By Betsy McKay, Yoree Koh and Catherine Lucey
Updated Feb. 12, 2021 8:09 pm ET
Federal health and education officials urged the nation’s elementary and secondary schools on Friday to reopen safely as soon as possible, saying they can operate by strictly adhering to safety precautions to reduce the risk of Covid-19 transmission in classrooms and in their communities.
In new guidelines for schools, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said students, teachers and staff should be required to wear masks at all times and should maintain distances of at least 6 feet from one another as much as possible, with students divided into small groups that don’t mix with one another.
Also essential, the agency said, are proper hand-washing practices, cleaning and maintaining healthy facilities, and working with health departments to use contact tracing, isolation and quarantine to reduce the risk of transmission once someone has been infected.
Strictly adhering to these measures will reduce the risk of Covid-19 in schools even if transmission is high in the community, the CDC said.
The timing and logistics of bringing students back to schools without Covid-19 transmission has led to sharp debates between parents pushing for reopenings and cautious school systems, as well as tense negotiations between teachers’ unions and city governments.
The CDC, the nation’s public-health agency, issued the guidelines as many cities and states move to resume in-person instruction with Covid-19 cases declining across the country and pressure from many parents growing.
President Biden has promised to help reopen a majority of K-8 schools in his first 100 days in office, calling the lack of school time a “national emergency.”
The White House clarified this week that the pledge means opening more than half of schools for in-person instruction at least one day a week, though the goal is fully reopening five days a week.
Under the new guidelines, teachers don’t need to be vaccinated in order for schools to reopen, as long as recommended measures are followed, the CDC said, though it stressed that teachers should get vaccinated when supplies allow.
“It is critical for schools to open as safely and as soon as possible, and remain open, to achieve the benefits of in-person learning and key support services,” the CDC said in the new guidelines. “All community members, students, families, teachers, and school staff should take actions to protect themselves and others where they live, work, learn, and play.”
K-12 schools should be last to close when governments impose restrictions, and should be reopened ahead of nonessential businesses and activities, the CDC said.
Many of the recommendations, like mask-wearing and physical distancing were in the agency’s previous guidelines. This time, though, the agency is urging schools to implement them, taking a more decisive tone.
“We are talking about your children, about your family who they come home to, about the most precious things you have,” said CDC Director Rochelle Walensky. “Our operational strategy is science-based with the goal of protecting students, teachers, and staff and their families while getting back to the classroom safely.”
After the novel coronavirus spread around the country early last year, schools were forced to close their doors and shift learning online.
Studies have shown in-person instruction is more productive and beneficial for children than remote learning.
The president, as part of his $1.9 trillion Covid-19 relief plan, has proposed an additional $130 billion in funding to help K-12 schools provide smaller class sizes, obtain supplies such as masks and disinfectants and improve ventilation.
Reopening will present many challenges, according to school experts. Many schools lack testing capacity, proper ventilation and supplies, and will likely need additional resources to reopen. It can also be hard to keep students wearing masks. Teachers unions in some locations have been pushing for vaccination before members return to the classroom.
The National Education Association, the country’s largest teachers union, applauded the CDC’s stronger tone on what mitigation strategies must be implemented and enforced for schools to safely reopen.
The agency’s previous approach left wiggle room on interpretation and application, said Becky Pringle, the union’s president. As a result, some schools spaced students 3 feet apart, instead of the recommended 6 feet, while others didn’t mandate mask-wearing inside buildings.
The clarity will also help cash-strapped districts make the case for additional funding to adhere to the safety guidelines, she said.
Dr. Walensky called the guidelines a one-stop shop for operating schools safely in the pandemic, and said they are based on an extensive, in-depth review of the latest science.
“CDC is not mandating that schools reopen,” Dr. Walensky said. “These recommendations simply provide schools a long-needed road map for how to do so safely under different levels of disease in the community.”
She said the CDC defines operating safely as having limited to no transmission in schools.
President Biden said in a statement Friday that this was the “best available scientific evidence on how to reopen schools safely.” He said that some schools will need more personnel, resources and supplies to open.
“These needs cost money. But the cost of keeping our children, families, and educators safe is nothing when compared with the cost of inaction,” Mr. Biden said. “Today, an entire generation of young people is on the brink of being set back up to a year or more in their learning.”
