Education

Whether you love to watch films, want to explore the hands on activities at the Clubhouse, or do both, a day pass is your access to the Festival!

Each day pass includes the following perks: In-person films on a first come, first served basis

• Clubhouse activities.
• Free UTA transit to the Festival at Mid-Valley Performing Arts Center in Taylorsville

Each member of your group needs a pass to access Tumbleweeds. Workshops require additional registration and fee. 

Choose a Saturday day pass, a Sunday day pass, or both! 

The best LEADERS are LEARNERS

Throughout the summit, each attendee will get the benefits of …

• Personalized Problem-Solving: Engage with peers to address critical challenges in the continued transition to better personalized, competency-based learning (PCBL).
• Job-Embedded Training: Learn with experienced principal coaches in key areas including: school culture and change management, professional learning, communication and community engagement.
• Tangible Examples of Innovation: Explore tested leadership strategies and visit spaces of innovation.
• Design Thinking Framework: Design solutions for your own problems of practice, and reflect, ideate and experiment with mavens and peer leaders.
• Continued Network of Support: Collaborate with school leaders with similar challenges during the summit, and with a growing network of innovative leaders after the summit.
• Improving Communication: Acquire strategies for having difficult conversations with staff, parents, and community members.

Need some more convincing?

Here is what some of our past summit cohort members said …

Who should attend?

Principals and assistant principals at any level with any amount of experience that are beginning, wanting to, or already making excellent strides with personalized, competency-based learning (PCBL) in their schools.

As a result of the continued consequences of the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, on this date and after consultation with public health officials as necessary, I, Xavier Becerra, Secretary of Health and Human Services, pursuant to the authority vested in me under section 319 of the Public Health Service Act, do hereby renew, effective April 16, 2022, the ​January 31, 2020, determination by former Secretary Alex M. Azar II, that he previously renewed on April 21, 2020, July 23, 2020, October 2, 2020, and January 7, 2021, and that I renewed on April 15, 2021, July 19, 2021, October 15, 2021, and January 14, 2022, that a public health emergency exists and has existed since January 27, 2020, nationwide.

Mar 25, 2022 10:00 AM

Reprinted with permission from Hitachi

Tokyo, Salt Lake City, Indianapolis – Hitachi, Ltd. (TSE: 6501, Hitachi), University of Utah Health (U of U Health), and Regenstrief Institute, Inc. (Regenstrief) today announced the development of an AI method to improve care for patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus who need complex treatment. One in 10 adults worldwide have been diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, but a smaller number require multiple medications to control blood glucose levels and avoid serious complications, such as loss of vision and kidney disease.

For this smaller group of patients, physicians may have limited clinical decision-making experience or evidence-based guidance for choosing drug combinations. The solution is to expand the number of patients to support development of general principles to guide decision-making. Combining patient data from multiple healthcare institutions, however, requires deep expertise in artificial intelligence (AI) and wide-ranging experience in developing machine learning models using sensitive and complex healthcare data.

Hitachi, U of U Health, and Regenstrief researchers partnered to develop and test a new AI method that analyzed electronic health record data across Utah and Indiana and learned generalizable treatment patterns of type 2 diabetes patients with similar characteristics. Those patterns can now be used to help determine an optimal drug regimen for a specific patient.

Some of the results of this study are published in the peer-reviewed medical journal, Journal of Biomedical Informatics, in the article, “Predicting pharmacotherapeutic outcomes for type 2 diabetes: An evaluation of three approaches to leveraging electronic health record data from multiple sources”.

Hitachi had been working with U of U Health for several years on development of a pharmacotherapy selection system for diabetes treatment[1]. However, the system was not always able to accurately predict more complex and less prevalent treatment patterns because it did not have enough data. In addition, it was not easy to use data from multiple facilities, as it was necessary to account for differences in patient disease states and therapeutic drugs prescribed among facilities and regions. To address these challenges, the project partnered with Regenstrief to enrich the data it was working with.

The new AI method initially groups patients with similar disease states and then analyzes their treatment patterns and clinical outcomes. It then matches the patient of interest to the disease state groups and predicts the range of potential outcomes for the patient depending on various treatment options. The researchers evaluated how well the method worked in predicting successful outcomes given drug regimens administered to patients with diabetes in Utah and Indiana. The algorithm was able to support medication selection for more than 83 percent of patients, even when two or more medications were used together.

