When kids showed up to West Marin schools on Monday, some wore masks, and others didn’t, for the first time in two years. Across California, counties and cities are following state guidance to loosen masking requirements. Last weekend, Marin County’s public health officers did away with the requirement that students in transitional kindergarten through 12th grade wear masks indoors, shifting the guidance to a “strong recommendation.”
West Marin’s largest school district, Shoreline Unified, followed state and county guidance to recommend but not require masks starting on Monday, despite relatively low vaccination rates among its younger students. At a special board meeting to discuss the policy last week, board president Jill Manning Sartori warned participants to be respectful of the “strong feeling and emotions on both sides.” But there were no dissenting comments from the public.
“This was a surprisingly easy decision,” Ms. Manning Sartori said. “I think because we’re following the guidelines of public health it makes it much easier.”
Kids were mostly unmasked as they left West Marin School on Monday afternoon. That morning, “there was a lot of confusion, like, ‘Am I gonna get made fun of? Are people not gonna wanna be near me?,’” school secretary Kasandra Semorile said. “But by recess, a lot of them had them off.”
Ms. Semorile’s own three kids at Shoreline schools had differing attitudes, she said. Her second grader, Addison, was singing songs about how excited she was to take off her mask. Her eighth grader, Colton, was more apprehensive; he didn’t want to feel like he was the only kid in class without a mask on.
At least for now, the county is still stressing that masks are strongly recommended, said Lisa Santora, Marin’s deputy public health officer. But she said that could change as soon as next week. “If we see low to no levels of school-based transmission as early as the week of the 21st, we would potentially relax our recommendations,” she said.
Not every district in Marin immediately followed the county’s lead. The Sausalito Marin City School District is still requiring its 400 students to wear masks indoors, and is surveying parents and teachers to determine the next move.
The district’s student vaccination rate is low compared to the rest of the county, Ms. Santora said, reflecting the persistent racial gap in vaccinations for children. More than 70 percent of Marin children ages 5 to 11 are fully vaccinated, but that number lags significantly for people of color. Only 52 percent of Latino kids, and just 24 percent of Black kids, in the same age range are vaccinated.
At Inverness and West Marin Schools, just over half of reporting students are vaccinated. For Judith Bravo, who runs the Abriendo Caminos program at West Marin Community Services, the matter comes down to access. Many Latino parents live on isolated ranches with little time to take off work. “It’s a circle,” she said. “You miss work, you don’t get your money for that day. You have to drive over the hill, that’s more gas money.”
Though Latino adults have a higher overall vaccination rate than white adults in Marin for first and second doses, fewer Latinos have received a booster shot. Nearly three quarters of eligible Marin residents are boosted, but that number falls to just 50 percent in the Latino community. Seamus Tomkins, who leads the West Marin Community Response Team, a new group organized by the county, said Latinos may be lagging in both boosters and pediatric vaccines because of high infection rates during the Omicron surge. Most got first and second doses, but many still got infected.
“There might be a sense of apathy about getting that third shot in communities that were hit hard by the Omicron surge,” Mr. Tomkins said. “If pediatrics were available at the time of the first and second doses, in my opinion, kids probably would have similar rates to the parents for those first and second doses.”
West Marin Community Services is planning a program that will send mobile vaccination clinics directly to ranches, so agricultural workers can get boosted on their lunch breaks. Tomales High School will also host a clinic with Marin’s mobile vaccination unit on March 31, a follow-up to pop-up last week. Pediatric Pfizer doses will be available, along with initial and booster doses of the Moderna and Johnson & Johnson vaccines. “We’re giving our families every opportunity to get vaccinated,” Shoreline superintendent Adam Jennings said.