State College Area School District will once again require indoor masking after Centre County moved back to the Centers for Disease Control’s high community level of COVID-19.
In a message to district families on Thursday night, Superintendent Bob O’Donnell wrote that mandatory masking will be in place beginning Tuesday and continuing while the county remains at the high level. The CDC recommends universal indoor masking in places open to the public for communities at the high level.
“This is in line with our following CDC guidance during the pandemic,” O’Donnell wrote. “Because of this short notice, we cannot make this change effectively districtwide tomorrow, so masks will remain optional but encouraged on Friday. As a reminder, if our county drops to Medium or Low level again, we would then return to masking optional indoors.”
State College Area’s last day of school is Friday, June 3.
The district had required masks for much of the school year but made them optional beginning March 21, a little over a week after the county moved to the low community level for the first time.
Centre County had been at the low level for 12 weeks until the CDC’s weekly update on Thursday night.
Community levels measure new cases and new COVID-19 admissions per 100,000 people over seven days, along with the percent of staffed inpatient beds occupied by COVID-19 patients. To be at the high level requires 200 or more new cases per 100,000, with 10 or more COVID hospital admissions per 100,000 and/or a seven-day average of 10% of hospital beds occupied by COVID inpatients.
Centre County had a case rate of 248.79 and 13.7 new COVID admissions per 100,000 people over the last week, with 5.7% of inpatient beds occupied by COVID-19 inpatients.
Even before the move to high, as cases steadily rose locally and statewide, the State College school board sent a message to families last week “strongly” encouraging students and staff to wear masks and follow other mitigation measures.
Penn State, meanwhile, appears poised to reinstitute mandatory masking at the University Park campus, though an official announcement had not yet been made as of late Thursday night.
Prior to the latest CDC update, the university implemented mask requirements at eight campuses because they were already at the high level: Abington, Behrend, Brandywine, Great Valley, Hazleton, Lehigh Valley and Wilkes-Barre. Masks were also required at the Scranton campus, which has swung between the high and medium levels.
“As this sixth wave of COVID-19 spreads across Pennsylvania, it is likely that we will see more campuses move to require masking as their home counties move from yellow or green to orange,” Kelly Wolgast, director of the University’s COVID-19 Operations Control Center, said in a statement. “We continue to encourage our community to stay up to date on their vaccinations as the best way to avoid a serious case of COVID-19 and to stay home and get tested if you are experiencing symptoms.”
