Vaccination Card? Save Yours. You May Need It For High School Football.
As state prepares for full June 11 reopen, school districts setting stage for more mandates and restrictions in the fall
(Photo Credit: New York Magazine)
Good morning and happy June 1. Thanks for spending a portion of your day with The Kerr Report. I hope everyone had a relaxing and maskless holiday.
There is quite a bit of news as we roll through graduation season. I thought I’d address a few highlights here in this article.
First off, proof of vaccination may be coming to a school athletic event near you. Can’t wait for football season!
Last Thursday, I conducted an interview with Matt Troha, assistant executive director of the Illinois High School Association, for the “Jon and Joe Show” weekly podcast. My show partner, Joe Aguilar, asked a question about vaccine verification as a condition for fans to enter games this fall (vaccination cards are a new normal at professional sporting events all over the country.)
This is how Troha answered the question:
As we look to the fall and think about a Friday night football game, the IDPH does provide guidance that masks don’t have to be worn or that vaccinated folks don’t have to wear masks that can create a difficult situation for our schools…to be able to check that and come up with an efficient system…it wouldn’t shock me even if the state guidance is vaccinated folks don’t haver to wear masks but from a school level that’s difficult to implement and that they still do ask some people to wear masks even if they are vaccinated. I think it is going to be that mixture and may create different situations based on what school, who’s game you are attending or what district you are in. I still think its going to be a little hit and miss depending on where you are at and who you are going to see play as we get into fall sports. All we can do is hope that there is guidance that makes it easier on everyone…it’s hard to say right now if that will happen or not.
The part of Troha’s quote where he says, “It wouldn’t shock me even if the state guidance is vaccinated folks don’t have to wear masks but from a school level that’s difficult to implement and that they still do ask some people to wear masks even if they are vaccinated” is the real money shot here.
(For the full interview, click here. The part about vaccination cards begins at the 13:15 mark.
Since #ReturnToPlay last fall, school districts have been asked to implement public health policy they are ill-equipped to execute. Some have done so with a nod to common sense and logic, creating a welcoming environment amidst overreaching recommendations. Others districts have taken ‘guidance’ as mandate and treated school grounds as modern day prison camps. We could be headed down this road again in the fall if attendance guidance around vaccination falls on the hands of individual school districts to interpret. Only now, we will be doing so with no spectator restrictions. How are schools going to crowd control two to four to eight thousand seat stadiums with a vaccination card/no mask requirement? They can’t, so as Troha said, many will default to what’s easiest and the “abundance of caution” creed. So they’ll just require masks. Even for schools that do want to hire extra operations staff and check the easy-to-doctor vaccination cards or digital passports, how many people will flat out refuse to bring them, forget or won’t have gotten vaccinated by then and don’t feel its anyone’s business as to why? They just want to sit outside an watch their kid or grandkid play football or soccer or field hockey.
Will there be a special section in the grandstands blocked out just for them? For the “my vaccination status is my business and not yours” crowd?
It will be a nightmare for schools to manage that situation a hundred times over as the fall sports seasons begin in August.
As for Troha’s last comment—“all we can do is hope there is guidance that makes it easier on everyone. It’s hard to know right now if that will happen or not”—well, we all know hope is not a strategy. And easier is not something Gov. Pritzker or his Illinois Department of Public Heath valets prefer, when heavy-handedness and overregulation is the competing option.
What I anticipate will happen is what we are seeing now at sporting events and graduations—forceful language followed my minimal enforcement. We’ll see photos of maskless fans at events over the state. This will be coming off a summer where masks will not be worn. The optics have flipped; mask shaming was trendy in the fall, winter and even into the early spring.
But after the CDC reversed its guidance in May, the maskers are the Bearded Ladies at the Circus. They are to be respected for making a personal decision, but their fears are their own and can no longer infringe on the personal freedoms of others.
And I’m still waiting for that definitive article of science-backed data that shows how wearing masks slows the spread of Covid. If discovered, send me a copy please to jon@jonjkerr.com.
I ran an investigative article last week, part two of my “Kids In Quarantine” series that featured an athlete at Huntley High School.
I had reached out to the school district and McHenry Department of Public Health, the public health department that services HHS, with questions related to the article. I never heard back before publication. But as often happens with these stories, I did receive a response post-publication.
No reason to publish the entire exchange. But there is a section of the answer important to the piece and to the larger issue of contact quarantines.
Most, if not all county public health agencies have an assigned worker that acts as a liaison between the agency and schools. In the case of MCDH, that person is Susan Karras. I asked Karras if data compiled by school districts is shared with county health departments. She said it was and provided a school-specific metrics dashboard page.
Karras added, “since the beginning of the pandemic MCDH has hosted weekly Situational Update calls/virtual meeting open to all school officials to get updates and ask questions. The MCDH Administrator and Director of Public Health Nursing meet with the Superintendents weekly to provide updates and consultation.”
It’s commonplace for health departments to hold conference calls with superintendents as a means to communicate the latest information with COVID-19. What’s not common is a school-specific dashboard page that serves as an aggregate for county-wide numbers (Lake County, where I live, does not have a school metrics dashboard page.) So credit should be given to MCDH for its dashboard page. But that’s as far as it goes because the information is woefully short on relevant data.
The MCDH page has four categories: Incidence rate, test positivity, hospital admissions and new cases. These data points may still be relevant as it pertains to reopening the state but has zero applicability to what’s really going on in these school districts.
For instance, there’s nothing on the dashboard page that lists statistics on quarantine cases, positive tests of those in quarantine or missed school days due to quarantines (you know, like contact tracing data.) It’s deep within those sections of data where the current crisis with Covid lies.
I don’t know if schools are sharing quarantine data with county health agencies who are in turn, not publishing the information for whatever reason (Pritzker/IDPH don’t want them to) or if enough schools are providing the data to agencies. Either way, a massive information gap remains with no clear end in sight.
I wrote last month about schools boards and how the time is now for them to step up and do the right thing in rejecting quarantine guidelines and setting a new normal.
Early returns are in. This may be an early working motto for school districts for the upcoming 2021-22 school year:
VACCINATE OR HIBERNATE
Warren Community District 121, which encompasses Warren Township High School in Gurnee, held a BOE meeting last week.
One of the resolutions to come out of the meeting, according to the Lake County News-Sun newspaper:
The district is mandating a 10-day quarantine for any unvaccinated student who might have been exposed to the virus next school year, and they will not be allowed to partake in remote classes during that time.
“That’s huge for kids to miss 10 days of school,” Associate Superintendent of Student Services Patrick Keeley said. “We’re hoping our families are doing their research, and we certainly hope that they make the decision to get a vaccine so we can get off to a great start next year.”
One conclusion to take from Keeley’s statement: it looks as though leaders in D121 are so determined to have their enrollment vaccinated, they are willing to resort to extortionist practices to see it through.
Expect other schools to adopt similar processes.
Although the environment around the state is loosening, not so with schools. In fact, it appears they are going in the opposite direction.
Sharpen your sword my friends. There are more battles to be fought.
Finally, it being graduation season, most of us have listened to commencement speeches these past few days and weeks (some good, some…eh.)
There was one given by Mitch Daniels, the former Governor of Indiana and now President of Purdue University.
Here’s a small portion of Daniels’ speech I thought worthy of re-printing here:
Certainty is an illusion…perfect safety is a mirage. Zero is always unattainable, except in the case of absolute zero where, as you remember, all motion and life itself stop
Thank you, President Daniels.
I hope education leaders in your neighboring state are listening.
For story ideas, article comments/feedback, media inquiries and more, drop note to jon@jonjkerr.com, or @jonjkerr on Twitter.