All students in third grade and above will be required to wear face masks in some situations in West Virginia when schools reopen Sept. 8, Gov. Jim Justice announced Friday in a shift from his earlier standards.
Schools will have different reopening criteria based on a color-coded system dependent on the spread of COVID-19 in a county. Justice’s previous standards did not require students at schools in the green zone to wear face masks in any situation. The updated standards, however, will require students in grades three or higher at those schools to wear masks on busses and in congregant settings in which social distancing cannot be maintained.
The face-mask requirement will be stricter for schools with a higher number of per capita cases in the yellow and orange categories. For schools in the yellow, the standards for grades three through five will be the same as schools in the green, but students in grade six and higher will be required to wear face masks at all times. Students attending schools in the orange will be required to wear face masks at all times in grades three and higher. Schools in the red will be required to offer only virtual schooling.
Schools in the green will be allowed to provide activities where social distancing is not possible, but they must be limited. Schools in the yellow will not be allowed to hold assemblies or activities where social distancing is not possible, and schools in the orange cannot hold any assemblies or large group activities.
To be in the green, the county in which the school is located must be averaging three or fewer new cases a day per 100,000 people. For yellow, the county must be averaging between 3.1 and 9.9 cases a day per 100,000 people. For orange, the county must be averaging between 10 and 24.9 cases a day per 100,000 people. Any county above that number will be in the red.
For counties that have a population greater than 16,000 people, these numbers will be based on a seven-day moving average and updated every Saturday. However, Justice also announced Friday that counties with a population less than 16,000 will be based on a moving average of 14 days because medical experts have advised the administration they need at least 20 cases before they can accurately measure a trend.
In smaller counties, a few new cases could inflate the per-capita numbers when basing them on a per-100,000-people scale, the state’s COVID-19 czar, Clay Marsh, said during a news conference. He said a 14-day scale is a better measure of the trend of these counties.
“The best predictor of the spread of [COVID-19] in schools is the spread in the community,” Marsh said. “So, the more we can control community spread, the more we can control school spread.”
