Medical task force urges Miami-Dade schools to mandate masks. Carvalho agrees.
Miami-Dade County public school students will likely be required to wear masks when they return to class next week, based on the unanimous recommendation a task force of medical experts advising the school district made Monday night.
The nine-member Miami-Dade County School Board is expected to vote on the issue when it meets Wednesday morning.
Superintendent Alberto Carvalho said Monday he fully supports the task force’s recommendation because Miami-Dade County continues to be hard hit by the delta variant of COVID-19.
“My mind is pretty made up on the way to move forward. And, that is in full agreement with the recommendations of this task force,” Carvalho said.
He said he came to his conclusion despite criticism by some parents and others against mask mandates who cite the statistically low probability of children becoming seriously ill or dying if they catch COVID. Carvalho pointed out that the delta strain is impacting younger people more. This includes a 13-year-old student in the district who died of COVID, Carvalho said.
“I don’t know what the threshold of acceptable pain in this community is. I don’t know what the acceptable threshold or statistical probability of a single child dying is in this community,” he said. “Just like I don’t know what the threshold that anyone should accept as appropriate for teachers, custodial staff, police officers who may have underlying conditions, and that’s not a crime, or not who may be hospitalized, who may be intubated or who may perish.”
Carvalho told reporters after the meeting that the 13-year-old, as well as four district employees, died “of COVID or COVID-related complications” in recent weeks.
School board members attending Monday’s virtual meeting also appeared to be aligned with the task force’s recommendations.
“Our children will be fine,” said Dorothy Bendross-Mindingall, who represents District 2 on the board. “We’re going to see to that.”
District would be changing course on masks
The recommended protocol is a reversal of the district’s stance earlier this summer that masks would be optional for students and staff for the 2021-22 school year. But that is because the COVID situation has changed drastically for the worse in a short period of time, said Jaime Torrens, the district’s deputy superintendent.
“Conditions in our community were much different than what we’re experiencing today,” he said during the meeting.
New cases of the more transmittable strain have increased 868% from the beginning of June to last week, Torrens said.
“The data speaks for itself, and not in a favorable way,” he said.
According to Torrens, in the beginning of the summer Miami-Dade County had around 73 cases per 100,000 people. The rate now is about 740 cases per 100,000 people, he said.
“This puts us well into the highest ranges of community transmission,” Torrens said.
The seven-member task force’s recommendation comes almost a week after the Broward County School Board voted 8-1 to keep its mask mandate in place when students return to class Wednesday, defying Gov. Ron DeSantis’ executive order requiring that Florida school districts make masking optional for students and staff.
But the doctors on the task force urged school officials to make their decisions based on the available science and not politics.
“Anything we can do that’s prevention is always going to be a better solution,” said task force member Dr. Aileen Marty, an infectious disease expert at Florida International University.
District staff recommended in the beginning of Monday’s meeting that masks should be mandated, but parents should have the option of obtaining some sort of a medical waiver in rare instances when their child demonstrates he or she cannot wear a facial covering.
However, task force members said there is no medical reason a child cannot wear one. Dr. Lisa Gwynn, associate professor of clinical pediatrics and public health sciences at the University of Miami, dismissed the notion that some children with special needs, including those on the autism spectrum, aren’t capable of wearing them nearly a year and a half into the pandemic.
“This should not be the first time that an autistic child has tried to wear a mask,” Gwynn said.
The mandate would also apply to children who ride the school bus. Children eating and those participating in athletics and other outdoor activities would not have to wear masks, although social distancing rules will be in place.
District officials are also considering trying to hold more classes and lunches outdoors.
“We’re blessed to be in a part of the world where we can do so many things outdoors,” Marty said, stressing the other mental and physical health benefits of being in nature.
“There’s a lot of good reasons to be outdoors,” she said.
Vaccines recommended, safety protocols in place
As part of the district’s COVID protocol, it will continue to urge more students, and their parents, to get vaccinated. According to Torrens, about 63% of Miami-Dade children between the ages of 12 and 17 have had at least one dose of a vaccine.
“We’re still not where we need to be,” Carvalho said.
All classrooms will have assigned seating and seating charts so district officials can contact trace in the event of positive cases, Torrens said.
If students test positive for COVID, the district’s current recommended protocol calls for them to quarantine for 10 days before returning to class if they are asymptomatic with or without taking a COVID test. Asymptomatic students may return to class after seven days if they receive a negative COVID test result.
The task force doctors, however, urged the district to lengthen the time period to at least 15 days for quarantining after a student or staff member tests positive.
Dr. Peter Paige, Miami-Dade County’s chief medical officer, said the delta variant has forced doctors to question what they thought they knew about COVID, and that includes how long someone should be isolated after catching it.
Paige also said that the delta variant challenges previous theories about a person’s ability to transmit COVID after having been vaccinated.
“Vaccination status still allows you to carry and transmit the virus for extended periods of time. So, we’ve changed our protocol around the vaccinated population and their exposure as well. So, if a vaccinated person gets exposed to a positive case, they quarantine,” Paige said.
A Miami-Dade Schools mask mandate is likely to trigger a response from Education Commissioner Richard Corcoran, who last week threatened to levy financial penalties against Broward County and Alachua County public schools after they defied the state’s masking orders by requiring a doctor’s note.
Corcoran warned that if the districts did not change their mask policies, he would recommend the State Board of Education withhold funds “in an amount equal to the salaries of the superintendent and all the members of the school board.” Corcoran is expected to make his case for sanctions against Broward and Alachua school officials on Tuesday afternoon, during an emergency meeting of the State Board of Education.
The emergency meeting is only noticed to address the decisions made by Broward and Alachua public schools. Miami-Dade’s mask mandate will likely be addressed in a separate meeting, if the state decides to propose sanctions for the district.
In response to the state’s threats, the Biden administration on Friday indicated it intends to step in and allow disobedient districts to use federal relief funds to offset any financial penalties. President Joe Biden also called Broward County interim superintendent Vickie Cartwright to say he supports the district’s decision to stay the course of the mask mandate and that he stands ready to help with resources to ensure a safe return to in-person classes.
Biden’s decision to call a local school superintendent was indicative of his personal engagement in his administration’s growing public push back against DeSantis’ public health policies amid a recent surge in coronavirus cases.
In relation to schools, DeSantis has been strongly opposed to mask mandates. He has framed the issue as one about “choice” and “freedom,” and has criticized the Biden administration for intervening on parents’ ability to choose whether their children should wear masks or not.
This story was updated to correct the title of Deputy Superintendent Jaime Torrens.
This story was originally published August 16, 2021 at 9:13 PM.
