptoms who test positive for COVID? Most parents have stopped testing kids unless they have symptoms, Colagrasso said, so it’s a quandary she has not encountered.
Still, some parents worry the relaxed rules put their communities at greater risk. Evelyn Alemán leads a group of Latino and Indigenous immigrant parents in Los Angeles County. The parents she represents, many of whom suffer from chronic illnesses and lack of access to health care, panicked when California did away with isolation requirements in January.
“I don’t think they’re considering what the impact will be for our families,” she said of California officials. “It feels like they don’t care — that we’re almost expendable.”
Other impacts of the pandemic linger, too, even as restrictions are lifted. In Ridley, the Philadelphia-area district, more students are reclusive and struggle to interact in-person with peers, said Wentzel, the superintendent. Interest in school dances has plummeted.
“Emotionally,” Wentzel said, “they’re having trouble.”
Four years after the COVID-19 pandemic closed schools and upended child care, the CDC says parents can start treating the virus like other respiratory illnesses.
Gone are mandated isolation periods and masking. But will schools and child care centers agree?
In case you’ve lost track: Before Friday, all Americans, including school children, were supposed to stay home for at least five days if they had COVID-19 and then mask for a set period of time, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Now, with COVID deaths and hospitalizations dropping, the CDC says children can go back to school when their overall symptoms improve and they’re fever-free for 24 hours without taking medication. Students are “encouraged” to wear a mask when they return.
Still, the change may not affect how individual schools urge parents to react when their children fall sick. Schools and child care providers have a mixed record on following CDC recommendations and often look to local authorities for the ultimate word. And sometimes other goals, such as reducing absences, can influence a state or district’s decisions.
The result can be a confusing array of policies among states and districts, not to mention workplaces — confounding parents whose lives have long been upended by the virus.
“This is so confusing,” said Gloria Cunningham, a single mom in the Boston area. “I just don’t know what I should think of COVID now. Is it still a monster?”
Cunningham, who manages a local store for a national restaurant chain, said her company requires her to take off 10 days if she gets COVID-19. And the school system where her son is in second grade has still been sending home COVID test kits for kids to use before returning to school after long breaks.
“I feel like we should just do away with anything that treats COVID differently or keep all of the precautions,” she said.
The public education system has long held varying policies on COVID. During the 2021-22 school year, 18 states followed CDC recommendations for mask-wearing in class. When the CDC lifted its masking guidelines in February 2022, states such as Massachusetts followed suit, but California kept the mask requirement for schools.
And in the child care world, some providers have long used more stringent testing and isolation protocols than the CDC has recommended. Reasons have ranged from trying to prevent outbreaks to keeping staff healthy — both for their personal safety and to keep the day care open.
Some states moved to more lenient guidelines ahead of the CDC. California and Oregon recently rescinded COVID-19 isolation requirements, and many districts followed their advice.
In an attempt to minimize school absences and address an epidemic of chronic absenteeism, California has encouraged kids to come to school when mildly sick and said that students who test positive for coronavirus but are asymptomatic can attend school. Los Angeles and San Diego’s school systems, among others, have adopted that policy.
But the majority of big-city districts around the country still have asked parents to isolate children for at least five days before returning to school. Some, including Boston and Atlanta, have required students to mask for another five days and report positive COVID-19 test results to the school.
Some school leaders suggest the CDC’s previous five-day isolation requirement was already only loosely followed.
Official policy in Burlington, Massachusetts, has been to have students stay home for five days if they test positive. But Superintendent Eric Conti said the real policy, in effect, is: “It’s a virus. Deal with it.”
That’s because COVID is managed at home, using the honor system.
“Without school-based testing, no one can enforce a five-day COVID policy,” he said via text message.
Ridley School District in the Philadelphia suburbs was already using a policy similar to the new CDC guidelines, said Superintendent Lee Ann Wentzel. Students who test positive for COVID must be fever-free without medication for at least 24 hours before returning to school. When they come back, they must mask for five days. Wentzel said the district is now considering dropping the masking requirement because of the new CDC guidance.
A school or day care’s specific guidelines are consequential for working parents who must miss work if their child can’t go to school or child care. In October 2023, during simultaneous surges of COVID, respiratory syncytial virus and influenza, 104,000 adults reported missing work because of child care issues, the highest number in at least a decade. That number has fallen: Last month, child care problems meant 41,000 adults missed work, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Melissa Colagrosso’s child care center in West Virginia dropped special guidelines for COVID about a year ago, she said. Now, they’re the same as other illnesses: A child must be free of severe symptoms such as fever for at least 24 hours before returning to the center.
“We certainly are treating COVID just like we would treat flu or hand, foot and mouth” disease, said Colagrosso, CEO of A Place To Grow Children’s Center in Oak Hill.
As for kids without symptoms who test positive for COVID? Most parents have stopped testing kids unless they have symptoms, Colagrasso said, so it’s a quandary she has not encountered.
Still, some parents worry the relaxed rules put their communities at greater risk. Evelyn Alemán leads a group of Latino and Indigenous immigrant parents in Los Angeles County. The parents she represents, many of whom suffer from chronic illnesses and lack of access to health care, panicked when California did away with isolation requirements in January.
“I don’t think they’re considering what the impact will be for our families,” she said of California officials. “It feels like they don’t care — that we’re almost expendable.”
Other impacts of the pandemic linger, too, even as restrictions are lifted. In Ridley, the Philadelphia-area district, more students are reclusive and struggle to interact in-person with peers, said Wentzel, the superintendent. Interest in school dances has plummeted.
“Emotionally,” Wentzel said, “they’re having trouble.”
Four years after the COVID-19 pandemic closed schools and upended child care, the CDC says parents can start treating the virus like other respiratory illnesses.
Gone are mandated isolation periods and masking. But will schools and child care centers agree?
In case you’ve lost track: Before Friday, all Americans, including school children, were supposed to stay home for at least five days if they had COVID-19 and then mask for a set period of time, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Now, with COVID deaths and hospitalizations dropping, the CDC says children can go back to school when their overall symptoms improve and they’re fever-free for 24 hours without taking medication. Students are “encouraged” to wear a mask when they return.
Still, the change may not affect how individual schools urge parents to react when their children fall sick. Schools and child care providers have a mixed record on following CDC recommendations and often look to local authorities for the ultimate word. And sometimes other goals, such as reducing absences, can influence a state or district’s decisions.
The result can be a confusing array of policies among states and districts, not to mention workplaces — confounding parents whose lives have long been upended by the virus.
“This is so confusing,” said Gloria Cunningham, a single mom in the Boston area. “I just don’t know what I should think of COVID now. Is it still a monster?”
Cunningham, who manages a local store for a national restaurant chain, said her company requires her to take off 10 days if she gets COVID-19. And the school system where her son is in second grade has still been sending home COVID test kits for kids to use before returning to school after long breaks.
“I feel like we should just do away with anything that treats COVID differently or keep all of the precautions,” she said.
The public education system has long held varying policies on COVID. During the 2021-22 school year, 18 states followed CDC recommendations for mask-wearing in class. When the CDC lifted its masking guidelines in February 2022, states such as Massachusetts followed suit, but California kept the mask requirement for schools.
And in the child care world, some providers have long used more stringent testing and isolation protocols than the CDC has recommended. Reasons have ranged from trying to prevent outbreaks to keeping staff healthy — both for their personal safety and to keep the day care open.
Some states moved to more lenient guidelines ahead of the CDC. California and Oregon recently rescinded COVID-19 isolation requirements, and many districts followed their advice.
In an attempt to minimize school absences and address an epidemic of chronic absenteeism, California has encouraged kids to come to school when mildly sick and said that students who test positive for coronavirus but are asymptomatic can attend school. Los Angeles and San Diego’s school systems, among others, have adopted that policy.
But the majority of big-city districts around the country still have asked parents to isolate children for at least five days before returning to school. Some, including Boston and Atlanta, have required students to mask for another five days and report positive COVID-19 test results to the school.
Some school leaders suggest the CDC’s previous five-day isolation requirement was already only loosely followed.
Official policy in Burlington, Massachusetts, has been to have students stay home for five days if they test positive. But Superintendent Eric Conti said the real policy, in effect, is: “It’s a virus. Deal with it.”
That’s because COVID is managed at home, using the honor system.
“Without school-based testing, no one can enforce a five-day COVID policy,” he said via text message.
Ridley School District in the Philadelphia suburbs was already using a policy similar to the new CDC guidelines, said Superintendent Lee Ann Wentzel. Students who test positive for COVID must be fever-free without medication for at least 24 hours before returning to school. When they come back, they must mask for five days. Wentzel said the district is now considering dropping the masking requirement because of the new CDC guidance.
A school or day care’s specific guidelines are consequential for working parents who must miss work if their child can’t go to school or child care. In October 2023, during simultaneous surges of COVID, respiratory syncytial virus and influenza, 104,000 adults reported missing work because of child care issues, the highest number in at least a decade. That number has fallen: Last month, child care problems meant 41,000 adults missed work, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Melissa Colagrosso’s child care center in West Virginia dropped special guidelines for COVID about a year ago, she said. Now, they’re the same as other illnesses: A child must be free of severe symptoms such as fever for at least 24 hours before returning to the center.
“We certainly are treating COVID just like we would treat flu or hand, foot and mouth” disease, said Colagrosso, CEO of A Place To Grow Children’s Center in Oak Hill.
As for kids without symptoms who test positive for COVID? Most parents have stopped testing kids unless they have symptoms, Colagrasso said, so it’s a quandary she has not encountered.
Still, some parents worry the relaxed rules put their communities at greater risk. Evelyn Alemán leads a group of Latino and Indigenous immigrant parents in Los Angeles County. The parents she represents, many of whom suffer from chronic illnesses and lack of access to health care, panicked when California did away with isolation requirements in January.
“I don’t think they’re considering what the impact will be for our families,” she said of California officials. “It feels like they don’t care — that we’re almost expendable.”
Other impacts of the pandemic linger, too, even as restrictions are lifted. In Ridley, the Philadelphia-area district, more students are reclusive and struggle to interact in-person with peers, said Wentzel, the superintendent. Interest in school dances has plummeted.
“Emotionally,” Wentzel said, “they’re having trouble.”
Four years after the COVID-19 pandemic closed schools and upended child care, the CDC says parents can start treating the virus like other respiratory illnesses.
Gone are mandated isolation periods and masking. But will schools and child care centers agree?
In case you’ve lost track: Before Friday, all Americans, including school children, were supposed to stay home for at least five days if they had COVID-19 and then mask for a set period of time, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Now, with COVID deaths and hospitalizations dropping, the CDC says children can go back to school when their overall symptoms improve and they’re fever-free for 24 hours without taking medication. Students are “encouraged” to wear a mask when they return.
Still, the change may not affect how individual schools urge parents to react when their children fall sick. Schools and child care providers have a mixed record on following CDC recommendations and often look to local authorities for the ultimate word. And sometimes other goals, such as reducing absences, can influence a state or district’s decisions.
The result can be a confusing array of policies among states and districts, not to mention workplaces — confounding parents whose lives have long been upended by the virus.
“This is so confusing,” said Gloria Cunningham, a single mom in the Boston area. “I just don’t know what I should think of COVID now. Is it still a monster?”
Cunningham, who manages a local store for a national restaurant chain, said her company requires her to take off 10 days if she gets COVID-19. And the school system where her son is in second grade has still been sending home COVID test kits for kids to use before returning to school after long breaks.
“I feel like we should just do away with anything that treats COVID differently or keep all of the precautions,” she said.
The public education system has long held varying policies on COVID. During the 2021-22 school year, 18 states followed CDC recommendations for mask-wearing in class. When the CDC lifted its masking guidelines in February 2022, states such as Massachusetts followed suit, but California kept the mask requirement for schools.
And in the child care world, some providers have long used more stringent testing and isolation protocols than the CDC has recommended. Reasons have ranged from trying to prevent outbreaks to keeping staff healthy — both for their personal safety and to keep the day care open.
Some states moved to more lenient guidelines ahead of the CDC. California and Oregon recently rescinded COVID-19 isolation requirements, and many districts followed their advice.
In an attempt to minimize school absences and address an epidemic of chronic absenteeism, California has encouraged kids to come to school when mildly sick and said that students who test positive for coronavirus but are asymptomatic can attend school. Los Angeles and San Diego’s school systems, among others, have adopted that policy.
But the majority of big-city districts around the country still have asked parents to isolate children for at least five days before returning to school. Some, including Boston and Atlanta, have required students to mask for another five days and report positive COVID-19 test results to the school.
Some school leaders suggest the CDC’s previous five-day isolation requirement was already only loosely followed.
