What Parents Need to Know About the C.D.C.’s Covid School Guidelines

The agency’s advice on distancing, masks and vaccination bring the coming school year a bit more into focus.

With less than a month to go before many schools begin reopening for the fall, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Friday released new guidelines for preventing Covid-19 transmission in schools. The guidelines outline numerous strategies that schools can take to help keep students, teachers and staff members safe, including masking, weekly screening testing and social distancing. But the agency also stressed that schools should fully reopen even if they were not able to put in effect all of these measures. The agency also left much of the decision-making up to local officials, urging them to consider community transmission rates, vaccination coverage and other factors. This approach won praise from some experts, who said that this more nuanced approach makes sense at this stage of the pandemic — but criticism from others, who said that state and local officials were not equipped to make those judgments and needed clearer guidance.