In the future, the research team expects to help patients with diabetes who require complex treatment in checking the efficacy of various drug combinations and then, with their doctors, deciding on a treatment plan that is right for them. This will lead not only to better management of diabetes but increased patient engagement, compliance, and quality of life.

The three parties will continue to evaluate and improve the effectiveness of the new AI method and contribute to future patient care through further research in healthcare informatics.

Hitachi will accelerate efforts, including the practical application of this technology through collaboration between its healthcare and IT business divisions and R&D group. GlobalLogic Inc., a Hitachi Group Company and leader in Digital Engineering, is promoting healthcare-related projects in the U.S., will also deepen the collaboration in this field. Through these efforts, the entire Hitachi group will contribute to the health and safety of people.

About Hitachi, Ltd.

Hitachi, Ltd. (TSE: 6501), headquartered in Tokyo, Japan, contributes to a sustainable society with a higher quality of life by driving innovation through data and technology as the Social Innovation Business. Hitachi is focused on strengthening its contribution to the Environment, the Resilience of business and social infrastructure as well as comprehensive programs to enhance Security & Safety. Hitachi resolves the issues faced by customers and society across six domains: IT, Energy, Mobility, Industry, Smart Life and Automotive Systems through its proprietary Lumada solutions. The company’s consolidated revenues for fiscal year 2020 (ended March 31, 2021) totaled 8,729.1 billion yen ($78.6 billion), with 871 consolidated subsidiaries and approximately 350,000 employees worldwide. For more information on Hitachi, please visit the company’s website at https://www.hitachi.com. 

About University of Utah Health

University of Utah Health provides leading-edge and compassionate medicine for a referral area that encompasses 10% of the U.S., including Idaho, Wyoming, Montana and much of Nevada. A hub for health sciences research and education in the region, U of U Health has a $428 million research enterprise and trains the majority of Utah’s physicians, including more than 1,250 health care providers each year at its Schools of Medicine and Dentistry and Colleges of Nursing, Pharmacy and Health. With more than 20,000 employees, the system includes 12 community clinics and four hospitals. For ten straight years, U of U Health has ranked among the top 10 U.S. academic medical centers in the Vizient Quality and Accountability Study.

About Regenstrief Institute

Founded in 1969 in Indianapolis, the Regenstrief Institute is a local, national, and global leader dedicated to a world where better information empowers people to end disease and realize true health. A key research partner to Indiana University, Regenstrief and its research scientists are responsible for a growing number of major healthcare innovations and studies. Examples range from the development of global health information technology standards that enable the use and interoperability of electronic health records to improving patient-physician communications, to creating models of care that inform practice and improve the lives of patients around the globe. 

Sam Regenstrief, a nationally successful entrepreneur from Connersville, Indiana, founded the institute with the goal of making healthcare more efficient and accessible for everyone. His vision continues to guide the institute’s research mission.

[1]Hitachi, Ltd. news release, March 12, 2018 “Pharmacotherapy Selection System Supports Shared Clinician-patient Decision-Making in Diabetes Treatment” https://www.hitachi.com/New/cnews/month/2018/03/180312h.html

Hitachi, Ltd. news release, February 27, 2019 “New Clinical Study Tests Pharmacotherapy Selection System that Aims to Improve the Impact of Diabetes Treatment” https://www.hitachi.com/New/cnews/month/2019/02/190227b.html

Research News
Diabetes

Congress should get a clearer picture of how patients use telehealth before making pandemic-inspired relaxed rules permanent, Medicare advisers say.

Lawmakers recently extended telehealth changes until five months after the end of the public health emergency is declared. This extension in the omnibus spending package eases telehealth advocates’ concerns about a “telehealth cliff,” or the abrupt cut off of coverage of most virtual care.

Many medical groups have called on lawmakers to make broader telehealth permanent because it increases health-care access and convenience. But concerns about quality, cost, and fraud keep lawmakers from moving forward on telehealth, which generally has bipartisan support.

“We hesitate to draw too many definitive conclusions” from data from 2020, “the year in which the entire health-care system was severely locked down,” said James Mathews, executive director of the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission, which advises Congress on Medicare. Once the commission has data from 2021 and 2022, “we’ll have a sense of what telehealth looks like in a more benign environment, a clearer picture of who’s using telehealth, and it’s implications on access to care,” Mathews said.

Telehealth wasn’t widely available before the pandemic because the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services would only reimburse visits that met a “perfect storm of criteria,” said Thomas Ferrante, a partner at Foley & Lardner LLP and member of the firm’s telemedicine team. Payment rules in the Social Security Act limit telehealth to patients who live in rural areas and initiate their visits in qualifying sites like hospitals. Only certain kinds of providers could deliver telehealth services.