Official policy in Burlington, Massachusetts, has been to have students stay home for five days if they test positive. But Superintendent Eric Conti said the real policy, in effect, is: “It’s a virus. Deal with it.”
That’s because COVID is managed at home, using the honor system.
“Without school-based testing, no one can enforce a five-day COVID policy,” he said via text message.
Ridley School District in the Philadelphia suburbs was already using a policy similar to the new CDC guidelines, said Superintendent Lee Ann Wentzel. Students who test positive for COVID must be fever-free without medication for at least 24 hours before returning to school. When they come back, they must mask for five days. Wentzel said the district is now considering dropping the masking requirement because of the new CDC guidance.
A school or day care’s specific guidelines are consequential for working parents who must miss work if their child can’t go to school or child care. In October 2023, during simultaneous surges of COVID, respiratory syncytial virus and influenza, 104,000 adults reported missing work because of child care issues, the highest number in at least a decade. That number has fallen: Last month, child care problems meant 41,000 adults missed work, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Melissa Colagrosso’s child care center in West Virginia dropped special guidelines for COVID about a year ago, she said. Now, they’re the same as other illnesses: A child must be free of severe symptoms such as fever for at least 24 hours before returning to the center.
“We certainly are treating COVID just like we would treat flu or hand, foot and mouth” disease, said Colagrosso, CEO of A Place To Grow Children’s Center in Oak Hill.
As for kids without symptoms who test positive for COVID? Most parents have stopped testing kids unless they have symptoms, Colagrasso said, so it’s a quandary she has not encountered.
Still, some parents worry the relaxed rules put their communities at greater risk. Evelyn Alemán leads a group of Latino and Indigenous immigrant parents in Los Angeles County. The parents she represents, many of whom suffer from chronic illnesses and lack of access to health care, panicked when California did away with isolation requirements in January.
“I don’t think they’re considering what the impact will be for our families,” she said of California officials. “It feels like they don’t care — that we’re almost expendable.”
Other impacts of the pandemic linger, too, even as restrictions are lifted. In Ridley, the Philadelphia-area district, more students are reclusive and struggle to interact in-person with peers, said Wentzel, the superintendent. Interest in school dances has plummeted.
“Emotionally,” Wentzel said, “they’re having trouble.”
Four years after the COVID-19 pandemic closed schools and upended child care, the CDC says parents can start treating the virus like other respiratory illnesses.
Gone are mandated isolation periods and masking. But will schools and child care centers agree?
In case you’ve lost track: Before Friday, all Americans, including school children, were supposed to stay home for at least five days if they had COVID-19 and then mask for a set period of time, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Now, with COVID deaths and hospitalizations dropping, the CDC says children can go back to school when their overall symptoms improve and they’re fever-free for 24 hours without taking medication. Students are “encouraged” to wear a mask when they return.
Still, the change may not affect how individual schools urge parents to react when their children fall sick. Schools and child care providers have a mixed record on following CDC recommendations and often look to local authorities for the ultimate word. And sometimes other goals, such as reducing absences, can influence a state or district’s decisions.
The result can be a confusing array of policies among states and districts, not to mention workplaces — confounding parents whose lives have long been upended by the virus.
“This is so confusing,” said Gloria Cunningham, a single mom in the Boston area. “I just don’t know what I should think of COVID now. Is it still a monster?”
Cunningham, who manages a local store for a national restaurant chain, said her company requires her to take off 10 days if she gets COVID-19. And the school system where her son is in second grade has still been sending home COVID test kits for kids to use before returning to school after long breaks.
“I feel like we should just do away with anything that treats COVID differently or keep all of the precautions,” she said.
The public education system has long held varying policies on COVID. During the 2021-22 school year, 18 states followed CDC recommendations for mask-wearing in class. When the CDC lifted its masking guidelines in February 2022, states such as Massachusetts followed suit, but California kept the mask requirement for schools.
And in the child care world, some providers have long used more stringent testing and isolation protocols than the CDC has recommended. Reasons have ranged from trying to prevent outbreaks to keeping staff healthy — both for their personal safety and to keep the day care open.
Some states moved to more lenient guidelines ahead of the CDC. California and Oregon recently rescinded COVID-19 isolation requirements, and many districts followed their advice.
In an attempt to minimize school absences and address an epidemic of chronic absenteeism, California has encouraged kids to come to school when mildly sick and said that students who test positive for coronavirus but are asymptomatic can attend school. Los Angeles and San Diego’s school systems, among others, have adopted that policy.
But the majority of big-city districts around the country still have asked parents to isolate children for at least five days before returning to school. Some, including Boston and Atlanta, have required students to mask for another five days and report positive COVID-19 test results to the school.
Some school leaders suggest the CDC’s previous five-day isolation requirement was already only loosely followed.
Official policy in Burlington, Massachusetts, has been to have students stay home for five days if they test positive. But Superintendent Eric Conti said the real policy, in effect, is: “It’s a virus. Deal with it.”
That’s because COVID is managed at home, using the honor system.
“Without school-based testing, no one can enforce a five-day COVID policy,” he said via text message.
Ridley School District in the Philadelphia suburbs was already using a policy similar to the new CDC guidelines, said Superintendent Lee Ann Wentzel. Students who test positive for COVID must be fever-free without medication for at least 24 hours before returning to school. When they come back, they must mask for five days. Wentzel said the district is now considering dropping the masking requirement because of the new CDC guidance.
A school or day care’s specific guidelines are consequential for working parents who must miss work if their child can’t go to school or child care. In October 2023, during simultaneous surges of COVID, respiratory syncytial virus and influenza, 104,000 adults reported missing work because of child care issues, the highest number in at least a decade. That number has fallen: Last month, child care problems meant 41,000 adults missed work, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Melissa Colagrosso’s child care center in West Virginia dropped special guidelines for COVID about a year ago, she said. Now, they’re the same as other illnesses: A child must be free of severe symptoms such as fever for at least 24 hours before returning to the center.
“We certainly are treating COVID just like we would treat flu or hand, foot and mouth” disease, said Colagrosso, CEO of A Place To Grow Children’s Center in Oak Hill.
As for kids without symptoms who test positive for COVID? Most parents have stopped testing kids unless they have symptoms, Colagrasso said, so it’s a quandary she has not encountered.
Still, some parents worry the relaxed rules put their communities at greater risk. Evelyn Alemán leads a group of Latino and Indigenous immigrant parents in Los Angeles County. The parents she represents, many of whom suffer from chronic illnesses and lack of access to health care, panicked when California did away with isolation requirements in January.
“I don’t think they’re considering what the impact will be for our families,” she said of California officials. “It feels like they don’t care — that we’re almost expendable.”
Other impacts of the pandemic linger, too, even as restrictions are lifted. In Ridley, the Philadelphia-area district, more students are reclusive and struggle to interact in-person with peers, said Wentzel, the superintendent. Interest in school dances has plummeted.
“Emotionally,” Wentzel said, “they’re having trouble.”
Four years after the COVID-19 pandemic closed schools and upended child care, the CDC says parents can start treating the virus like other respiratory illnesses.
Gone are mandated isolation periods and masking. But will schools and child care centers agree?
In case you’ve lost track: Before Friday, all Americans, including school children, were supposed to stay home for at least five days if they had COVID-19 and then mask for a set period of time, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Now, with COVID deaths and hospitalizations dropping, the CDC says children can go back to school when their overall symptoms improve and they’re fever-free for 24 hours without taking medication. Students are “encouraged” to wear a mask when they return.
Still, the change may not affect how individual schools urge parents to react when their children fall sick. Schools and child care providers have a mixed record on following CDC recommendations and often look to local authorities for the ultimate word. And sometimes other goals, such as reducing absences, can influence a state or district’s decisions.
The result can be a confusing array of policies among states and districts, not to mention workplaces — confounding parents whose lives have long been upended by the virus.
“This is so confusing,” said Gloria Cunningham, a single mom in the Boston area. “I just don’t know what I should think of COVID now. Is it still a monster?”
Cunningham, who manages a local store for a national restaurant chain, said her company requires her to take off 10 days if she gets COVID-19. And the school system where her son is in second grade has still been sending home COVID test kits for kids to use before returning to school after long breaks.
“I feel like we should just do away with anything that treats COVID differently or keep all of the precautions,” she said.
The public education system has long held varying policies on COVID. During the 2021-22 school year, 18 states followed CDC recommendations for mask-wearing in class. When the CDC lifted its masking guidelines in February 2022, states such as Massachusetts followed suit, but California kept the mask requirement for schools.
And in the child care world, some providers have long used more stringent testing and isolation protocols than the CDC has recommended. Reasons have ranged from trying to prevent outbreaks to keeping staff healthy — both for their personal safety and to keep the day care open.
Some states moved to more lenient guidelines ahead of the CDC. California and Oregon recently rescinded COVID-19 isolation requirements, and many districts followed their advice.
In an attempt to minimize school absences and address an epidemic of chronic absenteeism, California has encouraged kids to come to school when mildly sick and said that students who test positive for coronavirus but are asymptomatic can attend school. Los Angeles and San Diego’s school systems, among others, have adopted that policy.
But the majority of big-city districts around the country still have asked parents to isolate children for at least five days before returning to school. Some, including Boston and Atlanta, have required students to mask for another five days and report positive COVID-19 test results to the school.
Some school leaders suggest the CDC’s previous five-day isolation requirement was already only loosely followed.
Official policy in Burlington, Massachusetts, has been to have students stay home for five days if they test positive. But Superintendent Eric Conti said the real policy, in effect, is: “It’s a virus. Deal with it.”
That’s because COVID is managed at home, using the honor system.
“Without school-based testing, no one can enforce a five-day COVID policy,” he said via text message.
Ridley School District in the Philadelphia suburbs was already using a policy similar to the new CDC guidelines, said Superintendent Lee Ann Wentzel. Students who test positive for COVID must be fever-free without medication for at least 24 hours before returning to school. When they come back, they must mask for five days. Wentzel said the district is now considering dropping the masking requirement because of the new CDC guidance.
A school or day care’s specific guidelines are consequential for working parents who must miss work if their child can’t go to school or child care. In October 2023, during simultaneous surges of COVID, respiratory syncytial virus and influenza, 104,000 adults reported missing work because of child care issues, the highest number in at least a decade. That number has fallen: Last month, child care problems meant 41,000 adults missed work, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Melissa Colagrosso’s child care center in West Virginia dropped special guidelines for COVID about a year ago, she said. Now, they’re the same as other illnesses: A child must be free of severe symptoms such as fever for at least 24 hours before returning to the center.
“We certainly are treating COVID just like we would treat flu or hand, foot and mouth” disease, said Colagrosso, CEO of A Place To Grow Children’s Center in Oak Hill.
As for kids without symptoms who test positive for COVID? Most parents have stopped testing kids unless they have symptoms, Colagrasso said, so it’s a quandary she has not encountered.
Still, some parents worry the relaxed rules put their communities at greater risk. Evelyn Alemán leads a group of Latino and Indigenous immigrant parents in Los Angeles County. The parents she represents, many of whom suffer from chronic illnesses and lack of access to health care, panicked when California did away with isolation requirements in January.
“I don’t think they’re considering what the impact will be for our families,” she said of California officials. “It feels like they don’t care — that we’re almost expendable.”
Other impacts of the pandemic linger, too, even as restrictions are lifted. In Ridley, the Philadelphia-area district, more students are reclusive and struggle to interact in-person with peers, said Wentzel, the superintendent. Interest in school dances has plummeted.
“Emotionally,” Wentzel said, “they’re having trouble.”
Four years after the COVID-19 pandemic closed schools and upended child care, the CDC says parents can start treating the virus like other respiratory illnesses.
Gone are mandated isolation periods and masking. But will schools and child care centers agree?
In case you’ve lost track: Before Friday, all Americans, including school children, were supposed to stay home for at least five days if they had COVID-19 and then mask for a set period of time, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Now, with COVID deaths and hospitalizations dropping, the CDC says children can go back to school when their overall symptoms improve and they’re fever-free for 24 hours without taking medication. Students are “encouraged” to wear a mask when they return.
Still, the change may not affect how individual schools urge parents to react when their children fall sick. Schools and child care providers have a mixed record on following CDC recommendations and often look to local authorities for the ultimate word. And sometimes other goals, such as reducing absences, can influence a state or district’s decisions.
The result can be a confusing array of policies among states and districts, not to mention workplaces — confounding parents whose lives have long been upended by the virus.
“This is so confusing,” said Gloria Cunningham, a single mom in the Boston area. “I just don’t know what I should think of COVID now. Is it still a monster?”
Cunningham, who manages a local store for a national restaurant chain, said her company requires her to take off 10 days if she gets COVID-19. And the school system where her son is in second grade has still been sending home COVID test kits for kids to use before returning to school after long breaks.
