Masks Mandatory For Vaccinated Students, Staff At ETHS

EVANSTON, IL — Masks will be required indoors for all students and staff to start the school year next month at Evanston Township High School, administrators said Wednesday.

Superintendent Eric Witherspoon and Principal Marcus Campbell's announcement comes a day after updated guidance from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

"While we are encouraged by the high vaccination rate in the Evanston community, much has been learned about the Delta variant of COVID since the CDC released guidance in early July," the administrators told district families.

Citing new evidence about the highly contagious delta variant, the CDC now recommends "universal indoor masking for all teachers, staff, students, and visitors to K-12 schools, regardless of vaccination status."

Previously, school officials had planned to allow students and staff who submitted proof of vaccination to the district to go maskless inside school buildings when the 2021-22 school year begins Aug. 16.

Witherspoon and Campbell asked vaccinated students and staff to provide proof of their vaccination status anyway to help determine quarantine requirements.

"Teachers and select staff members will be able to view vaccination status to support our contact tracing efforts," they said.

Earlier: Proof Of Vaccination Required For Maskless ETHS Students, Staff

The Cook County Department of Public Health and the Illinois Department of Health have endorsed the new CDC recommendations and revised their school masking guidance.

"School districts are potentially going to be held liable if they don't live up to the standard that is set by the CDC and by the state, which we have set," Gov. J.B. Pritzker said Wednesday at an unrelated press conference.

In addition to mandatory indoor masking in schools, the new CDC guidance calls for universal mask-wearing in areas where there are more than 50 new cases per day per 100,000 people — deemed substantial or high transmission.

As of this week, Will County is the only Chicago area county to have reached the threshold of substantial transmission. Transmission is high in most counties in Southern and Western Illinois, according to the CDC.

"School districts need to decide, at this moment, are they going to be potentially subject to liability for not following those recommendations," Pritzker said. "I will also say that we're always looking, every day, at the question of whether further mitigations need to be imposed."