Michelle Wu says Boston schools won’t drop mask mandates with state

Mayor Michelle Wu said Boston Public Schools students and staff will have to keep their masks on even as the state schools requirement drops at the end of the month.

“The city of Boston is not ready to lift our mask mandate, and so ours will stay in place for the time being,” Wu said when asked about both the school mask mandate and the general one for businesses in the city.

When the school district does lift its mask rule for teachers and students, it will be “based on the specific needs of our school system,” she said.

This comes a day after Gov. Charlie Baker announced that the state will remove its schools mask mandate Feb. 28. That means that at that point it will be up to the individual districts to make the call of whether to continue to mask up.

Baker cited the improving state of the pandemic hear after the huge omicron-variant-driven coronavirus surge that peaked a month ago.

Wu said that the discussions around the city’s business mask mandate and the schools one are “related but distinct.”

She said the city’s eyeing multiple improving metrics, but will “need to see a consistent downward trend of these numbers” with weeks of good marks in order to remove those.

Asked whether students should expect to mask up all school year, Wu said it would depend on the data.

Wu, whose raft of mandates announced in December has drawn protests for the past month and a half, has begun to soften some elements of the city’s vax rules.

The requirement that businesses must require proof of vaccination from patrons appears to be on its way out in the coming weeks, as Wu on Tuesday laid out marks for various coronavirus metrics around positive test rate and hospitalizations for the city to use in removing the mandate. She said Thursday that the city is looking at those same metrics for the mask rules.

The city’s mask mandates predate Wu. The requirement for schools goes back to the heart of the pandemic, and the business rule was lifted last summer under then-Acting Mayor Kim Janey, but then Janey brought it back as the virus surged again.

from Boston Herald https://ift.tt/H65XxgO