“I feel like we should just do away with anything that treats COVID differently or keep all of the precautions,” she said.
The public education system has long held varying policies on COVID. During the 2021-22 school year, 18 states followed CDC recommendations for mask-wearing in class. When the CDC lifted its masking guidelines in February 2022, states such as Massachusetts followed suit, but California kept the mask requirement for schools.
And in the child care world, some providers have long used more stringent testing and isolation protocols than the CDC has recommended. Reasons have ranged from trying to prevent outbreaks to keeping staff healthy — both for their personal safety and to keep the day care open.
Some states moved to more lenient guidelines ahead of the CDC. California and Oregon recently rescinded COVID-19 isolation requirements, and many districts followed their advice.
In an attempt to minimize school absences and address an epidemic of chronic absenteeism, California has encouraged kids to come to school when mildly sick and said that students who test positive for coronavirus but are asymptomatic can attend school. Los Angeles and San Diego’s school systems, among others, have adopted that policy.
But the majority of big-city districts around the country still have asked parents to isolate children for at least five days before returning to school. Some, including Boston and Atlanta, have required students to mask for another five days and report positive COVID-19 test results to the school.
Some school leaders suggest the CDC’s previous five-day isolation requirement was already only loosely followed.
Official policy in Burlington, Massachusetts, has been to have students stay home for five days if they test positive. But Superintendent Eric Conti said the real policy, in effect, is: “It’s a virus. Deal with it.”
That’s because COVID is managed at home, using the honor system.
“Without school-based testing, no one can enforce a five-day COVID policy,” he said via text message.
Ridley School District in the Philadelphia suburbs was already using a policy similar to the new CDC guidelines, said Superintendent Lee Ann Wentzel. Students who test positive for COVID must be fever-free without medication for at least 24 hours before returning to school. When they come back, they must mask for five days. Wentzel said the district is now considering dropping the masking requirement because of the new CDC guidance.
A school or day care’s specific guidelines are consequential for working parents who must miss work if their child can’t go to school or child care. In October 2023, during simultaneous surges of COVID, respiratory syncytial virus and influenza, 104,000 adults reported missing work because of child care issues, the highest number in at least a decade. That number has fallen: Last month, child care problems meant 41,000 adults missed work, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Melissa Colagrosso’s child care center in West Virginia dropped special guidelines for COVID about a year ago, she said. Now, they’re the same as other illnesses: A child must be free of severe symptoms such as fever for at least 24 hours before returning to the center.
“We certainly are treating COVID just like we would treat flu or hand, foot and mouth” disease, said Colagrosso, CEO of A Place To Grow Children’s Center in Oak Hill.
As for kids without symptoms who test positive for COVID? Most parents have stopped testing kids unless they have symptoms, Colagrasso said, so it’s a quandary she has not encountered.
Still, some parents worry the relaxed rules put their communities at greater risk. Evelyn Alemán leads a group of Latino and Indigenous immigrant parents in Los Angeles County. The parents she represents, many of whom suffer from chronic illnesses and lack of access to health care, panicked when California did away with isolation requirements in January.
“I don’t think they’re considering what the impact will be for our families,” she said of California officials. “It feels like they don’t care — that we’re almost expendable.”
Other impacts of the pandemic linger, too, even as restrictions are lifted. In Ridley, the Philadelphia-area district, more students are reclusive and struggle to interact in-person with peers, said Wentzel, the superintendent. Interest in school dances has plummeted.
“Emotionally,” Wentzel said, “they’re having trouble.”
Four years after the COVID-19 pandemic closed schools and upended child care, the CDC says parents can start treating the virus like other respiratory illnesses.
Gone are mandated isolation periods and masking. But will schools and child care centers agree?
In case you’ve lost track: Before Friday, all Americans, including school children, were supposed to stay home for at least five days if they had COVID-19 and then mask for a set period of time, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Now, with COVID deaths and hospitalizations dropping, the CDC says children can go back to school when their overall symptoms improve and they’re fever-free for 24 hours without taking medication. Students are “encouraged” to wear a mask when they return.
Still, the change may not affect how individual schools urge parents to react when their children fall sick. Schools and child care providers have a mixed record on following CDC recommendations and often look to local authorities for the ultimate word. And sometimes other goals, such as reducing absences, can influence a state or district’s decisions.
The result can be a confusing array of policies among states and districts, not to mention workplaces — confounding parents whose lives have long been upended by the virus.
“This is so confusing,” said Gloria Cunningham, a single mom in the Boston area. “I just don’t know what I should think of COVID now. Is it still a monster?”
Cunningham, who manages a local store for a national restaurant chain, said her company requires her to take off 10 days if she gets COVID-19. And the school system where her son is in second grade has still been sending home COVID test kits for kids to use before returning to school after long breaks.
“I feel like we should just do away with anything that treats COVID differently or keep all of the precautions,” she said.
The public education system has long held varying policies on COVID. During the 2021-22 school year, 18 states followed CDC recommendations for mask-wearing in class. When the CDC lifted its masking guidelines in February 2022, states such as Massachusetts followed suit, but California kept the mask requirement for schools.
And in the child care world, some providers have long used more stringent testing and isolation protocols than the CDC has recommended. Reasons have ranged from trying to prevent outbreaks to keeping staff healthy — both for their personal safety and to keep the day care open.
Some states moved to more lenient guidelines ahead of the CDC. California and Oregon recently rescinded COVID-19 isolation requirements, and many districts followed their advice.
In an attempt to minimize school absences and address an epidemic of chronic absenteeism, California has encouraged kids to come to school when mildly sick and said that students who test positive for coronavirus but are asymptomatic can attend school. Los Angeles and San Diego’s school systems, among others, have adopted that policy.
But the majority of big-city districts around the country still have asked parents to isolate children for at least five days before returning to school. Some, including Boston and Atlanta, have required students to mask for another five days and report positive COVID-19 test results to the school.
Some school leaders suggest the CDC’s previous five-day isolation requirement was already only loosely followed.
Official policy in Burlington, Massachusetts, has been to have students stay home for five days if they test positive. But Superintendent Eric Conti said the real policy, in effect, is: “It’s a virus. Deal with it.”
That’s because COVID is managed at home, using the honor system.
“Without school-based testing, no one can enforce a five-day COVID policy,” he said via text message.
Ridley School District in the Philadelphia suburbs was already using a policy similar to the new CDC guidelines, said Superintendent Lee Ann Wentzel. Students who test positive for COVID must be fever-free without medication for at least 24 hours before returning to school. When they come back, they must mask for five days. Wentzel said the district is now considering dropping the masking requirement because of the new CDC guidance.
A school or day care’s specific guidelines are consequential for working parents who must miss work if their child can’t go to school or child care. In October 2023, during simultaneous surges of COVID, respiratory syncytial virus and influenza, 104,000 adults reported missing work because of child care issues, the highest number in at least a decade. That number has fallen: Last month, child care problems meant 41,000 adults missed work, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Melissa Colagrosso’s child care center in West Virginia dropped special guidelines for COVID about a year ago, she said. Now, they’re the same as other illnesses: A child must be free of severe symptoms such as fever for at least 24 hours before returning to the center.
“We certainly are treating COVID just like we would treat flu or hand, foot and mouth” disease, said Colagrosso, CEO of A Place To Grow Children’s Center in Oak Hill.
As for kids without symptoms who test positive for COVID? Most parents have stopped testing kids unless they have symptoms, Colagrasso said, so it’s a quandary she has not encountered.
Still, some parents worry the relaxed rules put their communities at greater risk. Evelyn Alemán leads a group of Latino and Indigenous immigrant parents in Los Angeles County. The parents she represents, many of whom suffer from chronic illnesses and lack of access to health care, panicked when California did away with isolation requirements in January.
“I don’t think they’re considering what the impact will be for our families,” she said of California officials. “It feels like they don’t care — that we’re almost expendable.”
Other impacts of the pandemic linger, too, even as restrictions are lifted. In Ridley, the Philadelphia-area district, more students are reclusive and struggle to interact in-person with peers, said Wentzel, the superintendent. Interest in school dances has plummeted.
“Emotionally,” Wentzel said, “they’re having trouble.”
The Biden administration finalized nursing home staffing rules Monday that will require thousands of them to hire more nurses and aides — while giving them years to do so.
The new rules from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services are the most substantial changes to federal oversight of the nation’s roughly 15,000 nursing homes in more than three decades. But they are less stringent than what patient advocates said was needed to provide high-quality care.
Spurred by disproportionate deaths from covid-19 in long-term care facilities, the rules aim to address perennially sparse staffing that can be a root cause of missed diagnoses, severe bedsores, and frequent falls.
“For residents, this will mean more staff, which means fewer ER visits potentially, more independence,” Vice President Kamala Harris said while meeting with nursing home workers in La Crosse, Wisconsin. “For families, it’s going to mean peace of mind in terms of your loved one being taken care of.”
When the regulations are fully enacted, 4 in 5 homes will need to augment their payrolls, CMS estimated. But the new standards are likely to require slight if any improvements for many of the 1.2 million residents in facilities that are already quite close to or meet the minimum levels.
“Historically, this is a big deal, and we’re glad we have now established a floor,” Blanca Castro, California’s long-term care ombudsman, said in an interview. “From here we can go upward, recognizing there will be a lot of complaints about where we are going to get more people to fill these positions.”
The rules primarily address staffing levels for three types of nursing home workers. Registered nurses, or RNs, are the most skilled and responsible for guiding overall care and setting treatment plans. Licensed practical nurses, sometimes called licensed vocational nurses, work under the direction of RNs and perform routine medical care such as taking vital signs. Certified nursing assistants are supposed to be the most plentiful and help residents with daily activities like going to the bathroom, getting dressed, and eating.
While the industry has increased wages by 27% since February 2020, homes say they are still struggling to compete against better-paying work for nurses at hospitals and at retail shops and restaurants for aides. On average, nursing home RNs earn $40 an hour, licensed practical nurses make $31 an hour, and nursing assistants are paid $19 an hour, according to the most recent data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
CMS estimated the rules will ultimately cost $6 billion annually, but the plan omits any more payments from Medicare or Medicaid, the public insurers that cover most residents’ stays — meaning additional wages would have to come out of owners’ pockets or existing facility budgets.
The American Health Care Association, which represents the nursing home industry, called the regulation “an unreasonable standard” that “creates an impossible task for providers” amid a persistent worker shortage nationwide.
“This unfunded mandate doesn’t magically solve the nursing crisis,” the association’s CEO, Mark Parkinson, said in a statement. Parkinson said the industry will keep pressing Congress to overturn the regulation.
Richard Mollot, executive director of the Long Term Care Community Coalition, a New York City-based advocacy nonprofit, said “it is hard to call this a win for nursing home residents and families” given that the minimum levels were below what studies have found to be ideal.
The plan was welcomed by labor unions that represent nurses — and whom President Joe Biden is counting on for support in his reelection campaign. Service Employees International Union President Mary Kay Henry called it a “long-overdue sea change.” This political bond was underscored by the administration’s decision to have Harris announce the rule with SEIU members in Wisconsin, a swing state.
The new rules supplant the vague federal mandate that has been in place since the 1980s requiring nursing homes to have “sufficient” staffing to meet residents’ needs. In practice, inspectors rarely categorized inadequate staffing as a serious infraction resulting in possible penalties, federal records show.
Starting in two years, most homes must provide an average of at least 3.48 hours of daily care per resident. About 6 in 10 nursing homes are already operating at that level, a KFF analysis found.
The rules give homes breathing room before they must comply with more specific requirements. Within three years, most nursing homes will need to provide daily RN care of at least 0.55 hours per resident and 2.45 hours from aides.
CMS also mandated that within two years an RN must be on duty at all times in case of a patient crisis on weekends or overnight. Currently, CMS requires at least eight consecutive hours of RN presence each day and a licensed nurse of any level on duty around the clock. An inspector general report found that nearly a thousand nursing homes didn’t meet those basic requirements.
Nursing homes in rural areas will have longer to staff up. Within three years, they must meet the overall staffing numbers and the round-the-clock RN requirement. CMS’ rule said rural homes have four years to achieve the RN and nurse aide thresholds, although there was some confusion within CMS, as its press materials said rural homes would have five years.
Under the new rules, the average nursing home, which has around 100 residents, would need to have at least two RNs working each day, and at least 10 or 11 nurse aides, the administration said. Homes could meet the overall requirements through two more workers, who could be RNs, vocational nurses, or aides.
Homes can get a hardship exemption from the minimums if they are in regions with low populations of nurses or aides and demonstrate good-faith efforts to recruit.
Democrats praised the rules, though some said the administration did not go nearly far enough. Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas), the ranking member of the House Ways and Means Health Subcommittee, said the changes were “modest improvements” but that “much more is needed to ensure sufficient care and resident safety.” A Republican senator from Nebraska, Deb Fischer, said the rule would “devastate nursing homes across the country and worsen the staffing shortages we are already facing.”
