Photo: Getty Images
South Florida’s School Districts continue to unlawfully impose school mask mandates without parental opt-outs. This, despite South Florida’s spread of COVID-19 now being 88% below peak levels in mid-August, around the start of the school year. While there’s no indication as to when the school districts intend to comply with the law, by dropping their mandatory mask policies, we’ve continued to see a dynamic playout in school districts in which those most likely to test positive aren’t the students but rather employees of the school districts.
The numbers have changed but the reality hasn’t. Employees of the Broward, Miami-Dade, and Palm Beach County School Districts have been more likely to test positive for COVID-19 at school than the students.
As part of my analysis, I take the current data available on each school district’s COVID-19 dashboards along with the current student and staff populations to produce the results.
- 33,000 employees – 632 infections:1.9%
- 271,000students – 2,639 infections: 1.0%
- 54,861 employees – 473 infections:0.9%
- 350,000students – 2,939 infections:0.8%
It just so happens that the COVID cases reported by school districts mirror the vaccination rates in each county. Miami-Dade, with the fewest infections, has the highest vaccination rate with 93% of the county’s vaccine-eligible population having been vaccinated. In Broward, the vaccination rate is 82% among the eligible. Perhaps it’s a coincidence that vaccination rates correspond with the rates of COVID-19 detected in each county’s school district, but it’s most plausible that there’s something to it. Using the information available in this analysis, the school districts would probably be better served by focusing on the vaccination rates of their faculty as opposed to the mandatory masking of students.