CDC Relaxes Social Distancing Guidance For Schools, Will Unions Relent?

The CDC announced Friday that it was reducing its school social distancing guideline from six feet to three, which now puts pressure on teachers unions who have said classrooms couldn't accommodate students with the six-foot rule.

“We don’t really have the evidence that 6 feet is required in order to maintain low spread,” Greta Massetti of the CDC said. Also, younger children are less likely to get seriously ill from the coronavirus and don’t seem to spread it as much as adults do, and “that allows us that confidence that that 3 feet of physical distance is safe.”

Further guidance from the CDC:

• Plastic shields or barriers between desks can be removed. “We don’t have a lot of evidence of their effectiveness,” Massetti said.

• Three-foot separation between desks should be used at the elementary, middle and high school levels in cities where there's not an outbreak. Even in cities where there's an outbreak, desks just need to be separated by six feet.

So, will the unions now back off and return to classrooms? Not so fast. Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, told the Associated Press that the organization would take a look at the new guidelines, “but we are concerned this change has been driven by a lack of physical space rather than the hard science on aerosol exposure and transmission.”

According to the NY Times, the teachers union has been lobbying the CDC and Biden administrators to maintain the six-foot guideline, which kept schools closed in many parts of the country. Now that this part of the war between the unions and local school districts seems to favor the administration, unions will supposedly shift their focus and insist on not returning to school because students remove their masks at lunch, the Times reports.

Weingarten hasn't admitted publicly what the next offensive by her membership will be, though she says money will help everything.

"The issue with the change in distancing in schools is that overcrowded and under resourced schools are already having trouble meeting basic safety guidelines. We need to be focusing on actually getting all of the mitigation strategies in place first," Weingarten tweeted Thursday.