Advocates for nursing home residents have been pressing CMS for years to adopt a higher standard than what it ultimately settled on. A CMS-commissioned study in 2001 found that the quality of care improved with increases of staff up to a level of 4.1 hours per resident per day — nearly a fifth higher than what CMS will require. The consultants CMS hired in preparing its new rules did not incorporate the earlier findings in their evaluation of options.
CMS said the levels it endorsed were more financially feasible for homes, but that assertion didn’t quiet the ongoing battle about how many people are willing to work in homes at current wages and how financially strained homes owners actually are.
“If states do not increase Medicaid payments to nursing homes, facilities are going to close,” said John Bowblis, an economics professor and research fellow with the Scripps Gerontology Center at Miami University. “There aren’t enough workers and there are shortages everywhere. When you have a 3% to 4% unemployment rate, where are you going to get people to work in nursing homes?”
Researchers, however, have been skeptical that all nursing homes are as broke as the industry claims or as their books show. A study published in March by the National Bureau of Economic Research estimated that 63% of profits were secretly siphoned to owners through inflated rents and other fees paid to other companies owned by the nursing homes’ investors.
Charlene Harrington, a professor emeritus at the nursing school of the University of California-San Francisco, said: “In their unchecked quest for profits, the nursing home industry has created its own problems by not paying adequate wages and benefits and setting heavy nursing workloads that cause neglect and harm to residents and create an unsatisfactory and stressful work environment.”
The Biden administration finalized nursing home staffing rules Monday that will require thousands of them to hire more nurses and aides — while giving them years to do so.
The new rules from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services are the most substantial changes to federal oversight of the nation’s roughly 15,000 nursing homes in more than three decades. But they are less stringent than what patient advocates said was needed to provide high-quality care.
Spurred by disproportionate deaths from covid-19 in long-term care facilities, the rules aim to address perennially sparse staffing that can be a root cause of missed diagnoses, severe bedsores, and frequent falls.
“For residents, this will mean more staff, which means fewer ER visits potentially, more independence,” Vice President Kamala Harris said while meeting with nursing home workers in La Crosse, Wisconsin. “For families, it’s going to mean peace of mind in terms of your loved one being taken care of.”
When the regulations are fully enacted, 4 in 5 homes will need to augment their payrolls, CMS estimated. But the new standards are likely to require slight if any improvements for many of the 1.2 million residents in facilities that are already quite close to or meet the minimum levels.
“Historically, this is a big deal, and we’re glad we have now established a floor,” Blanca Castro, California’s long-term care ombudsman, said in an interview. “From here we can go upward, recognizing there will be a lot of complaints about where we are going to get more people to fill these positions.”
The rules primarily address staffing levels for three types of nursing home workers. Registered nurses, or RNs, are the most skilled and responsible for guiding overall care and setting treatment plans. Licensed practical nurses, sometimes called licensed vocational nurses, work under the direction of RNs and perform routine medical care such as taking vital signs. Certified nursing assistants are supposed to be the most plentiful and help residents with daily activities like going to the bathroom, getting dressed, and eating.
While the industry has increased wages by 27% since February 2020, homes say they are still struggling to compete against better-paying work for nurses at hospitals and at retail shops and restaurants for aides. On average, nursing home RNs earn $40 an hour, licensed practical nurses make $31 an hour, and nursing assistants are paid $19 an hour, according to the most recent data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
CMS estimated the rules will ultimately cost $6 billion annually, but the plan omits any more payments from Medicare or Medicaid, the public insurers that cover most residents’ stays — meaning additional wages would have to come out of owners’ pockets or existing facility budgets.
The American Health Care Association, which represents the nursing home industry, called the regulation “an unreasonable standard” that “creates an impossible task for providers” amid a persistent worker shortage nationwide.
“This unfunded mandate doesn’t magically solve the nursing crisis,” the association’s CEO, Mark Parkinson, said in a statement. Parkinson said the industry will keep pressing Congress to overturn the regulation.
Richard Mollot, executive director of the Long Term Care Community Coalition, a New York City-based advocacy nonprofit, said “it is hard to call this a win for nursing home residents and families” given that the minimum levels were below what studies have found to be ideal.
The plan was welcomed by labor unions that represent nurses — and whom President Joe Biden is counting on for support in his reelection campaign. Service Employees International Union President Mary Kay Henry called it a “long-overdue sea change.” This political bond was underscored by the administration’s decision to have Harris announce the rule with SEIU members in Wisconsin, a swing state.
The new rules supplant the vague federal mandate that has been in place since the 1980s requiring nursing homes to have “sufficient” staffing to meet residents’ needs. In practice, inspectors rarely categorized inadequate staffing as a serious infraction resulting in possible penalties, federal records show.
Starting in two years, most homes must provide an average of at least 3.48 hours of daily care per resident. About 6 in 10 nursing homes are already operating at that level, a KFF analysis found.
The rules give homes breathing room before they must comply with more specific requirements. Within three years, most nursing homes will need to provide daily RN care of at least 0.55 hours per resident and 2.45 hours from aides.
CMS also mandated that within two years an RN must be on duty at all times in case of a patient crisis on weekends or overnight. Currently, CMS requires at least eight consecutive hours of RN presence each day and a licensed nurse of any level on duty around the clock. An inspector general report found that nearly a thousand nursing homes didn’t meet those basic requirements.
Nursing homes in rural areas will have longer to staff up. Within three years, they must meet the overall staffing numbers and the round-the-clock RN requirement. CMS’ rule said rural homes have four years to achieve the RN and nurse aide thresholds, although there was some confusion within CMS, as its press materials said rural homes would have five years.
Under the new rules, the average nursing home, which has around 100 residents, would need to have at least two RNs working each day, and at least 10 or 11 nurse aides, the administration said. Homes could meet the overall requirements through two more workers, who could be RNs, vocational nurses, or aides.
Homes can get a hardship exemption from the minimums if they are in regions with low populations of nurses or aides and demonstrate good-faith efforts to recruit.
Democrats praised the rules, though some said the administration did not go nearly far enough. Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas), the ranking member of the House Ways and Means Health Subcommittee, said the changes were “modest improvements” but that “much more is needed to ensure sufficient care and resident safety.” A Republican senator from Nebraska, Deb Fischer, said the rule would “devastate nursing homes across the country and worsen the staffing shortages we are already facing.”
Advocates for nursing home residents have been pressing CMS for years to adopt a higher standard than what it ultimately settled on. A CMS-commissioned study in 2001 found that the quality of care improved with increases of staff up to a level of 4.1 hours per resident per day — nearly a fifth higher than what CMS will require. The consultants CMS hired in preparing its new rules did not incorporate the earlier findings in their evaluation of options.
CMS said the levels it endorsed were more financially feasible for homes, but that assertion didn’t quiet the ongoing battle about how many people are willing to work in homes at current wages and how financially strained homes owners actually are.
“If states do not increase Medicaid payments to nursing homes, facilities are going to close,” said John Bowblis, an economics professor and research fellow with the Scripps Gerontology Center at Miami University. “There aren’t enough workers and there are shortages everywhere. When you have a 3% to 4% unemployment rate, where are you going to get people to work in nursing homes?”
Researchers, however, have been skeptical that all nursing homes are as broke as the industry claims or as their books show. A study published in March by the National Bureau of Economic Research estimated that 63% of profits were secretly siphoned to owners through inflated rents and other fees paid to other companies owned by the nursing homes’ investors.
Charlene Harrington, a professor emeritus at the nursing school of the University of California-San Francisco, said: “In their unchecked quest for profits, the nursing home industry has created its own problems by not paying adequate wages and benefits and setting heavy nursing workloads that cause neglect and harm to residents and create an unsatisfactory and stressful work environment.”
Four years after the COVID-19 pandemic closed schools and upended child care, the CDC says parents can start treating the virus like other respiratory illnesses.
Gone are mandated isolation periods and masking. But will schools and child care centers agree?
In case you’ve lost track: Before Friday, all Americans, including school children, were supposed to stay home for at least five days if they had COVID-19 and then mask for a set period of time, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Now, with COVID deaths and hospitalizations dropping, the CDC says children can go back to school when their overall symptoms improve and they’re fever-free for 24 hours without taking medication. Students are “encouraged” to wear a mask when they return.
Still, the change may not affect how individual schools urge parents to react when their children fall sick. Schools and child care providers have a mixed record on following CDC recommendations and often look to local authorities for the ultimate word. And sometimes other goals, such as reducing absences, can influence a state or district’s decisions.
The result can be a confusing array of policies among states and districts, not to mention workplaces — confounding parents whose lives have long been upended by the virus.
“This is so confusing,” said Gloria Cunningham, a single mom in the Boston area. “I just don’t know what I should think of COVID now. Is it still a monster?”
Cunningham, who manages a local store for a national restaurant chain, said her company requires her to take off 10 days if she gets COVID-19. And the school system where her son is in second grade has still been sending home COVID test kits for kids to use before returning to school after long breaks.
“I feel like we should just do away with anything that treats COVID differently or keep all of the precautions,” she said.
The public education system has long held varying policies on COVID. During the 2021-22 school year, 18 states followed CDC recommendations for mask-wearing in class. When the CDC lifted its masking guidelines in February 2022, states such as Massachusetts followed suit, but California kept the mask requirement for schools.
And in the child care world, some providers have long used more stringent testing and isolation protocols than the CDC has recommended. Reasons have ranged from trying to prevent outbreaks to keeping staff healthy — both for their personal safety and to keep the day care open.
Some states moved to more lenient guidelines ahead of the CDC. California and Oregon recently rescinded COVID-19 isolation requirements, and many districts followed their advice.
In an attempt to minimize school absences and address an epidemic of chronic absenteeism, California has encouraged kids to come to school when mildly sick and said that students who test positive for coronavirus but are asymptomatic can attend school. Los Angeles and San Diego’s school systems, among others, have adopted that policy.
But the majority of big-city districts around the country still have asked parents to isolate children for at least five days before returning to school. Some, including Boston and Atlanta, have required students to mask for another five days and report positive COVID-19 test results to the school.
Some school leaders suggest the CDC’s previous five-day isolation requirement was already only loosely followed.
Official policy in Burlington, Massachusetts, has been to have students stay home for five days if they test positive. But Superintendent Eric Conti said the real policy, in effect, is: “It’s a virus. Deal with it.”
That’s because COVID is managed at home, using the honor system.
“Without school-based testing, no one can enforce a five-day COVID policy,” he said via text message.
Ridley School District in the Philadelphia suburbs was already using a policy similar to the new CDC guidelines, said Superintendent Lee Ann Wentzel. Students who test positive for COVID must be fever-free without medication for at least 24 hours before returning to school. When they come back, they must mask for five days. Wentzel said the district is now considering dropping the masking requirement because of the new CDC guidance.
A school or day care’s specific guidelines are consequential for working parents who must miss work if their child can’t go to school or child care. In October 2023, during simultaneous surges of COVID, respiratory syncytial virus and influenza, 104,000 adults reported missing work because of child care issues, the highest number in at least a decade. That number has fallen: Last month, child care problems meant 41,000 adults missed work, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Melissa Colagrosso’s child care center in West Virginia dropped special guidelines for COVID about a year ago, she said. Now, they’re the same as other illnesses: A child must be free of severe symptoms such as fever for at least 24 hours before returning to the center.
“We certainly are treating COVID just like we would treat flu or hand, foot and mouth” disease, said Colagrosso, CEO of A Place To Grow Children’s Center in Oak Hill.
As for kids without symptoms who test positive for COVID? Most parents have stopped testing kids unless they have symptoms, Colagrasso said, so it’s a quandary she has not encountered.
Still, some parents worry the relaxed rules put their communities at greater risk. Evelyn Alemán leads a group of Latino and Indigenous immigrant parents in Los Angeles County. The parents she represents, many of whom suffer from chronic illnesses and lack of access to health care, panicked when California did away with isolation requirements in January.
“I don’t think they’re considering what the impact will be for our families,” she said of California officials. “It feels like they don’t care — that we’re almost expendable.”
Other impacts of the pandemic linger, too, even as restrictions are lifted. In Ridley, the Philadelphia-area district, more students are reclusive and struggle to interact in-person with peers, said Wentzel, the superintendent. Interest in school dances has plummeted.
“Emotionally,” Wentzel said, “they’re having trouble.”
Four years after the COVID-19 pandemic closed schools and upended child care, the CDC says parents can start treating the virus like other respiratory illnesses.
Gone are mandated isolation periods and masking. But will schools and child care centers agree?
