Sacramento City Unified and another local K-12 district to drop mask orders for students
Sacramento City Unified School District will end its mask mandate upon return from spring break in mid-April, doing so after local coronavirus infections have plummeted to very low levels.
The district in a statement Thursday announced it will “shift from requiring masking to strongly recommending masking, starting Monday, April 18,” which will align the district with state COVID-19 guidance.
California health officials lifted the statewide K-12 mask mandate March 11, though individual districts remained free beyond that date to implement their own, stricter standards.
The Sacramento City Unified school board on March 8 voted to lift its mask requirement for students and staff, but only once Sacramento County had been classified in the “low” community level of COVID-19 spread for four consecutive weeks. That move was in accordance with a then-new framework from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
In last month’s announcement, the district said that if the county first met that standard on April 7 – the first day it would be eligible to do so – then the removal of the mandate would be effective April 18, the first day back after next week’s spring recess.
The county remained well within the bounds for low community spread in Thursday’s update, CDC data show, triggering the end of the mask order.
The California Department of Public Health ended its mask order in most indoor public settings on Feb. 16 for those who are fully vaccinated against COVID-19, then expanded that March 1 to the unvaccinated, with several exceptions that included K-12 campuses until March 11.
Most other K-12 districts in the region ended their mandates in alignment with the state’s change in school mask guidance; some, including in El Dorado and Placer counties, preempted the change in the state health order and dropped their requirements in late February or in the early days of March.
Masks are still mandatory in a number of settings, including nursing homes, prisons, public transit and health care, including things like nurses’ offices at K-12 schools.
The changing policy at Sacramento City Unified comes as Sacramento County records some of its lowest virus numbers of the two-year pandemic. County health officials in a weekly update Wednesday reported a daily case rate of just 2.7 per 100,000 residents, Sacramento’s lowest since June 2020.
That’s nearly one-hundredth of the county’s peak, 254 cases per 100,000, recorded in early January at the height of winter’s omicron surge.
Davis district also dropping mask order
Davis Joint Unified, the other major district in the region that kept masks mandatory beyond March 11, announced last month it would lift the requirement next Monday, April 11.
In a statement to its website, Davis Joint Unified said the date was chosen to give the district additional time and “protect against a possible COVID-19 surge following spring break,” which was observed March 21-25 in that district.
Yolo County, like all but one of California’s 58 counties, is also in the CDC’s low community level as of this week’s update.
The state’s only exception is Plumas County, which has a “medium” community level in the three-tier system.
Could mask order return at Sacramento district?
The announcement by Sacramento City Unified in March, of its plan to drop mask requirements after four weeks in the CDC’s low level, also made clear that the district could return to a mandate if pandemic conditions worsen.
The district said it will return to mandatory masking if Sacramento County returns to a “high” community level, and that district officials would “consider” a return to masking if the county returned to medium, “depending on global/national/local trends.”
For those reporting fewer than 200 daily cases per 100,000 residents, counties are classified in the CDC’s high level if they record 20 or more virus hospital admissions per 100,000 residents, or if 15% or more of staffed hospital beds are occupied by virus patients.
The medium-level cutoffs are 10 hospitalizations per 100,000 or at least 10% of hospital beds taken by COVID-19 cases.
Sacramento County as of this week maintained a large cushion, with all associated metrics less than half the medium thresholds: the CDC on Thursday reported Sacramento at 37 cases per 100,000 over the past seven days, with 4.0 new hospital admissions per 100,000 and just 2.9% of hospital beds occupied by COVID-19 patients.
This story was originally published April 8, 2022 at 8:08 AM.