The CARES Act, a cross-sector Covid-19 relief bill, allowed doctors to initiate telehealth treatment with patients in their home during the public health emergency. Medicare beneficiaries used telehealth 88 times more during the first year of the pandemic than they used it the year before, according to a report from the Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General.

The pandemic led to an “involuntary laboratory experiment” testing the utility of telehealth, which never would’ve seen such widespread adoption without the reimbursement flexibility, Ferrante said.

Benefits

Democrats and Republicans in Congress support telehealth because it has increased access to care for their constituents, particularly in the early days of the pandemic when people were hesitant to receive in-person care.

Over 28 million Medicare beneficiaries used telehealth in the first year of the pandemic—more than 2 out of 5 beneficiaries, according to the OIG report.

Telehealth can encourage people to access necessary care when they would otherwise put it off because of a long commute to a doctor’s office, said Krista Drobac, a partner at health-care consulting firm Sirona Strategies and executive director of the Alliance for Connected Care. The modality is ideal for post-acute care check-ins and chronic disease management, she said.

“There’s also cost savings in places like nursing homes,” Drobac said. “Instead of putting a patient in an ambulance and sending them to the hospital, a telehealth provider can actually address more issues on site.”

The five-month extension in the omnibus package “provides certainty not only to providers on what they’re able to do, but also to patients that they’re still able to receive some of these services through these modalities,” said Mei Kwong, executive director of the Center for Connected Health Policy.

“As patients take advantage of these changes and health access is broadened, we are hopeful that Congress will see the wisdom of making these changes permanent,” Gerald Harmon, president of the American Medical Association, said in a statement.

“There is no doubt that telehealth saves lives,” HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra said at a recent press conference. The HHS is “going to work as aggressively as we can to get as much authority as possible,” he said.

Hesitations

Data on the quality of care and patient outcomes for remote versus in-person treatment “would be essential to discussions about making any or all of these waivers permanent,” Mathews said. MedPAC is going to work on comparing population-level data on hospitalizations and emergency room visits from 2019 to 2022 and 2023, once telehealth “has become stable,” to see whether those visits could have been avoided due to the presence of telehealth, Mathews said.

In order to get clear data, lawmakers would need to keep telehealth around for at least a year after the public health emergency, Mathews said.

Advocates say the data on quality is already clear. “We are providing the same, and in some cases, enhanced care when we are meeting patients where they are,” said Shabana Khan, a child and adolescent psychiatrist and member of the American Psychiatric Association’s committee on telepsychiatry.

Cost is also a barrier to passing more permanent legislation. “It’s expensive to deliver telehealth, and so I think there is concern about the financial impact to the Medicare program at large,” said Claire Ernst, director of government affairs for the Medical Group Management Association. If people who otherwise wouldn’t have gotten care do via telehealth, it’s more taxing on the program.

More data is also needed to assess whether patients follow up a virtual visit with an in-person visit, increasing costs, Drobac said.

Fraud is always a concern for the Medicare program, and some lawmakers may be wary that fraud is easier to commit virtually, said Morgan Reed, executive director for the Connected Health Initiative. Digital medicine has actually “reduced the amount of fraud because there are better fingerprints” like length of visit and IP address than physical records, Reed said.

Future Action

Providers are investing in telehealth, which will likely grow irrespective of the future of Medicare reimbursement. “The consumer demand is there now,” Ferrante said, and some telehealth provider pricing is more competitive than a patient’s copay.

But “they would certainly invest more” if they knew how long the flexibility would last, Ferrante said. “Why invest when you don’t know if the service you’re providing today is going to get paid for tomorrow?”

The omnibus package requires MedPAC to study expanding telehealth services, which would mean amending the Social Security Act, Ernst said. The report is due June 15, 2023. A separate HHS OIG report on fraud prevention measures is due on the same day.

Congress could keep offering temporary telehealth waivers through that due date, particularly if lawmakers’ decision making depends on MedPAC’s and OIG’s analysis, Drobac said.

The five-month extension “is enough time to really continue to work with our bipartisan champions in both the House and the Senate and the administration to make sure that Congress acts again,” said Kyle Zebley, vice president of public policy at the American Telemedicine Association.

Join GEGUtah and UEN for a video series on using Google’s Applied Digital Skills in your classroom!

