Pennsylvania’s acting health secretary rebuked Bucks County over its school reopening guidelines Monday, calling the guidance “alarming” and saying it could diminish the county’s ability to respond to coronavirus outbreaks and derail the goal of resuming in-school instruction for students.
By early Tuesday, the county had revised its guidance to schools. Its new statement insisted much of the county’s previous guidance had been “in sync” with the CDC but that the revision “will serve to strengthen that connection.”
Still, the back-and-forth highlights what has appeared to be one of the most intense debates in the Philadelphia region over how to reopen schools safely after a year of disrupted learning. And it came less than a week after the county had already revised its Aug. 15 recommendations to call for in-school masking amid public complaints over its initial guidance that schools could make masks optional.
With districts in the county on the cusp of a new school year, a slate of Bucks school boards are meeting this week to consider revised masking policies. Officials are bracing to face a divided public; parents opposed to masking have voiced outrage, while others say schools aren’t planning to do nearly enough to mitigate the spreading virus.
Like the entire region, Bucks County has high transmission of COVID-19, with rising case numbers and a 6% test positivity rate as of Friday, according to the CDC.
In a letter sent Monday to the county commissioners, Pennsylvania’s acting health secretary, Alison Beam, said aspects of the county’s guidance “disregard evidence-based public health practices,” are not supported by scientific understanding of the virus, and are inconsistent with recommendations for schools from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the state.
The intervention came as Pennsylvania has largely left reopening decisions up to individual districts, recommending that they follow CDC guidance but declining to impose a statewide school mask mandate.
That paved the way for a patchwork of rules that can differ from town to town and has left school boards, rather than scientists or government officials, making health decisions that have spurred bitter community division. In the handful of counties with health departments, which are tasked with preventing disease, that’s put an onus on them to provide direction to schools.
The debate in Bucks has been particularly contentious — in part because the county’s health director, David Damsker, has recommended less strict COVID-19 prevention measures for schools than federal and state officials, advocating this summer for schools to treat the virus as they would a typical seasonal flu.
His approach, some aspects of which Beam said were not based on scientific evidence or best practices and which has differed from neighboring counties, has made him a lightning rod — drawing support from those who have wanted schools to reopen quickly and criticism from those who say his philosophy is too lax to be safe.
In a July email to an administrator of a Bucks County daycare facility that was widely circulated online and sparked outcry among some parents, Damsker suggested that “one easy way” of handling the requirement to notify the county of cases “is not to have your parents report COVID-19 to you.”
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Pennsylvania has only told districts and counties to follow federal recommendations for reopening schools this fall — declining to impose mandates or give local leaders directives beyond asking for adherence to CDC guidelines and the case-reporting requirement.
Beam’s letter, a copy of which was obtained by The Inquirer, marked an unusual intervention.
“Without… clear messaging — or worse, with the inconsistent and alarming messaging included in the BCHD guidance document — I fear our school leaders will not be equipped with the tools to keep our children safely in school,” Beam wrote in the letter to the commissioners.
Damsker did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but a county spokesperson shared the new guidance with The Inquirer in response to questions about Beam’s letter.
The updated guidance says anyone who has coronavirus symptoms should be referred for testing, and anyone who tests positive for COVID-19 must isolate from school for 10 days. It also indicates that school and the county are expected to contact trace, which Bucks had previously said it was not planning to do.
Taken together, it represents a sharp reversal from the county’s earlier directive that students who test positive for COVID could return to school after being fever-free for 24 hours or if they have not developed symptoms within three days.
Beam called that policy “completely inconsistent” with federal and state recommendations and said there was “no definitive evidence” for it “published in the scientific record.” She said the county’s Aug. 15 guidance would “allow for infectious people to be in schools,” putting all children under 12 and anyone else unvaccinated at risk for infection and death.
The Bucks County Health Department ”wants our schools to be safe, healthy, open, and able to provide a quality in-person education,” officials wrote in the new guidance.
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