In case you’ve lost track: Before Friday, all Americans, including school children, were supposed to stay home for at least five days if they had COVID-19 and then mask for a set period of time, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Now, with COVID deaths and hospitalizations dropping, the CDC says children can go back to school when their overall symptoms improve and they’re fever-free for 24 hours without taking medication. Students are “encouraged” to wear a mask when they return.
Still, the change may not affect how individual schools urge parents to react when their children fall sick. Schools and child care providers have a mixed record on following CDC recommendations and often look to local authorities for the ultimate word. And sometimes other goals, such as reducing absences, can influence a state or district’s decisions.
The result can be a confusing array of policies among states and districts, not to mention workplaces — confounding parents whose lives have long been upended by the virus.
“This is so confusing,” said Gloria Cunningham, a single mom in the Boston area. “I just don’t know what I should think of COVID now. Is it still a monster?”
Cunningham, who manages a local store for a national restaurant chain, said her company requires her to take off 10 days if she gets COVID-19. And the school system where her son is in second grade has still been sending home COVID test kits for kids to use before returning to school after long breaks.
“I feel like we should just do away with anything that treats COVID differently or keep all of the precautions,” she said.
The public education system has long held varying policies on COVID. During the 2021-22 school year, 18 states followed CDC recommendations for mask-wearing in class. When the CDC lifted its masking guidelines in February 2022, states such as Massachusetts followed suit, but California kept the mask requirement for schools.
And in the child care world, some providers have long used more stringent testing and isolation protocols than the CDC has recommended. Reasons have ranged from trying to prevent outbreaks to keeping staff healthy — both for their personal safety and to keep the day care open.
Some states moved to more lenient guidelines ahead of the CDC. California and Oregon recently rescinded COVID-19 isolation requirements, and many districts followed their advice.
In an attempt to minimize school absences and address an epidemic of chronic absenteeism, California has encouraged kids to come to school when mildly sick and said that students who test positive for coronavirus but are asymptomatic can attend school. Los Angeles and San Diego’s school systems, among others, have adopted that policy.
But the majority of big-city districts around the country still have asked parents to isolate children for at least five days before returning to school. Some, including Boston and Atlanta, have required students to mask for another five days and report positive COVID-19 test results to the school.
Some school leaders suggest the CDC’s previous five-day isolation requirement was already only loosely followed.
Official policy in Burlington, Massachusetts, has been to have students stay home for five days if they test positive. But Superintendent Eric Conti said the real policy, in effect, is: “It’s a virus. Deal with it.”
That’s because COVID is managed at home, using the honor system.
“Without school-based testing, no one can enforce a five-day COVID policy,” he said via text message.
Ridley School District in the Philadelphia suburbs was already using a policy similar to the new CDC guidelines, said Superintendent Lee Ann Wentzel. Students who test positive for COVID must be fever-free without medication for at least 24 hours before returning to school. When they come back, they must mask for five days. Wentzel said the district is now considering dropping the masking requirement because of the new CDC guidance.
A school or day care’s specific guidelines are consequential for working parents who must miss work if their child can’t go to school or child care. In October 2023, during simultaneous surges of COVID, respiratory syncytial virus and influenza, 104,000 adults reported missing work because of child care issues, the highest number in at least a decade. That number has fallen: Last month, child care problems meant 41,000 adults missed work, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Melissa Colagrosso’s child care center in West Virginia dropped special guidelines for COVID about a year ago, she said. Now, they’re the same as other illnesses: A child must be free of severe symptoms such as fever for at least 24 hours before returning to the center.
“We certainly are treating COVID just like we would treat flu or hand, foot and mouth” disease, said Colagrosso, CEO of A Place To Grow Children’s Center in Oak Hill.
As for kids without symptoms who test positive for COVID? Most parents have stopped testing kids unless they have symptoms, Colagrasso said, so it’s a quandary she has not encountered.
Still, some parents worry the relaxed rules put their communities at greater risk. Evelyn Alemán leads a group of Latino and Indigenous immigrant parents in Los Angeles County. The parents she represents, many of whom suffer from chronic illnesses and lack of access to health care, panicked when California did away with isolation requirements in January.
“I don’t think they’re considering what the impact will be for our families,” she said of California officials. “It feels like they don’t care — that we’re almost expendable.”
Other impacts of the pandemic linger, too, even as restrictions are lifted. In Ridley, the Philadelphia-area district, more students are reclusive and struggle to interact in-person with peers, said Wentzel, the superintendent. Interest in school dances has plummeted.
“Emotionally,” Wentzel said, “they’re having trouble.”
MANTI, Utah — Garrett Clark estimates he has spent about six years in the Sanpete County Jail, a plain concrete building perched on a dusty hill just outside this small, rural town where he grew up.
He blames his addiction. He started using in middle school, and by the time he was an adult he was addicted to meth and heroin. At various points, he’s done time alongside his mom, his dad, his sister, and his younger brother.
“That’s all I’ve known my whole life,” said Clark, 31, in December.
Clark was at the jail to pick up his sister, who had just been released. The siblings think this time will be different. They are both sober. Shantel Clark, 33, finished earning her high school diploma during her four-month stay at the jail. They have a place to live where no one is using drugs.
And they have Cheryl Swapp, the county sheriff’s new community health worker, on their side.
“She saved my life probably, for sure,” Garrett Clark said.
Swapp meets with every person booked into the county jail soon after they arrive and helps them create a plan for the day they get out.
She makes sure everyone has a state ID card, a birth certificate, and a Social Security card so they can qualify for government benefits, apply to jobs, and get to treatment and probation appointments. She helps nearly everyone enroll in Medicaid and apply for housing benefits and food stamps. If they need medication to stay off drugs, she lines that up. If they need a place to stay, she finds them a bed.
Then Swapp coordinates with the jail captain to have people released directly to the treatment facility. Nobody leaves the jail without a ride and a drawstring backpack filled with items like toothpaste, a blanket, and a personalized list of job openings.
“A missing puzzle piece,” Sgt. Gretchen Nunley, who runs educational and addiction recovery programming for the jail, called Swapp.
Swapp also assesses the addiction history of everyone held by the county. More than half arrive at the jail addicted to something.
Nationally, 63% of people booked into local jails struggle with a substance use disorder — at least six times the rate of the general population, according to the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. The incidence of mental illness in jails is more than twice the rate in the general population, federal data shows. At least 4.9 million people are arrested and jailed every year, according to an analysis of 2017 data by the Prison Policy Initiative, a nonprofit organization that documents the harm of mass incarceration. Of those incarcerated, 25% are booked two or more times, the analysis found. And among those arrested twice, more than half had a substance use disorder and a quarter had a mental illness.
“We don’t lock people up for being diabetic or epileptic,” said David Mahoney, a retired sheriff in Dane County, Wisconsin, who served as president of the National Sheriffs’ Association in 2020-21. “The question every community needs to ask is: ‘Are we doing our responsibility to each other for locking people up for a diagnosed medical condition?’”
The idea that county sheriffs might owe it to society to offer medical and mental health treatment to people in their jails is part of a broader shift in thinking among law enforcement officials that Mahoney said he has observed during the past decade.
“Don’t we have a moral and ethical responsibility as community members to address the reasons people are coming into the criminal justice system?” asked Mahoney, who has 41 years of experience in law enforcement.
Swapp previously worked as a teacher’s aide for those she calls the “behavior kids” — children who had trouble self-regulating in class. She feels her work at the jail is a way to change things for the parents of those kids. And it appears to be working.
Since the Sanpete County Sheriff’s Office hired Swapp last year, recidivism has dropped sharply. In the 18 months before she began her work, 599 of the people booked into Sanpete County Jail had been there before. In the 18 months after she started, that number dropped to 237.
In most places, people are released from county jails with no health care coverage, no job, nowhere to live, and no plan to stay off drugs or treat their mental illness. Research shows that people newly released from incarceration face a risk of overdose that is 10 times as high as that of the general public.
Sanpete wasn’t any different.
“For seven to eight years of me being here, we’d just release people and cross our fingers,” said Jared Hill, the clinical director for Sanpete County and a counselor at the jail.
Nunley, the programming sergeant, remembers watching people released from jail walk the mile to town with nothing but the clothes they’d worn on the day they were arrested — it was known as the “walk of shame.” Swapp hates that phrase. She said no one has made the trip on foot since she started in July 2022.
Swapp’s work was initially funded by a grant from the U.S. Health Resources and Services Administration, but it has proved so popular that commissioners in Sanpete County voted to use a portion of its opioid settlement money to cover the position in the future.
Swapp doesn’t have formal medical or social work training. She is certified by the state of Utah as a community health worker, a job that has become more common nationwide. There were about 67,000 people working as community health workers in 2022, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Evidence is mounting that the model of training people to help their neighbors connect to government and health care services is sound, said Aditi Vasan, a senior fellow at the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics at the University of Pennsylvania who has reviewed the research on the relatively new role.
The day before Swapp coordinated Shantel Clark’s release, she sat with Robert Draper, a man in his 50s with long white hair and bright-blue eyes. Draper has been in and out of jail for decades. He was sober for a year and had been taking care of his ill mother. She kept getting worse. Then his daughter and her child came to help. It was all a little too much.
“I thought, if I can just go and get high, I can deal with this shit,” said Draper. “But after you’ve been using for 40 years, it’s kinda easy to slip back in.”
He didn’t blame his probation officer for throwing him back in jail when he tested positive for drugs, he said. But he thinks jail time is an overreaction to a relapse. Draper sent a note to Swapp through the jail staff asking to see her. He was hoping she could help him get out so he could be with his mom, who had just been sent to hospice. He had missed his father’s death years ago because he was in jail at the time.
Swapp listened to Draper’s story without interruptions or questions. Then she asked if she could run through her list with him so she would know what he needed.
“Do you have your Social Security card?”
“My card?” Draper shrugged. “I know my number.”
“Your birth certificate, you have it?”
“Yeah, I don’t know where it is.”
“Driver’s license?”
“No.”
“Was it revoked?”
“A long, long time ago,” Draper said. “DUI from 22 years ago. Paid for and everything.”
“Are you interested in getting it back?”
“Yeah!”
Swapp has some version of this conversation with every person she meets in the jail. She also runs through their history of addiction and asks them what they most need to get back on their feet.
She told Draper she would try to get him into intensive outpatient therapy. That would involve four to five classes a week and a lot of driving. He’d need his license back. She didn’t make promises but said she would talk to his probation officer and the judge. He sighed and thanked her.
“I’m your biggest fan here,” Swapp said. “I want you to succeed. I want you to be with your mom, too.”
The federal grant that funded the launch of Sanpete’s community health worker program is held by the regional health care services organization Intermountain Health. Intermountain took the idea to the county and has provided Swapp with support and training. Intermountain staff also administer the $1 million, three-year grant, which includes efforts to increase addiction recovery services in the area.
A similarly funded program in Kentucky called First Day Forward took the community health worker model a step further, using “peer support specialists” — people who have experienced the issues they are trying to help others navigate. Spokespeople from HRSA pointed to four programs, including the ones in Utah and Kentucky, that are using their grant money for people facing or serving time in local jails.
Back in Utah, Sanpete’s new jail captain, Jeff Nielsen, said people in small-town law enforcement weren’t so far removed from those serving time.
“We know these people,” Nielsen said. He has known Robert Draper since middle school. “They are friends, neighbors, sometimes family. We’d rather help than lock them up and throw away the key. We’d rather help give them a good life.”
MANTI, Utah — Garrett Clark estimates he has spent about six years in the Sanpete County Jail, a plain concrete building perched on a dusty hill just outside this small, rural town where he grew up.
He blames his addiction. He started using in middle school, and by the time he was an adult he was addicted to meth and heroin. At various points, he’s done time alongside his mom, his dad, his sister, and his younger brother.
“That’s all I’ve known my whole life,” said Clark, 31, in December.
Clark was at the jail to pick up his sister, who had just been released. The siblings think this time will be different. They are both sober. Shantel Clark, 33, finished earning her high school diploma during her four-month stay at the jail. They have a place to live where no one is using drugs.
And they have Cheryl Swapp, the county sheriff’s new community health worker, on their side.
“She saved my life probably, for sure,” Garrett Clark said.
Swapp meets with every person booked into the county jail soon after they arrive and helps them create a plan for the day they get out.
She makes sure everyone has a state ID card, a birth certificate, and a Social Security card so they can qualify for government benefits, apply to jobs, and get to treatment and probation appointments. She helps nearly everyone enroll in Medicaid and apply for housing benefits and food stamps. If they need medication to stay off drugs, she lines that up. If they need a place to stay, she finds them a bed.
Then Swapp coordinates with the jail captain to have people released directly to the treatment facility. Nobody leaves the jail without a ride and a drawstring backpack filled with items like toothpaste, a blanket, and a personalized list of job openings.
