Indoor mask wearing required until May 2
By Sam Catanzaro
Culver City education officials last week extended the school district’s indoor mask mandates for students.
On Friday, April 15, Culver City Unified School District (CCUSD) Superintendent Quoc Tran announced the extension of an in-door mask mandate for an additional two weeks, until Monday, May 2.
“Due to the new highly transmissible variants that have been circulating since mid-March (Omicron Subvariants, BA.2.12 & BA.2.12.1), and the recent acceleration in COVID-19 cases nationally, in California, and in Los Angeles County, we have decided to extend the in-door mask mandate,” Tran said. “This is out of an abundance of caution for the health and safety of our students, our staff, and our families.”
Other school districts in the area, including the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District, Los Angeles Unified School District and Beverly Hills Unified School District, lifted mask requirements for students last month.
This decision by Culver City school officials was made based on several factors, according to Tran. The first cited was the rising of the national and LA County case rate by around 25 percent over the last two weeks.
“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,” Tran said. “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.”
According to Tran, when students and staff returned from winter break in January of this year, the exponential rise in cases did not surface until two weeks after the break. This forced the District to send everyone home for three days in order to stem the outbreak. By keeping the mask mandate in place for a little while longer Tran says CCUSD hopes it will prevent a repeat of the January surge and keep our students and teachers attending school in person.
‘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,” Tran said.
