When will masks leave Grafton schools? Discussion is set for March 8

Superintendent of Schools Jay Cummings gets the questions every day.

“What are the vaccination rates in the schools?”

“When can students take their masks off?”

With the Grafton Board of Health voting Monday to end the town’s COVID-19 mask mandate on February 18 and the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education mandate ending on February 28, the School Committee will discuss student masking during their meeting on March 8.

Taking off masks, however, will not be a slam dunk decision.

Late last year, DESE allowed school districts to apply for mask waivers for high school and middle schools only, provided that building vaccination rates — that is, both students and staff — were over 80 percent. At the time, both Grafton High School and Grafton Middle School fell below the minimum and waivers were not requested — and the surge of the Omicron variant quickly shut down waivers in the few school systems that qualified.

“We had just one positive case this week at the high school today,” Cummings told the School Committee Tuesday night.

Grafton High now has 81 percent of students and staff vaccinated while the middle school has 78 percent. In the elementary schools, rates have steadily rose as vaccines for younger children rolled out: 45 percent for Millbury Street, 48 percent for North Street, 34 percent for North Grafton and 49 percent for South Grafton.

“I’m disappointed that our (vaccine) numbers at the middle school and the high school are not stronger,” School Committee Chair Amy Marr said. “If they want to drop masks, they need to get vaccinated.”

In both Hopkinton and Westborough, vaccination rates were more than 90 percent, and both received waivers prior to the beginning of the surge.

There have been 841 Covid cases since the start of the school year, with 3,695 school cases since the start of the pandemic in March 2020.

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