“A missing puzzle piece,” Sgt. Gretchen Nunley, who runs educational and addiction recovery programming for the jail, called Swapp.
Swapp also assesses the addiction history of everyone held by the county. More than half arrive at the jail addicted to something.
Nationally, 63% of people booked into local jails struggle with a substance use disorder — at least six times the rate of the general population, according to the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. The incidence of mental illness in jails is more than twice the rate in the general population, federal data shows. At least 4.9 million people are arrested and jailed every year, according to an analysis of 2017 data by the Prison Policy Initiative, a nonprofit organization that documents the harm of mass incarceration. Of those incarcerated, 25% are booked two or more times, the analysis found. And among those arrested twice, more than half had a substance use disorder and a quarter had a mental illness.
“We don’t lock people up for being diabetic or epileptic,” said David Mahoney, a retired sheriff in Dane County, Wisconsin, who served as president of the National Sheriffs’ Association in 2020-21. “The question every community needs to ask is: ‘Are we doing our responsibility to each other for locking people up for a diagnosed medical condition?’”
The idea that county sheriffs might owe it to society to offer medical and mental health treatment to people in their jails is part of a broader shift in thinking among law enforcement officials that Mahoney said he has observed during the past decade.
“Don’t we have a moral and ethical responsibility as community members to address the reasons people are coming into the criminal justice system?” asked Mahoney, who has 41 years of experience in law enforcement.
Swapp previously worked as a teacher’s aide for those she calls the “behavior kids” — children who had trouble self-regulating in class. She feels her work at the jail is a way to change things for the parents of those kids. And it appears to be working.
Since the Sanpete County Sheriff’s Office hired Swapp last year, recidivism has dropped sharply. In the 18 months before she began her work, 599 of the people booked into Sanpete County Jail had been there before. In the 18 months after she started, that number dropped to 237.
In most places, people are released from county jails with no health care coverage, no job, nowhere to live, and no plan to stay off drugs or treat their mental illness. Research shows that people newly released from incarceration face a risk of overdose that is 10 times as high as that of the general public.
Sanpete wasn’t any different.
“For seven to eight years of me being here, we’d just release people and cross our fingers,” said Jared Hill, the clinical director for Sanpete County and a counselor at the jail.
Nunley, the programming sergeant, remembers watching people released from jail walk the mile to town with nothing but the clothes they’d worn on the day they were arrested — it was known as the “walk of shame.” Swapp hates that phrase. She said no one has made the trip on foot since she started in July 2022.
Swapp’s work was initially funded by a grant from the U.S. Health Resources and Services Administration, but it has proved so popular that commissioners in Sanpete County voted to use a portion of its opioid settlement money to cover the position in the future.
Swapp doesn’t have formal medical or social work training. She is certified by the state of Utah as a community health worker, a job that has become more common nationwide. There were about 67,000 people working as community health workers in 2022, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Evidence is mounting that the model of training people to help their neighbors connect to government and health care services is sound, said Aditi Vasan, a senior fellow at the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics at the University of Pennsylvania who has reviewed the research on the relatively new role.
The day before Swapp coordinated Shantel Clark’s release, she sat with Robert Draper, a man in his 50s with long white hair and bright-blue eyes. Draper has been in and out of jail for decades. He was sober for a year and had been taking care of his ill mother. She kept getting worse. Then his daughter and her child came to help. It was all a little too much.
“I thought, if I can just go and get high, I can deal with this shit,” said Draper. “But after you’ve been using for 40 years, it’s kinda easy to slip back in.”
He didn’t blame his probation officer for throwing him back in jail when he tested positive for drugs, he said. But he thinks jail time is an overreaction to a relapse. Draper sent a note to Swapp through the jail staff asking to see her. He was hoping she could help him get out so he could be with his mom, who had just been sent to hospice. He had missed his father’s death years ago because he was in jail at the time.
Swapp listened to Draper’s story without interruptions or questions. Then she asked if she could run through her list with him so she would know what he needed.
“Do you have your Social Security card?”
“My card?” Draper shrugged. “I know my number.”
“Your birth certificate, you have it?”
“Yeah, I don’t know where it is.”
“Driver’s license?”
“No.”
“Was it revoked?”
“A long, long time ago,” Draper said. “DUI from 22 years ago. Paid for and everything.”
“Are you interested in getting it back?”
“Yeah!”
Swapp has some version of this conversation with every person she meets in the jail. She also runs through their history of addiction and asks them what they most need to get back on their feet.
She told Draper she would try to get him into intensive outpatient therapy. That would involve four to five classes a week and a lot of driving. He’d need his license back. She didn’t make promises but said she would talk to his probation officer and the judge. He sighed and thanked her.
“I’m your biggest fan here,” Swapp said. “I want you to succeed. I want you to be with your mom, too.”
The federal grant that funded the launch of Sanpete’s community health worker program is held by the regional health care services organization Intermountain Health. Intermountain took the idea to the county and has provided Swapp with support and training. Intermountain staff also administer the $1 million, three-year grant, which includes efforts to increase addiction recovery services in the area.
A similarly funded program in Kentucky called First Day Forward took the community health worker model a step further, using “peer support specialists” — people who have experienced the issues they are trying to help others navigate. Spokespeople from HRSA pointed to four programs, including the ones in Utah and Kentucky, that are using their grant money for people facing or serving time in local jails.
Back in Utah, Sanpete’s new jail captain, Jeff Nielsen, said people in small-town law enforcement weren’t so far removed from those serving time.
“We know these people,” Nielsen said. He has known Robert Draper since middle school. “They are friends, neighbors, sometimes family. We’d rather help than lock them up and throw away the key. We’d rather help give them a good life.”
Four years after the COVID-19 pandemic closed schools and upended child care, the CDC says parents can start treating the virus like other respiratory illnesses.
Gone are mandated isolation periods and masking. But will schools and child care centers agree?
In case you’ve lost track: Before Friday, all Americans, including school children, were supposed to stay home for at least five days if they had COVID-19 and then mask for a set period of time, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Now, with COVID deaths and hospitalizations dropping, the CDC says children can go back to school when their overall symptoms improve and they’re fever-free for 24 hours without taking medication. Students are “encouraged” to wear a mask when they return.
Still, the change may not affect how individual schools urge parents to react when their children fall sick. Schools and child care providers have a mixed record on following CDC recommendations and often look to local authorities for the ultimate word. And sometimes other goals, such as reducing absences, can influence a state or district’s decisions.
The result can be a confusing array of policies among states and districts, not to mention workplaces — confounding parents whose lives have long been upended by the virus.
“This is so confusing,” said Gloria Cunningham, a single mom in the Boston area. “I just don’t know what I should think of COVID now. Is it still a monster?”
Cunningham, who manages a local store for a national restaurant chain, said her company requires her to take off 10 days if she gets COVID-19. And the school system where her son is in second grade has still been sending home COVID test kits for kids to use before returning to school after long breaks.
“I feel like we should just do away with anything that treats COVID differently or keep all of the precautions,” she said.
The public education system has long held varying policies on COVID. During the 2021-22 school year, 18 states followed CDC recommendations for mask-wearing in class. When the CDC lifted its masking guidelines in February 2022, states such as Massachusetts followed suit, but California kept the mask requirement for schools.
And in the child care world, some providers have long used more stringent testing and isolation protocols than the CDC has recommended. Reasons have ranged from trying to prevent outbreaks to keeping staff healthy — both for their personal safety and to keep the day care open.
Some states moved to more lenient guidelines ahead of the CDC. California and Oregon recently rescinded COVID-19 isolation requirements, and many districts followed their advice.
In an attempt to minimize school absences and address an epidemic of chronic absenteeism, California has encouraged kids to come to school when mildly sick and said that students who test positive for coronavirus but are asymptomatic can attend school. Los Angeles and San Diego’s school systems, among others, have adopted that policy.
But the majority of big-city districts around the country still have asked parents to isolate children for at least five days before returning to school. Some, including Boston and Atlanta, have required students to mask for another five days and report positive COVID-19 test results to the school.
Some school leaders suggest the CDC’s previous five-day isolation requirement was already only loosely followed.
Official policy in Burlington, Massachusetts, has been to have students stay home for five days if they test positive. But Superintendent Eric Conti said the real policy, in effect, is: “It’s a virus. Deal with it.”
That’s because COVID is managed at home, using the honor system.
“Without school-based testing, no one can enforce a five-day COVID policy,” he said via text message.
Ridley School District in the Philadelphia suburbs was already using a policy similar to the new CDC guidelines, said Superintendent Lee Ann Wentzel. Students who test positive for COVID must be fever-free without medication for at least 24 hours before returning to school. When they come back, they must mask for five days. Wentzel said the district is now considering dropping the masking requirement because of the new CDC guidance.
A school or day care’s specific guidelines are consequential for working parents who must miss work if their child can’t go to school or child care. In October 2023, during simultaneous surges of COVID, respiratory syncytial virus and influenza, 104,000 adults reported missing work because of child care issues, the highest number in at least a decade. That number has fallen: Last month, child care problems meant 41,000 adults missed work, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Melissa Colagrosso’s child care center in West Virginia dropped special guidelines for COVID about a year ago, she said. Now, they’re the same as other illnesses: A child must be free of severe symptoms such as fever for at least 24 hours before returning to the center.
“We certainly are treating COVID just like we would treat flu or hand, foot and mouth” disease, said Colagrosso, CEO of A Place To Grow Children’s Center in Oak Hill.
As for kids without symptoms who test positive for COVID? Most parents have stopped testing kids unless they have symptoms, Colagrasso said, so it’s a quandary she has not encountered.
Still, some parents worry the relaxed rules put their communities at greater risk. Evelyn Alemán leads a group of Latino and Indigenous immigrant parents in Los Angeles County. The parents she represents, many of whom suffer from chronic illnesses and lack of access to health care, panicked when California did away with isolation requirements in January.
“I don’t think they’re considering what the impact will be for our families,” she said of California officials. “It feels like they don’t care — that we’re almost expendable.”
Other impacts of the pandemic linger, too, even as restrictions are lifted. In Ridley, the Philadelphia-area district, more students are reclusive and struggle to interact in-person with peers, said Wentzel, the superintendent. Interest in school dances has plummeted.
“Emotionally,” Wentzel said, “they’re having trouble.”
Four years after the COVID-19 pandemic closed schools and upended child care, the CDC says parents can start treating the virus like other respiratory illnesses.
Gone are mandated isolation periods and masking. But will schools and child care centers agree?
In case you’ve lost track: Before Friday, all Americans, including school children, were supposed to stay home for at least five days if they had COVID-19 and then mask for a set period of time, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Now, with COVID deaths and hospitalizations dropping, the CDC says children can go back to school when their overall symptoms improve and they’re fever-free for 24 hours without taking medication. Students are “encouraged” to wear a mask when they return.
Still, the change may not affect how individual schools urge parents to react when their children fall sick. Schools and child care providers have a mixed record on following CDC recommendations and often look to local authorities for the ultimate word. And sometimes other goals, such as reducing absences, can influence a state or district’s decisions.
The result can be a confusing array of policies among states and districts, not to mention workplaces — confounding parents whose lives have long been upended by the virus.
“This is so confusing,” said Gloria Cunningham, a single mom in the Boston area. “I just don’t know what I should think of COVID now. Is it still a monster?”
Cunningham, who manages a local store for a national restaurant chain, said her company requires her to take off 10 days if she gets COVID-19. And the school system where her son is in second grade has still been sending home COVID test kits for kids to use before returning to school after long breaks.
“I feel like we should just do away with anything that treats COVID differently or keep all of the precautions,” she said.
The public education system has long held varying policies on COVID. During the 2021-22 school year, 18 states followed CDC recommendations for mask-wearing in class. When the CDC lifted its masking guidelines in February 2022, states such as Massachusetts followed suit, but California kept the mask requirement for schools.
And in the child care world, some providers have long used more stringent testing and isolation protocols than the CDC has recommended. Reasons have ranged from trying to prevent outbreaks to keeping staff healthy — both for their personal safety and to keep the day care open.
Some states moved to more lenient guidelines ahead of the CDC. California and Oregon recently rescinded COVID-19 isolation requirements, and many districts followed their advice.
In an attempt to minimize school absences and address an epidemic of chronic absenteeism, California has encouraged kids to come to school when mildly sick and said that students who test positive for coronavirus but are asymptomatic can attend school. Los Angeles and San Diego’s school systems, among others, have adopted that policy.
But the majority of big-city districts around the country still have asked parents to isolate children for at least five days before returning to school. Some, including Boston and Atlanta, have required students to mask for another five days and report positive COVID-19 test results to the school.
Some school leaders suggest the CDC’s previous five-day isolation requirement was already only loosely followed.
