Students in the Culver City Unified School District will still have to wear masks inside the classrooms another week.
The local school district issued the following statement this week:
“Due to the new highly transmissible Omicron variants that have been circulating since mid-March and the recent acceleration in COVID-19 cases nationally, in California, and in Los Angeles County, the Culver City Unified School District has decided to extend the in-door mask mandate for an additional two weeks, until Monday, May 2, when they hope to make masks optional.
This is out of an abundance of caution for the health and safety of our students, our staff, and our families. This decision was made based on several factors:
The national case rate has risen by around 25% over the last two weeks. Today, Los Angeles County reports a 23% increase in the last week.
The CDC advises taking a cautious approach in regards to prematurely lifting safety mandates, and is keeping its mask order “in order to assess the potential impact the rise of cases has on severe disease, including hospitalizations and deaths, and health care system capacity.”
The federal government has also extended mask mandates on public transit until May 3.
We continue to live by and operate on the principle that the safer our schools are, the safer our homes are. Despite a high vaccination rate in our schools and in Culver City, there are immunocompromised people in our community whose health is at high risk if they contract COVID-19. And there are still children in our schools, and at home, who have not received the vaccine or are not yet eligible to be vaccinated.
We had the best of intentions before Spring Break that we could lift the in-door mask mandate after being back in school for one week, and testing everyone to ensure there was no outbreak. However, the newly detected variants, responsible for this most current surge due to their aggressive transmissibility, require us to be more cautious.
We all are struggling with overwhelming COVID fatigue. This extended mandate undoubtedly comes as an unwelcome development to many students and staff who were looking forward to the option of not wearing masks while in-door at school. We continue to ask for compassion, grace and patience as we ask you to keep your masks on for two more weeks, to patiently support one another, and keep doing what we’ve been diligently doing just a little while longer.
The district will continue weekly testing. We will continue to urge all eligible students to get vaccinated if they aren’t already and to get boosted (and boosted again) as eligible. And we will continue to diligently monitor the caseload in our schools, in our community and in the county.”
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