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The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention urged schools on Friday to fully reopen in the fall, even if they cannot take all of the steps the agency recommends to curb the spread of the coronavirus — a major turn in a public health crisis in which childhood education has long been a political flash point. The agency also said school districts should use local health data to guide decisions about when to tighten or relax prevention measures like masking and physical distancing. With the highly contagious Delta variant spreading and children under 12 still ineligible for vaccination, it recommended that unvaccinated students and staff members keep wearing masks. (Stolberg, Anthes, Mervosh and Taylor, 7/9)

The changes come amid a national vaccination campaign in which children as young as 12 are eligible to get shots, as well as a general decline in COVID-19 hospitalizations and deaths. “We’re at a new point in the pandemic that we’re all really excited about,” and so it’s time to update the guidance, said Erin Sauber-Schatz, who leads the CDC task force that prepares recommendations designed to keep Americans safe from COVID-19. (Stobbe and Binkley, 7/9)

The guidance, which goes beyond mask-wearing, is aimed at kindergartners through high school seniors, and is meant "to help keep kids in classrooms, as well as participating in any sports or extracurricular activities," said Erin Sauber-Schatz, who heads the CDC's Community Interventions and Critical Populations Task Force. (Edwards, 7/9)

With the start of school only weeks away in some parts of the country, schools, school districts and some teachers unions are pushing to get students vaccinated to ensure they are inoculated against the spread of Covid-19 when classes fully reopen in the fall. Sixty-three percent of public schools were open full-time, in-person for all students by May, while 2% offered remote learning exclusively, according to data released Thursday from the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences. (Campa, 7/12)

With about a month until back to school begins in many K-12 districts, most states in the U.S. have no uniform plan to require masks, even as public health guidance still strongly recommends them for the unvaccinated. Kids younger than 12 still haven't been eligible for vaccination and, without mitigation efforts like masking, the fall could bring an uptick in the spread of COVID. (Fernandez, 7/12)

The new school year in California will start with students and teachers wearing masks, state officials announced Friday, staking out a cautious position on a day when new federal guidelines stressed the importance of fully reopening schools and recommended masks only for those who are not vaccinated. As part of a multilayered approach to limit the spread of COVID-19, those who are not vaccinated should wear masks indoors — and schools, health departments or states may continue to require masks on campus, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said. (Shalby and Blume, 7/10)

The agency also left much of the decision-making up to local officials, urging them to consider community transmission rates, vaccination coverage and other factors. This approach won praise from some experts, who said that this more nuanced approach makes sense at this stage of the pandemic — but criticism from others, who said that state and local officials were not equipped to make those judgments and needed clearer guidance. Here are answers to some common questions about the new guidance. (Anthes and Mervosh, 7/9)

At 8 a.m. sharp, Laura Farnan, a parent in Chapel Hill of one rising first-grader and one middle school student, is all set. She sits beside her younger boy to make sure his eyes are on the iPad in front of him where his teacher begins the morning classes. Across the table, Farnan is relieved to see her older daughter making progress on school assignments without much adult monitoring. This had been Farnan’s routine for much of the pandemic. (Huang, 7/12)