Official policy in Burlington, Massachusetts, has been to have students stay home for five days if they test positive. But Superintendent Eric Conti said the real policy, in effect, is: “It’s a virus. Deal with it.”
That’s because COVID is managed at home, using the honor system.
“Without school-based testing, no one can enforce a five-day COVID policy,” he said via text message.
Ridley School District in the Philadelphia suburbs was already using a policy similar to the new CDC guidelines, said Superintendent Lee Ann Wentzel. Students who test positive for COVID must be fever-free without medication for at least 24 hours before returning to school. When they come back, they must mask for five days. Wentzel said the district is now considering dropping the masking requirement because of the new CDC guidance.
A school or day care’s specific guidelines are consequential for working parents who must miss work if their child can’t go to school or child care. In October 2023, during simultaneous surges of COVID, respiratory syncytial virus and influenza, 104,000 adults reported missing work because of child care issues, the highest number in at least a decade. That number has fallen: Last month, child care problems meant 41,000 adults missed work, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Melissa Colagrosso’s child care center in West Virginia dropped special guidelines for COVID about a year ago, she said. Now, they’re the same as other illnesses: A child must be free of severe symptoms such as fever for at least 24 hours before returning to the center.
“We certainly are treating COVID just like we would treat flu or hand, foot and mouth” disease, said Colagrosso, CEO of A Place To Grow Children’s Center in Oak Hill.
As for kids without symptoms who test positive for COVID? Most parents have stopped testing kids unless they have symptoms, Colagrasso said, so it’s a quandary she has not encountered.
Still, some parents worry the relaxed rules put their communities at greater risk. Evelyn Alemán leads a group of Latino and Indigenous immigrant parents in Los Angeles County. The parents she represents, many of whom suffer from chronic illnesses and lack of access to health care, panicked when California did away with isolation requirements in January.
“I don’t think they’re considering what the impact will be for our families,” she said of California officials. “It feels like they don’t care — that we’re almost expendable.”
Other impacts of the pandemic linger, too, even as restrictions are lifted. In Ridley, the Philadelphia-area district, more students are reclusive and struggle to interact in-person with peers, said Wentzel, the superintendent. Interest in school dances has plummeted.
“Emotionally,” Wentzel said, “they’re having trouble.”
MANTI, Utah — Garrett Clark estimates he has spent about six years in the Sanpete County Jail, a plain concrete building perched on a dusty hill just outside this small, rural town where he grew up.
He blames his addiction. He started using in middle school, and by the time he was an adult he was addicted to meth and heroin. At various points, he’s done time alongside his mom, his dad, his sister, and his younger brother.
“That’s all I’ve known my whole life,” said Clark, 31, in December.
Clark was at the jail to pick up his sister, who had just been released. The siblings think this time will be different. They are both sober. Shantel Clark, 33, finished earning her high school diploma during her four-month stay at the jail. They have a place to live where no one is using drugs.
And they have Cheryl Swapp, the county sheriff’s new community health worker, on their side.
“She saved my life probably, for sure,” Garrett Clark said.
Swapp meets with every person booked into the county jail soon after they arrive and helps them create a plan for the day they get out.
She makes sure everyone has a state ID card, a birth certificate, and a Social Security card so they can qualify for government benefits, apply to jobs, and get to treatment and probation appointments. She helps nearly everyone enroll in Medicaid and apply for housing benefits and food stamps. If they need medication to stay off drugs, she lines that up. If they need a place to stay, she finds them a bed.
Then Swapp coordinates with the jail captain to have people released directly to the treatment facility. Nobody leaves the jail without a ride and a drawstring backpack filled with items like toothpaste, a blanket, and a personalized list of job openings.
“A missing puzzle piece,” Sgt. Gretchen Nunley, who runs educational and addiction recovery programming for the jail, called Swapp.
Swapp also assesses the addiction history of everyone held by the county. More than half arrive at the jail addicted to something.
Nationally, 63% of people booked into local jails struggle with a substance use disorder — at least six times the rate of the general population, according to the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. The incidence of mental illness in jails is more than twice the rate in the general population, federal data shows. At least 4.9 million people are arrested and jailed every year, according to an analysis of 2017 data by the Prison Policy Initiative, a nonprofit organization that documents the harm of mass incarceration. Of those incarcerated, 25% are booked two or more times, the analysis found. And among those arrested twice, more than half had a substance use disorder and a quarter had a mental illness.
“We don’t lock people up for being diabetic or epileptic,” said David Mahoney, a retired sheriff in Dane County, Wisconsin, who served as president of the National Sheriffs’ Association in 2020-21. “The question every community needs to ask is: ‘Are we doing our responsibility to each other for locking people up for a diagnosed medical condition?’”
The idea that county sheriffs might owe it to society to offer medical and mental health treatment to people in their jails is part of a broader shift in thinking among law enforcement officials that Mahoney said he has observed during the past decade.
“Don’t we have a moral and ethical responsibility as community members to address the reasons people are coming into the criminal justice system?” asked Mahoney, who has 41 years of experience in law enforcement.
Swapp previously worked as a teacher’s aide for those she calls the “behavior kids” — children who had trouble self-regulating in class. She feels her work at the jail is a way to change things for the parents of those kids. And it appears to be working.
Since the Sanpete County Sheriff’s Office hired Swapp last year, recidivism has dropped sharply. In the 18 months before she began her work, 599 of the people booked into Sanpete County Jail had been there before. In the 18 months after she started, that number dropped to 237.
In most places, people are released from county jails with no health care coverage, no job, nowhere to live, and no plan to stay off drugs or treat their mental illness. Research shows that people newly released from incarceration face a risk of overdose that is 10 times as high as that of the general public.
Sanpete wasn’t any different.
“For seven to eight years of me being here, we’d just release people and cross our fingers,” said Jared Hill, the clinical director for Sanpete County and a counselor at the jail.
Nunley, the programming sergeant, remembers watching people released from jail walk the mile to town with nothing but the clothes they’d worn on the day they were arrested — it was known as the “walk of shame.” Swapp hates that phrase. She said no one has made the trip on foot since she started in July 2022.
Swapp’s work was initially funded by a grant from the U.S. Health Resources and Services Administration, but it has proved so popular that commissioners in Sanpete County voted to use a portion of its opioid settlement money to cover the position in the future.
Swapp doesn’t have formal medical or social work training. She is certified by the state of Utah as a community health worker, a job that has become more common nationwide. There were about 67,000 people working as community health workers in 2022, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Evidence is mounting that the model of training people to help their neighbors connect to government and health care services is sound, said Aditi Vasan, a senior fellow at the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics at the University of Pennsylvania who has reviewed the research on the relatively new role.
The day before Swapp coordinated Shantel Clark’s release, she sat with Robert Draper, a man in his 50s with long white hair and bright-blue eyes. Draper has been in and out of jail for decades. He was sober for a year and had been taking care of his ill mother. She kept getting worse. Then his daughter and her child came to help. It was all a little too much.
“I thought, if I can just go and get high, I can deal with this shit,” said Draper. “But after you’ve been using for 40 years, it’s kinda easy to slip back in.”
He didn’t blame his probation officer for throwing him back in jail when he tested positive for drugs, he said. But he thinks jail time is an overreaction to a relapse. Draper sent a note to Swapp through the jail staff asking to see her. He was hoping she could help him get out so he could be with his mom, who had just been sent to hospice. He had missed his father’s death years ago because he was in jail at the time.
Swapp listened to Draper’s story without interruptions or questions. Then she asked if she could run through her list with him so she would know what he needed.
“Do you have your Social Security card?”
“My card?” Draper shrugged. “I know my number.”
“Your birth certificate, you have it?”
“Yeah, I don’t know where it is.”
“Driver’s license?”
“No.”
“Was it revoked?”
“A long, long time ago,” Draper said. “DUI from 22 years ago. Paid for and everything.”
“Are you interested in getting it back?”
“Yeah!”
Swapp has some version of this conversation with every person she meets in the jail. She also runs through their history of addiction and asks them what they most need to get back on their feet.
She told Draper she would try to get him into intensive outpatient therapy. That would involve four to five classes a week and a lot of driving. He’d need his license back. She didn’t make promises but said she would talk to his probation officer and the judge. He sighed and thanked her.
“I’m your biggest fan here,” Swapp said. “I want you to succeed. I want you to be with your mom, too.”
The federal grant that funded the launch of Sanpete’s community health worker program is held by the regional health care services organization Intermountain Health. Intermountain took the idea to the county and has provided Swapp with support and training. Intermountain staff also administer the $1 million, three-year grant, which includes efforts to increase addiction recovery services in the area.
A similarly funded program in Kentucky called First Day Forward took the community health worker model a step further, using “peer support specialists” — people who have experienced the issues they are trying to help others navigate. Spokespeople from HRSA pointed to four programs, including the ones in Utah and Kentucky, that are using their grant money for people facing or serving time in local jails.
Back in Utah, Sanpete’s new jail captain, Jeff Nielsen, said people in small-town law enforcement weren’t so far removed from those serving time.
“We know these people,” Nielsen said. He has known Robert Draper since middle school. “They are friends, neighbors, sometimes family. We’d rather help than lock them up and throw away the key. We’d rather help give them a good life.”
MANTI, Utah — Garrett Clark estimates he has spent about six years in the Sanpete County Jail, a plain concrete building perched on a dusty hill just outside this small, rural town where he grew up.
He blames his addiction. He started using in middle school, and by the time he was an adult he was addicted to meth and heroin. At various points, he’s done time alongside his mom, his dad, his sister, and his younger brother.
“That’s all I’ve known my whole life,” said Clark, 31, in December.
Clark was at the jail to pick up his sister, who had just been released. The siblings think this time will be different. They are both sober. Shantel Clark, 33, finished earning her high school diploma during her four-month stay at the jail. They have a place to live where no one is using drugs.
And they have Cheryl Swapp, the county sheriff’s new community health worker, on their side.
“She saved my life probably, for sure,” Garrett Clark said.
Swapp meets with every person booked into the county jail soon after they arrive and helps them create a plan for the day they get out.
She makes sure everyone has a state ID card, a birth certificate, and a Social Security card so they can qualify for government benefits, apply to jobs, and get to treatment and probation appointments. She helps nearly everyone enroll in Medicaid and apply for housing benefits and food stamps. If they need medication to stay off drugs, she lines that up. If they need a place to stay, she finds them a bed.
Then Swapp coordinates with the jail captain to have people released directly to the treatment facility. Nobody leaves the jail without a ride and a drawstring backpack filled with items like toothpaste, a blanket, and a personalized list of job openings.
“A missing puzzle piece,” Sgt. Gretchen Nunley, who runs educational and addiction recovery programming for the jail, called Swapp.
Swapp also assesses the addiction history of everyone held by the county. More than half arrive at the jail addicted to something.
Nationally, 63% of people booked into local jails struggle with a substance use disorder — at least six times the rate of the general population, according to the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. The incidence of mental illness in jails is more than twice the rate in the general population, federal data shows. At least 4.9 million people are arrested and jailed every year, according to an analysis of 2017 data by the Prison Policy Initiative, a nonprofit organization that documents the harm of mass incarceration. Of those incarcerated, 25% are booked two or more times, the analysis found. And among those arrested twice, more than half had a substance use disorder and a quarter had a mental illness.
“We don’t lock people up for being diabetic or epileptic,” said David Mahoney, a retired sheriff in Dane County, Wisconsin, who served as president of the National Sheriffs’ Association in 2020-21. “The question every community needs to ask is: ‘Are we doing our responsibility to each other for locking people up for a diagnosed medical condition?’”
The idea that county sheriffs might owe it to society to offer medical and mental health treatment to people in their jails is part of a broader shift in thinking among law enforcement officials that Mahoney said he has observed during the past decade.
“Don’t we have a moral and ethical responsibility as community members to address the reasons people are coming into the criminal justice system?” asked Mahoney, who has 41 years of experience in law enforcement.
Swapp previously worked as a teacher’s aide for those she calls the “behavior kids” — children who had trouble self-regulating in class. She feels her work at the jail is a way to change things for the parents of those kids. And it appears to be working.
Since the Sanpete County Sheriff’s Office hired Swapp last year, recidivism has dropped sharply. In the 18 months before she began her work, 599 of the people booked into Sanpete County Jail had been there before. In the 18 months after she started, that number dropped to 237.
In most places, people are released from county jails with no health care coverage, no job, nowhere to live, and no plan to stay off drugs or treat their mental illness. Research shows that people newly released from incarceration face a risk of overdose that is 10 times as high as that of the general public.
Sanpete wasn’t any different.
“For seven to eight years of me being here, we’d just release people and cross our fingers,” said Jared Hill, the clinical director for Sanpete County and a counselor at the jail.
