An analysis of all 50 states’ school COVID-19 policies finds widespread discordance and variation.

The look at policies about masking in schools, requiring COVID-19 vaccines for eligible students and teachers, and providing COVID-19 services in the school setting, finds variation among states but also within states, as individual districts adopt policies at odds with their own governors’ guidelines.

“The COVID-19 virus doesn’t care about school district or state lines,” says Megan Collins, a bioethicist and associate professor of medicine at the Wilmer Eye Institute who co-directs the Johns Hopkins University’s Consortium for School-Based Health Solutions.

“The current uncoordinated approach has us in a third year of schooling impacted by coronavirus and we’re rapidly closing in on a fourth. Our goal is to provide useful, reliable information for education and public health policy stakeholders and researchers, teachers, school staff, and parents from across the country—anyone working on or thinking about kids going back to school and staying there.”

The analysis uses information from a new online tracker launched by the Johns Hopkins eSchool+ Initiative that examines state policies about masking in schools, COVID-19 vaccines for eligible students and teachers, and COVID-19 services offered in the school setting in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, the Bureau of Indian Education, and major US territories. The tracker also includes details from 56 index school districts selected from 20 states, representing the lowest and highest poverty, as well as the largest school district in each state.

Read the full article about COVID-19 school policies from Johns Hopkins University at Futurity.