COVID at school? 2 in 3 parents support mask mandates. Many worry kids will get very sick.
mask-wearing and teacher vaccinations amid the surge in pediatric COVID cases.
Still, parents are eager for their children to return to classrooms, and they’re more skeptical of online learning now than they were last school year.
That’s according to a new USA TODAY/Ipsos poll, which found declining optimism about distance learning as schools, having just reopened, close or go back online. Across the U.S., more than 1,000 schools have already halted in-person learning because of COVID-19 outbreaks. Thousands of children are quarantined.
15-percentage-point drop from last May. Concerns are especially high among Black parents; just 37% said their children were well-prepared for distance learning.
Parents’ confidence that their children “will eventually be able to make up any lost ground” has also taken a dip. A majority of parents said online learning has caused their children to fall behind.
These sentiments may help to explain why most Americans are in favor of resuming in-person learning. Among parents of schoolchildren, 7 in 10 support returning to full-time instruction in classrooms. Support is strongest among white and Asian parents and weakest among Black and Hispanic parents, communities that have been harder hit by COVID-19.
The poll was conducted online between Aug. 30 and Sept. 1 among roughly 2,000 adults in the U.S. About a fifth are parents of schoolchildren. The poll had a credibility interval, akin to a margin of error, of plus or minus 2.5 percentage points.
more than half a dozen states that banned school mask requirements. Leventhal’s school district in late August issued a temporary mask mandate amid ongoing litigation throughout the state challenging the ban’s legality. school board meetings and garnering lawsuits.
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Roughly 2 in 3 Americans – parents and non-parents alike – are in favor of schools or states implementing mask mandates for teachers and students. Support is strongest among parents of color. Forty-three percent of poll participants said student mask-wearing should be at the discretion of individual parents.
Respondents are similarly in strong favor of requiring teachers and other school employees to be vaccinated against COVID-19, with 65% of all participants – and 56% of parents – saying they support such mandates.
Denver has a strict vaccine mandate for teachers:It’s working.
The political divide
Opinions are slightly more mixed when it comes to student vaccination mandates: Roughly 6 in 10 respondents – and half of parents – said they’re in favor of requiring eligible students to be vaccinated against the virus. A person’s political views are most likely to determine their position: Just 31% of Republican parents of schoolchildren said they support such mandates, compared with 70% of Democrats.
About a dozen states have passed laws or issued orders that somehow restrict schools’ ability to require vaccination against COVID-19. At least eight states, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico have implemented COVID vaccine requirements for schools.
“I think the masks are worthless,” said Wayne Pittman, a Republican father of three in Monument, Colorado. “They’re just a feel-good measure and a way for people to get mad at each other and point fingers.”
Pittman, a 46-year-old civil engineer, strongly supports his kids’ schools’ return to full-time, in-person learning. “That’s where kids learn the best,” said Pittman. He said his children, ages 10, 13 and 15, grew listless from all the remote instruction last year, their motivation levels so low they’d even refuse to walk the family dog.
But he’s wary of vaccine requirements as a way to keep them in school. Pittman himself is vaccinated – his parents have respiratory issues – as are his two older children. But vaccination should be a personal choice, he said. The decision to sign his teenagers up for the shots was largely based on convenience: The family will soon be flying to Hawaii, which waives certain travel restrictions for visitors who show proof of vaccination.
He and his youngest child contracted COVID-19 earlier this year, both with mild symptoms. “You should have the right to not be vaccinated if you’re not afraid” of COVID-19, he said.
Mohit Mathew, a 32-year-old pharmaceutical scientist in Germantown, Maryland, has a different take. School mask and vaccination mandates are “just common-sense rules,” said Mathew, who has a 5-year-old daughter in public school. He has “absolutely no doubt” that his daughter will get vaccinated against COVID-19 as soon as she’s eligible.
Mathew, who doesn’t affiliate with a political party, said mask-wearing is the norm in his community, including at his daughter’s school, which is one reason he felt comfortable sending her back for in-person learning. The school did a pretty good job with remote instruction, but the in-person experience is especially hard to replicate for children her age, he said.
What parents fear: Kids’ illness
Many parents may feel such requirements are necessary because they’re worried their children may get severely ill from COVID-19. Nationally, children now account for roughly 15% of all cases during the pandemic, according to recent data collected by the American Academy of Pediatricians.
Forty-one percent of parents in the poll said severe illness would be their top concern if their kids were to be exposed to the coronavirus, including 60% of Black parents.Among all parents, just over 15% were worried about higher-risk family members catching the virus from their kids or their kids missing class time because of a COVID infection.
A majority of parents – 60% – said schoolchildren face greater risks from COVID-19 now than they did last year.
Tameka Dumas, a 48-year-old mother of two in Grenada, Mississippi, is wary of the return to in-person learning because of the health risks. Her younger son, who’s in high school and back in class, regularly tells her how scared he is of catching the virus at school. But he doesn’t have the option of sticking with distance learning, and students at his school aren’t required to mask up.
“He’s still giving it his all,” Dumas said, but returning to school is affecting him emotionally. “We should not have to put that kind of stress on them. … It’s unfair for a child to have to go to school and feel that way.”
So to Dumas, a Democrat whose son got the vaccine as soon as he was eligible, school mask and vaccine requirements are a no-brainer. “The more time these children are spending in that school” without such mandates, she said, “the more likely they are to get sick. I don’t know what the excuse is.”
Asked about the people who shape schools, respondents were most satisfied with their local teachers, though educators’ approval ratings have declined since pre-pandemic times. Respondents were least satisfied with the U.S. Department of Education, governors and state boards of education.
“It’s just going to be an insane year,” said Leventhal, the Dallas-area mother. “What scares me the most is at some point everyone is going to get (COVID-19) … The difference is I’m vaccinated, my husband’s vaccinated, my parents are vaccinated – but my kids aren’t.”
Contact Alia Wong at (202) 507-2256 or awong@usatoday.com. Follow her on Twitter at @aliaemily.