Middletown Schools Make COVID Quarantining Optional

MIDDLETOWN, NJ — Yet again, the Middletown school district is bucking the state of New Jersey's coronavirus recommendations:

At their meeting this past Monday night, the Middletown school board unanimously voted to stop requiring quarantine for students and teachers deemed close contacts of a COVID positive.

Under Middletown's new policy, students and teachers will still be notified if they were in close contact, but it is now entirely optional if they want to quarantine.

Nobody is required to stay home for two weeks. You can read the district's new policy here: https://www.middletownk12.org/...

The change is effective immediately, starting on Tuesday of this week.

However, Dave Brown, health officer for the Monmouth County Regional Health Commission, told NJ.com the Middletown school board never consulted his team before making quarantine optional. He also told NJ.com “In the worst-case scenario, it’s a recipe for disaster."

Currently, New Jersey’s schools are seeing the highest number of COVID cases since the pandemic first began: For every 1,000 students, 2.05 are testing positive, according to a report today in the Asbury Park Press. New Jersey's health officials also warn the omicron variant will spread very rapidly.

Board vice president Frank Capone said the decision was made after the school board noticed thousands of children were missing weeks of school at a time.

"This wasn't an overnight decision. We pulled all the data from the past year: Kids were being sent home to quarantine and they were not coming down sick with COVID; less than one percent were actually getting COVID," said Capone. "We looked at the data and found that kids had missed more than 30,000 days of school in the last year."

Capone said in the past year, more than 2,400 Middletown students had to miss at least two weeks of school due to the state's quarantine recommendation.

"In practice, the policy of removing unvaccinated-yet-healthy children from the classroom provided little benefit in slowing the spread of COVID-19," said Middletown's school board lawyer Bruce Padula at Monday night's meeting, saying he too supports the change. "The district weighed the very low positivity rate of quarantined students with the thousands of lost school days."

Capone said it's his understanding that the two weeks was always a "recommendation," never a mandate that school districts had to follow.

The state Department of Health confirmed their two-week quarantine was indeed a recommendation — not a requirement — and also said that, starting this week, they shortened the recommended quarantine period from 14 to 10 days (and down to 7 following a negative test). Also, the DOH said any student or teacher who is vaccinated does not need to quarantine at all.

The Dept. of Health just announced this change Thursday: NJ Schools May Shorten COVID Quarantines Amid New State Guidance

"Asymptomatic fully vaccinated individuals do not need to quarantine/be excluded from school following an exposure," said Donna Leusner, spokeswoman for the NJ Department of Health. "We encourage all eligible school children to become vaccinated."

Is the Middletown school district unique in the entire state for making quarantine optional, even for unvaccinated students and staff?

"I was told there are other, maybe smaller districts (no longer requiring quarantine)," Capone told Patch Thursday morning.

Just this week, the Hazlet school district reduced quarantine to eight days, but said all students have to come back with a negative test.

"This wasn't an overnight decision," Capone emphasized. "We really examined the data and talked about this policy change and reached this decision as a board."

The decision was unanimously approved by all eight board members at their Monday night meeting; only Board member Tom Giaimo was absent. Middletown schools superintendent Mary Ellen Walker also approved the quarantine change.

"If they want to stay home for 14 days, they can. We recommend a student or teacher tests five days after an exposure; we offer a test for them if they want it," said Capone. "We are doing everything recommended, except for the archaic and political measure of sending them home for 14 days. It's causing system-wide disruption: Teachers have to miss work because their kid is quarantining; kids are missing school. It's a system designed to fail."

In September, a few weeks after the school year began, Monmouth County state Sen. Declan O'Scanlon (R) introduced legislation to end the 14-day quarantine from the state. He called the quarantine rules "excessive" and causing kids to miss too much school, and parents to miss too much work.

The latest recommendation from the CDC is that fully vaccinated close contacts who show no COVID symptoms do not need to quarantine. But the CDC recommends they get tested three to five days after exposure.

Board member Jacqueline Tobacco also voted to shorten the quarantine, saying students' mental health is suffering, and the number of days in school "has been severely lacking in the past two years."

Related: Hazlet Students Must Have Negative Test With 8-Day Quarantine

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