Nunley, the programming sergeant, remembers watching people released from jail walk the mile to town with nothing but the clothes they’d worn on the day they were arrested — it was known as the “walk of shame.” Swapp hates that phrase. She said no one has made the trip on foot since she started in July 2022.
Swapp’s work was initially funded by a grant from the U.S. Health Resources and Services Administration, but it has proved so popular that commissioners in Sanpete County voted to use a portion of its opioid settlement money to cover the position in the future.
Swapp doesn’t have formal medical or social work training. She is certified by the state of Utah as a community health worker, a job that has become more common nationwide. There were about 67,000 people working as community health workers in 2022, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Evidence is mounting that the model of training people to help their neighbors connect to government and health care services is sound, said Aditi Vasan, a senior fellow at the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics at the University of Pennsylvania who has reviewed the research on the relatively new role.
The day before Swapp coordinated Shantel Clark’s release, she sat with Robert Draper, a man in his 50s with long white hair and bright-blue eyes. Draper has been in and out of jail for decades. He was sober for a year and had been taking care of his ill mother. She kept getting worse. Then his daughter and her child came to help. It was all a little too much.
“I thought, if I can just go and get high, I can deal with this shit,” said Draper. “But after you’ve been using for 40 years, it’s kinda easy to slip back in.”
He didn’t blame his probation officer for throwing him back in jail when he tested positive for drugs, he said. But he thinks jail time is an overreaction to a relapse. Draper sent a note to Swapp through the jail staff asking to see her. He was hoping she could help him get out so he could be with his mom, who had just been sent to hospice. He had missed his father’s death years ago because he was in jail at the time.
Swapp listened to Draper’s story without interruptions or questions. Then she asked if she could run through her list with him so she would know what he needed.
“Do you have your Social Security card?”
“My card?” Draper shrugged. “I know my number.”
“Your birth certificate, you have it?”
“Yeah, I don’t know where it is.”
“Driver’s license?”
“No.”
“Was it revoked?”
“A long, long time ago,” Draper said. “DUI from 22 years ago. Paid for and everything.”
“Are you interested in getting it back?”
“Yeah!”
Swapp has some version of this conversation with every person she meets in the jail. She also runs through their history of addiction and asks them what they most need to get back on their feet.
She told Draper she would try to get him into intensive outpatient therapy. That would involve four to five classes a week and a lot of driving. He’d need his license back. She didn’t make promises but said she would talk to his probation officer and the judge. He sighed and thanked her.
“I’m your biggest fan here,” Swapp said. “I want you to succeed. I want you to be with your mom, too.”
The federal grant that funded the launch of Sanpete’s community health worker program is held by the regional health care services organization Intermountain Health. Intermountain took the idea to the county and has provided Swapp with support and training. Intermountain staff also administer the $1 million, three-year grant, which includes efforts to increase addiction recovery services in the area.
A similarly funded program in Kentucky called First Day Forward took the community health worker model a step further, using “peer support specialists” — people who have experienced the issues they are trying to help others navigate. Spokespeople from HRSA pointed to four programs, including the ones in Utah and Kentucky, that are using their grant money for people facing or serving time in local jails.
Back in Utah, Sanpete’s new jail captain, Jeff Nielsen, said people in small-town law enforcement weren’t so far removed from those serving time.
“We know these people,” Nielsen said. He has known Robert Draper since middle school. “They are friends, neighbors, sometimes family. We’d rather help than lock them up and throw away the key. We’d rather help give them a good life.”
Four years after the COVID-19 pandemic closed schools and upended child care, the CDC says parents can start treating the virus like other respiratory illnesses.
Gone are mandated isolation periods and masking. But will schools and child care centers agree?
In case you’ve lost track: Before Friday, all Americans, including school children, were supposed to stay home for at least five days if they had COVID-19 and then mask for a set period of time, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Now, with COVID deaths and hospitalizations dropping, the CDC says children can go back to school when their overall symptoms improve and they’re fever-free for 24 hours without taking medication. Students are “encouraged” to wear a mask when they return.
Still, the change may not affect how individual schools urge parents to react when their children fall sick. Schools and child care providers have a mixed record on following CDC recommendations and often look to local authorities for the ultimate word. And sometimes other goals, such as reducing absences, can influence a state or district’s decisions.
The result can be a confusing array of policies among states and districts, not to mention workplaces — confounding parents whose lives have long been upended by the virus.
“This is so confusing,” said Gloria Cunningham, a single mom in the Boston area. “I just don’t know what I should think of COVID now. Is it still a monster?”
Cunningham, who manages a local store for a national restaurant chain, said her company requires her to take off 10 days if she gets COVID-19. And the school system where her son is in second grade has still been sending home COVID test kits for kids to use before returning to school after long breaks.
“I feel like we should just do away with anything that treats COVID differently or keep all of the precautions,” she said.
The public education system has long held varying policies on COVID. During the 2021-22 school year, 18 states followed CDC recommendations for mask-wearing in class. When the CDC lifted its masking guidelines in February 2022, states such as Massachusetts followed suit, but California kept the mask requirement for schools.
And in the child care world, some providers have long used more stringent testing and isolation protocols than the CDC has recommended. Reasons have ranged from trying to prevent outbreaks to keeping staff healthy — both for their personal safety and to keep the day care open.
Some states moved to more lenient guidelines ahead of the CDC. California and Oregon recently rescinded COVID-19 isolation requirements, and many districts followed their advice.
In an attempt to minimize school absences and address an epidemic of chronic absenteeism, California has encouraged kids to come to school when mildly sick and said that students who test positive for coronavirus but are asymptomatic can attend school. Los Angeles and San Diego’s school systems, among others, have adopted that policy.
But the majority of big-city districts around the country still have asked parents to isolate children for at least five days before returning to school. Some, including Boston and Atlanta, have required students to mask for another five days and report positive COVID-19 test results to the school.
Some school leaders suggest the CDC’s previous five-day isolation requirement was already only loosely followed.
Official policy in Burlington, Massachusetts, has been to have students stay home for five days if they test positive. But Superintendent Eric Conti said the real policy, in effect, is: “It’s a virus. Deal with it.”
That’s because COVID is managed at home, using the honor system.
“Without school-based testing, no one can enforce a five-day COVID policy,” he said via text message.
Ridley School District in the Philadelphia suburbs was already using a policy similar to the new CDC guidelines, said Superintendent Lee Ann Wentzel. Students who test positive for COVID must be fever-free without medication for at least 24 hours before returning to school. When they come back, they must mask for five days. Wentzel said the district is now considering dropping the masking requirement because of the new CDC guidance.
A school or day care’s specific guidelines are consequential for working parents who must miss work if their child can’t go to school or child care. In October 2023, during simultaneous surges of COVID, respiratory syncytial virus and influenza, 104,000 adults reported missing work because of child care issues, the highest number in at least a decade. That number has fallen: Last month, child care problems meant 41,000 adults missed work, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Melissa Colagrosso’s child care center in West Virginia dropped special guidelines for COVID about a year ago, she said. Now, they’re the same as other illnesses: A child must be free of severe symptoms such as fever for at least 24 hours before returning to the center.
“We certainly are treating COVID just like we would treat flu or hand, foot and mouth” disease, said Colagrosso, CEO of A Place To Grow Children’s Center in Oak Hill.
As for kids without symptoms who test positive for COVID? Most parents have stopped testing kids unless they have symptoms, Colagrasso said, so it’s a quandary she has not encountered.
Still, some parents worry the relaxed rules put their communities at greater risk. Evelyn Alemán leads a group of Latino and Indigenous immigrant parents in Los Angeles County. The parents she represents, many of whom suffer from chronic illnesses and lack of access to health care, panicked when California did away with isolation requirements in January.
“I don’t think they’re considering what the impact will be for our families,” she said of California officials. “It feels like they don’t care — that we’re almost expendable.”
Other impacts of the pandemic linger, too, even as restrictions are lifted. In Ridley, the Philadelphia-area district, more students are reclusive and struggle to interact in-person with peers, said Wentzel, the superintendent. Interest in school dances has plummeted.
“Emotionally,” Wentzel said, “they’re having trouble.”
Four years after the COVID-19 pandemic closed schools and upended child care, the CDC says parents can start treating the virus like other respiratory illnesses.
Gone are mandated isolation periods and masking. But will schools and child care centers agree?
In case you’ve lost track: Before Friday, all Americans, including school children, were supposed to stay home for at least five days if they had COVID-19 and then mask for a set period of time, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Now, with COVID deaths and hospitalizations dropping, the CDC says children can go back to school when their overall symptoms improve and they’re fever-free for 24 hours without taking medication. Students are “encouraged” to wear a mask when they return.
Still, the change may not affect how individual schools urge parents to react when their children fall sick. Schools and child care providers have a mixed record on following CDC recommendations and often look to local authorities for the ultimate word. And sometimes other goals, such as reducing absences, can influence a state or district’s decisions.
The result can be a confusing array of policies among states and districts, not to mention workplaces — confounding parents whose lives have long been upended by the virus.
“This is so confusing,” said Gloria Cunningham, a single mom in the Boston area. “I just don’t know what I should think of COVID now. Is it still a monster?”
Cunningham, who manages a local store for a national restaurant chain, said her company requires her to take off 10 days if she gets COVID-19. And the school system where her son is in second grade has still been sending home COVID test kits for kids to use before returning to school after long breaks.
“I feel like we should just do away with anything that treats COVID differently or keep all of the precautions,” she said.
The public education system has long held varying policies on COVID. During the 2021-22 school year, 18 states followed CDC recommendations for mask-wearing in class. When the CDC lifted its masking guidelines in February 2022, states such as Massachusetts followed suit, but California kept the mask requirement for schools.
And in the child care world, some providers have long used more stringent testing and isolation protocols than the CDC has recommended. Reasons have ranged from trying to prevent outbreaks to keeping staff healthy — both for their personal safety and to keep the day care open.
Some states moved to more lenient guidelines ahead of the CDC. California and Oregon recently rescinded COVID-19 isolation requirements, and many districts followed their advice.
In an attempt to minimize school absences and address an epidemic of chronic absenteeism, California has encouraged kids to come to school when mildly sick and said that students who test positive for coronavirus but are asymptomatic can attend school. Los Angeles and San Diego’s school systems, among others, have adopted that policy.
But the majority of big-city districts around the country still have asked parents to isolate children for at least five days before returning to school. Some, including Boston and Atlanta, have required students to mask for another five days and report positive COVID-19 test results to the school.
Some school leaders suggest the CDC’s previous five-day isolation requirement was already only loosely followed.
Official policy in Burlington, Massachusetts, has been to have students stay home for five days if they test positive. But Superintendent Eric Conti said the real policy, in effect, is: “It’s a virus. Deal with it.”
That’s because COVID is managed at home, using the honor system.
“Without school-based testing, no one can enforce a five-day COVID policy,” he said via text message.
Ridley School District in the Philadelphia suburbs was already using a policy similar to the new CDC guidelines, said Superintendent Lee Ann Wentzel. Students who test positive for COVID must be fever-free without medication for at least 24 hours before returning to school. When they come back, they must mask for five days. Wentzel said the district is now considering dropping the masking requirement because of the new CDC guidance.
A school or day care’s specific guidelines are consequential for working parents who must miss work if their child can’t go to school or child care. In October 2023, during simultaneous surges of COVID, respiratory syncytial virus and influenza, 104,000 adults reported missing work because of child care issues, the highest number in at least a decade. That number has fallen: Last month, child care problems meant 41,000 adults missed work, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Melissa Colagrosso’s child care center in West Virginia dropped special guidelines for COVID about a year ago, she said. Now, they’re the same as other illnesses: A child must be free of severe symptoms such as fever for at least 24 hours before returning to the center.
“We certainly are treating COVID just like we would treat flu or hand, foot and mouth” disease, said Colagrosso, CEO of A Place To Grow Children’s Center in Oak Hill.
As for kids without symptoms who test positive for COVID? Most parents have stopped testing kids unless they have symptoms, Colagrasso said, so it’s a quandary she has not encountered.
Still, some parents worry the relaxed rules put their communities at greater risk. Evelyn Alemán leads a group of Latino and Indigenous immigrant parents in Los Angeles County. The parents she represents, many of whom suffer from chronic illnesses and lack of access to health care, panicked when California did away with isolation requirements in January.
“I don’t think they’re considering what the impact will be for our families,” she said of California officials. “It feels like they don’t care — that we’re almost expendable.”
Other impacts of the pandemic linger, too, even as restrictions are lifted. In Ridley, the Philadelphia-area district, more students are reclusive and struggle to interact in-person with peers, said Wentzel, the superintendent. Interest in school dances has plummeted.
“Emotionally,” Wentzel said, “they’re having trouble.”