Questions? Contact Us

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Poetry uses language in a musical, imaginative way. It uses devices such
as rhythm, sound pattern, rhyme, imagery, assonance, alliteration, and
repetition.  

Sample some of the following activities to learn more about poetry.

Places To Go    People
To See    Things To Do    Teacher
Resources    Bibliography

Places To Go

People To See

Things To Do

Teacher Resources

Lesson Plans/Webquests

Bibliography

A series highlighting how the use of technology in Utah classrooms has redesigned the way teachers teach, and students learn. The series is also a reminder why it’s important to complete this year’s digital technology inventory.

2021
2019

About the Utah Education and Telehealth Network:
UETN connects public schools, higher education, libraries, and health care institutions to a robust broadband network, tools, and resources. UETN serves more than 880,000 students, more than 73,000 educators, over 70 hospitals, community health centers and local health departments throughout Utah. In addition, the Utah Education and Telehealth Network operates public media station UEN-TV on behalf of the Utah State Board of Regents. For more information, please visit: uetn.org.

About Connected Nation:
Our mission is to improve lives by providing innovative solutions that expand access, adoption, and use of high-speed internet and its related technology to all people. Everyone belongs in a Connected Nation.
Connected Nation works with consumers, local community leaders, states, technology providers, and foundations to develop and implement technology expansion programs with core competencies centered on a mission to improve digital inclusion for people and places previously underserved or overlooked. For more information, please visit: connectednation.org.

The Utah Education & Telehealth Network marketing specialist organizes, creates, and executes marketing initiatives that align with goals set in the UETN strategic plan. These goals include—but are not limited to— identifying and creating awareness among target audience groups, collaborating with community partners, and increasing utilization of UETN resources.

Our ideal candidate is an inclusive team player with the ability to build trust within our team and in the community we serve. You should have a commitment to our core values and have the ability to be mindful of the diverse voices and lived experiences in our community that broaden perceptions and find common ground.

Benefits

1. Develop creative briefs that guide the creative direction for marketing campaigns to meet objectives for advertising and public-facing communications including social media, digital, print, and video assets.
2. Evaluate the effectiveness and impact of marketing campaigns and strategies through evaluating key performance metrics and optimizing as necessary.
3. Establish and nurture relationships with internal and external stakeholders to ensure a collaborative working environment across departments.
4. Adhere to project timelines by following through on project details and coordinating multiple tasks/projects simultaneously.
5. Coordinate with colleagues to produce the monthly editorial calendar, promotional items, and oversee the design, printing, mailing, and delivery of promotional materials.
6. Write and produce written communications tools and support the creation and publication of UETN reports.
7. Write and produce copy for press releases, and public service announcements, specifically to support digital content distribution.
8. Assist with planning and staffing events to promote UEN-TV and NHK World-Japan in the community.

Problem Solving

Representative challenges faced by the incumbent include supervising communication project development and working with various areas to coordinate marketing and communications efforts.

Work Environment and Level of Frequency typically required

Nearly Continuously: Office environment and telework.

Physical Requirements and Level of Frequency that may be required

Nearly Continuously: Sitting, hearing, listening, talking.

Often: Repetitive hand motion (such as typing), walking. 

Seldom: Bending, reaching overhead.

The University of Utah values candidates who have experience working in settings with students from diverse backgrounds and possess a strong commitment to improving access to higher education for historically underrepresented students.

Individuals from historically underrepresented groups, such as minorities, women, qualified persons with disabilities and protected veterans are encouraged to apply. Veterans’ preference is extended to qualified applicants, upon request and consistent with University policy and Utah state law. Upon request, reasonable accommodations in the application process will be provided to individuals with disabilities. 

The University of Utah is an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity employer and does not discriminate based upon race, ethnicity, color, religion, national origin, age, disability, sex, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, gender expression, pregnancy, pregnancy-related conditions, genetic information, or protected veteran’s status. The University does not discriminate on the basis of sex in the education program or activity that it operates, as required by Title IX and 34 CFR part 106. The requirement not to discriminate in education programs or activities extends to admission and employment. Inquiries about the application of Title IX and its regulations may be referred to the Title IX Coordinator, to the Department of Education, Office for Civil Rights, or both. 