He urged states to give priority to teachers for vaccination and called on Congress to pass his relief package.
The CDC’s previous guidelines left many decisions up to communities rather than urging them directly to take specific actions.
Schools were told they may consider strategies to reinforce mask-wearing and implement social distancing, and the agency didn’t recommend regular testing of students or staff, or screening for symptoms.
The new guidelines recommend testing, as well as vaccinations for teachers and school staff, as soon as supplies allow.
“We’ve been much more prescriptive here,” Dr. Walensky said.
The precautions a school takes can be adjusted based on the level of transmission in their communities, the CDC said. When transmission is low, schools can provide full in-person instruction, if everyone wears masks and follows other precautions, Dr. Walensky said.
Where transmission is high—as is the case currently in more than 90% of U.S. counties—schools should require physical distancing of at least 6 feet, and reduce sports and other extracurricular activities, she said.
Schools should improve ventilation “to the extent possible,” the CDC said, by opening windows and doors if they can do that safely, or use child-safe fans. The guidelines also urge schools to consider upgrading ventilation systems to deliver more clean air and dilute contaminants. Dr. Walensky said that would help with other public needs beyond Covid-19, such as reducing asthma and exposure to mold.
“It would have been more helpful to have the guidelines months ago,” said Roseann Canfora, spokeswoman for the Cleveland Metropolitan School District. “Having the checklist of what it takes to safely operate schools is critical for finalizing the plans,” she said.
In lieu of these decisive guidelines, the district has been putting many of the safety precautions included in the new guidelines in place by following recommendations from local, state and federal health officials, she said. The district also vaccinated about half of its 7,000 school staff members this week.
Tanya Critchfield, a high-school history teacher in Albuquerque, N.M., said the guidelines don’t do enough to make schools safe. “The problem with the CDC guidelines for the return to school has to do with the five words that make a return safe: ‘Strictly adhere to the guidelines,’ ” she said. “We can’t even get adults to strictly adhere to the guidelines. It is not safe for teachers.”
The administration should do more, said Annette Anderson, deputy director of the Center for Safe and Healthy Schools at Johns Hopkins University and a former teacher and school principal. “I think it is important for the Biden administration to consider assigning a school-reopening czar to take all of this on,” she said. “There is so much to do.”
Toddy Dyer said she is desperate for her children—a junior and freshman in high school in Seattle Public Schools—to return to the physical classroom, learning face-to-face and socializing with friends. Yet she said the CDC should have recommended teachers get vaccinated before reopening schools.
“I understand why as a parent we don’t have them in school right now, because teachers aren’t vaccinated and school workers aren’t vaccinated,” she said. “I don’t understand why a prisoner is getting vaccinated before a teacher. I just really think they should be high up there on the list.”
Washington state hasn’t given educators priority access to the vaccine. Some inmates and prison guards in the state received vaccinations in late December, according to the state department of corrections.
Currently, 25 states plus Washington, D.C., are allowing teachers to get vaccines in all or some parts of the state, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. Other states lack enough doses to inoculate them.
“I’m truly relieved to hear we might be back in classrooms sooner than we’d thought possible, but we need teachers to feel safe individually, not just be relatively safe statistically speaking,” said Nancy Bui, principal at the Rooftop School, a pre-K–8 public school in San Francisco. “Government funding and vaccination are absolutely key to making that happen. Getting back to in-person learning is a science and an art.”
Teachers are eligible to get vaccinated in California.
Ms. Bui analyzed the reopening plans of local private schools to learn how to effectively resume operations at Rooftop. She had assumed most of it wouldn’t be doable on a public-school budget but found that staggering entrances, social-distancing classroom plans, and other steps can be replicated at no cost.
“People think private schools are able to do it because they have so much more money, but most of it was totally doable without an influx of resources,” she said.
The main difference Ms. Bui found was that the logistical complexity of reopening an entire school district, composed of many more schools and thousands of students, is herculean compared with that facing a private-school headmaster who only has to take a single school’s needs into consideration.
As of December, about 55% of districts were in remote learning at least part of the time, and the absence is affecting students’ academic success and mental health, according to the Center on Reinventing Public Education, a nonpartisan research group at the University of Washington.
School attendance—either in person or remote—has dropped this academic year, and is continuing to decline as the pandemic wears on. Students have fallen significantly behind expectations in math, and modestly behind in reading in some grades, according to a report last fall by online testing firm Renaissance Learning Inc.
