As COVID cases rise, LR5 asks DHEC to loosen quarantine requirements
The Lexington-Richland 5 school board is asking state health officials to loosen restrictions on when students must be kept out of class due to COVID-19.
Board members voted 4-2 on Monday to ask the S.C. Department of Health and Environmental Control to scale back quarantine requirements for some students exposed to the coronavirus, questioning the effectiveness of vaccines and masks in the process.
Board members voted to have DHEC “re-evaluate its COVID exclusion rules to limit required quarantine only to students who are symptomatic or who have tested positive and remove any and all quarantine rules based on vaccination status or mask wearing.”
Monday’s vote came in response to DHEC’s most recent updates to its COVID-19 quarantine guidelines. Students exposed to COVID-19 must quarantine for at least five days and wear a mask for another five days to prevent the spread of the disease. Individuals with a positive COVID-19 test and no subsequent negative test or symptoms are required to quarantine for a full 10 days.
Fully vaccinated people who have their booster shot or who have tested positive for the coronavirus in the previous 90 days do not have to quarantine after an exposure, but must wear a mask for 10 days.
Board member Catherine Huddle rejected stricter requirements for unvaccinated students in the guidelines, arguing it was equivalent to a backdoor vaccine mandate.
“DHEC’s rule is very intellectually dishonest,” she said. “They know that vaccine status does not matter in the spread of this disease, and they know that cloth masks are basically useless. This is political and it’s putting our children at risk... They are trying to force the vaccine on children.”
The latest COVID-19 numbers from the district’s dashboard show that 2,438 students district-wide were out of class due to either a positive COVID test or quarantine requirements as of Tuesday, along with 168 staff. Those are the highest numbers Lexington-Richland 5 has seen since the beginning of the school year, but in line with the surge reported by other school districts since the winter break. On Wednesday, Chapin Elementary School became the latest school to switch to all-virtual instruction until Tuesday due to the surge.
“Did y’all not just look at the numbers we’re looking at?” board member Tiffani Moore said ahead of Monday’s vote. “We’re talking about people’s lives. This isn’t a game.”
Moore and board Vice Chairman Ken Loveless voted against the resolution. The resolution passed with Huddle, Chairwoman Jan Hammond, Nikki Gardner and Matt Hogan voting in favor. Board member Rebecca Blackburn Hines was absent from Monday’s meeting.
In arguing against making distinctions in isolation rules based on vaccination status, the resolution cites breakthrough infections — when someone who has been vaccinated tests positive for COVID-19 — as well as a study by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that showed similar viral loads among vaccinated and unvaccinated people last year.
While breakthrough cases are increasingly common as more of the population is vaccinated, health officials emphasize that the large majority of serious COVID-related cases in hospitals are unvaccinated patients, and that far less than 1% of fully vaccinated people have been hospitalized or died from the disease.
The resolution also disputes masking requirements, citing a state law prohibiting schools from enforcing mask mandates this school year, and “numerous studies demonstrating the ineffectiveness of cloth masks in preventing the spread of the Omicron variant of Covid.”
“Neither requiring vaccination nor requiring cloth masks appear to prevent the spread of Omicron,” the resolution asserts.
The consensus among the vast majority of public health experts is that wearing masks is an effective way to reduce the spread of COVID-19, and the best way to prevent catching the coronavirus is for everyone 5 and over to receive the vaccine as soon as they can.
School board members said the “small” risk of hospitalization with the latest COVID-19 variant doesn’t outweigh the “unfair... economic hardship to parents who have to stay home with healthy children who are quarantined” and the “undue burden on teachers (who) have to keep up with mask rules for individual students.”
Masking has been a controversial point in the Chapin-Irmo area school district. The school board voted to do away with a requirement just before the end of the last school year, even though it was still a statewide requirement at the time. That prompted threats of legal action from some teachers and led the administration to roll back immediate enforcement of the policy change. The controversy is believed to have contributed to the sudden resignation of popular superintendent Christina Melton a month later.
The district has also resisted a COVID-19 vaccine mandate, with a policy the district will neither encourage students to get the vaccine nor ask about students’ vaccination status.
Some board members were reluctant to question DHEC’s decision-making.
”I don’t know enough to say somebody is playing politics, or that they’re not,” Loveless said. “We have an administration in the trenches every day on this. I don’t know enough to cast doubt on it one way or another. But what we try to do is keep kids in school. … I’m sure DHEC is trying their best to keep kids in schools.”
New superintendent Akil Ross told the board that when it comes to the rules that the state puts on schools, “I don’t have the luxury of having opinions about statues.”
“We’re an administrative arm, not a policy arm,” Ross said. “We follow them on what temperature we can serve food, on how long students stay in a building without running water, on what chemicals we can have in a science lab.”
This story was originally published January 13, 2022 at 5:00 AM.
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