Mental health-related visits to hospital emergency departments rose 24% for 5- to 11-year-olds and 31% for 12- to 17-year-olds between April and October compared with the same period in 2019, according to a CDC study.
Some Republicans have argued that the president should use the close ties that Mr. Biden and Democrats have with teachers unions to persuade them to support school openings. The White House says it simply wants to safely open schools.
School leaders in Chicago and San Francisco reached tentative agreements with teachers unions last weekend to reopen schools.
Chicago officials had threatened to block the city’s teachers from logging into remote learning and the teachers threatened not to show up for work.
The first group of Chicago students—prekindergarten and special education—returned to school buildings on Thursday. Under their agreement, schools in San Francisco could start reopening if community spread becomes more moderate, meaning 2% to 4.9% of Covid-19 tests are positive.
Giving CDC and school officials confidence about reopening schools was a recent study analyzing the experience of 17 schools in rural Wisconsin that reopened in the fall by requiring masks and dividing students into small groups.
The schools didn’t avoid Covid-19 cases altogether, but incidence of the disease in the schools was 37% lower than in the community, the study found.
Still, reducing transmission in communities is an important part of keeping schools safe, Dr. Walensky said. If new virus variants take hold and lead to “really high levels of community spread,” she said, “we may need to revisit” the guidelines.
Taking the precautions needed to reopen schools presents challenges, however. A survey of nearly 4,000 13- to 21-year-olds conducted in October and published by the CDC this week found that while about 65% of students reported that their fellow students wore masks all the time in classrooms and hallways, 42% wore them on school buses, 40% in restrooms, and 36% in the cafeteria when not eating.
High-contact sports should be avoided when the virus is circulating widely in a community, the CDC said in another report, chronicling transmission during two high-school wrestling tournaments in Florida in early December.
Complying with the CDC recommendations will also be difficult for schools that lack proper ventilation, basic hygiene supplies or the funds for them.
“There isn’t hot water in many of our schools, nor is there soap or paper towels,” said Kristen Stephens, an associate professor of the practice of education at Duke University.
Schools that are overcrowded—like those with mobile classrooms—will likely find it hard to bring everyone back to school and maintain physical distance, other school experts say.
The Philadelphia School District and its teachers union are battling over ventilation in district schools. Negotiations on resuming in-person learning have reached an impasse because the union says school buildings are unsafe.
The district has installed window fans in schools that lacked functional mechanical ventilation systems. The union has said the new fans—the kind that are typically found at hardware stores—are for residential use only, bring in cold air and pose an electrical hazard. The school district declined to comment because the two parties are in active mediation.
The district, which is preparing to reopen some elementary classrooms this month, said it has already been working to implement many of the safety measures included in the new guidelines. But the cost has been substantial—about $65 million in Covid-related expenses—and continues to climb, said district superintendent William R. Hite Jr. “That’s in addition to other lost local revenue. While federal stimulus dollars have helped to offset these new costs and lost revenues, the district is still facing fiscal uncertainties due to ongoing pandemic-related costs.”
Testing regularly for the virus could provide an extra layer of protection for staff and families, but is logistically complex and most schools would need significant resources to implement it, according to two reports released last week by the Rockefeller Foundation.
Children may be infected with the virus less often than adults, several studies suggest. Those who are infected don’t normally become as ill as adults. Yet some develop a rare, serious inflammatory syndrome, and children with underlying conditions are at higher risk of severe illness.
Yet 203 children 18 years old or younger had died as of Jan. 27, according to the National Center for Health Statistics, part of the CDC. One-third of children who are hospitalized have been treated in intensive-care units, and Hispanic and Black children are at higher risk.
The number of school-age children who develop Covid-19 has been on the rise, according to the CDC. About 9.3% of all diagnosed cases in the U.S. are among children ages 5 to 17, according to data collected by the agency.
Write to Betsy McKay at betsy.mckay@wsj.com, Yoree Koh at yoree.koh@wsj.com and Catherine Lucey at catherine.lucey@wsj.com
Corrections & Amplifications
Roseann Canfora is the spokeswoman for the Cleveland Metropolitan School District. A previous version of this story misspelled her first name as Rosann. (Corrected on Feb. 12.)