To request a reasonable accommodation for a disability or if you or someone you know has experienced discrimination or sexual misconduct including sexual harassment, you may contact the Director/Title IX Coordinator in the Office of Equal Opportunity and Affirmative Action:

The University is a participating employer with Utah Retirement Systems (“URS”). Eligible new hires with prior URS service, may elect to enroll in URS if they make the election before they become eligible for retirement (usually the first day of work). Contact Human Resources at (801) 581-7447 for information. Individuals who previously retired and are receiving monthly retirement benefits from URS are subject to URS’ post-retirement rules and restrictions. Please contact Utah Retirement Systems at (801) 366-7770 or (800) 695-4877 or University Human Resource Management at (801) 581-7447 if you have questions regarding the post-retirement rules.

This position may require the successful completion of a criminal background check and/or drug screen.

A sign in a hallway at a Chicago elementary school reinforces the mantra of social distancing.

Scott Olson/Getty Images

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Scott Olson/Getty Images

A sign in a hallway at a Chicago elementary school reinforces the mantra of social distancing.

Scott Olson/Getty Images

Kids are carrying the trauma of the pandemic and, even if COVID is eventually defanged, it has already left indelible marks on students’ psyches and education.

That’s the warning of Chicago school principal, Seth Lavin.

As the pandemic has disrupted education across the country, the situation in Chicago has been particularly acute. The city’s public school system shut down for five days earlier this month as the teachers union and city officials were in a standoff over COVID safety rules.

“Our schools are not OK. Children are not OK. Teachers are not OK,” Lavin wrote in a recent commentary for the Chicago Sun-Times. “Yesterday we COVID-tested a line of students 300 children long. But this surreal circus is not the main plot of this year. The surge is ending. The crisis will still be here.”

Lavin, who heads the Brentano Elementary Math & Science Academy (Pre-K – 8th grade), spoke with NPR’s All Things Considered.

The interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Members of the Chicago Teachers Union and their supporters participate in a car caravan around City Hall to protest against in-person learning in Chicago public schools on January 10, 2022 in Chicago, Illinois.

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Members of the Chicago Teachers Union and their supporters participate in a car caravan around City Hall to protest against in-person learning in Chicago public schools on January 10, 2022 in Chicago, Illinois.

Scott Olson/Getty Images

What’s not OK?

We’ve all been through so much in the past two years. Most of last year we were apart and now we’re together again. Children and all of us are out of practice being a community. We’ve all lost a lot. We’ve all been hurt a lot. So, the children need help. They need love. The adults need help and love too. And so as a community, we’re struggling through it.

How children carry the burdens of COVID

Principal Seth Lavin.

Seth Lavin

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Seth Lavin

Principal Seth Lavin.

Seth Lavin

Kids have experienced loss and kids have lost experiences. They are carrying trauma and, even the ones who aren’t carrying trauma from really terrible things happening during this pandemic, they’ve had experiences that kids shouldn’t have and have lacked experiences that kids should have.

Their friendships are harder. Their emotions are bigger. Their ability to have empathy, and process with those around them, and notice the humans around them is lower. And that just makes everything more challenging in a school because, in a school, we are together and everything we do impacts the people around us directly.

I talk to friends of mine who are teachers, who are principals, and we all share these stories, just examples of things that worry us about our kids – stories that you wouldn’t hear two or three years ago. A friend of mine who’s a principal told me when I asked how she’s doing, she said in the last three years, she had once gone through the process that you go through when a child has suicidal ideation, when they talk a lot about self-harm. She said [she has] done it four times in the last one month.

A student arrives for classes at a Chicago elementary school on January 12, 2022.

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A student arrives for classes at a Chicago elementary school on January 12, 2022.

Scott Olson/Getty Images

Too much focus on learning loss

It is objectively true that over the last two years, kids have not experienced the same lessons they would have, if school had just been in person. But, I really think there’s too much focus on that or on this idea of learning loss, whatever that means.

What school does and what school is isn’t just a sequence of lessons that you’re supposed to get in order at the right time in order to grow up to be the person you’re supposed to grow up to be. That’s not what school is really about. School is about becoming the person you’re meant to be through being in community and having experiences with others, learning who you are, learning how to be a person who shows up in a way that is good for others – and fractions and grammar.

So, yes, our kids missed out on things. They have experiences that they need to have, now, to grow into the people they need to be and to grow in community in the right way. That is all much more important and much more urgent than this idea that we need to somehow make up for the lessons that they didn’t have because they were remote or because school was closed at a certain period of time. That stuff will come. The urgency is we need to help our kids feel safe and good in community at school, so they know how to be with others.

When will things get back to normal?

We can’t pretend that we’re not still in the present tense in the pandemic, and I think it’s important to say that out loud because when we pretend the pandemic is over, when we pretend that these disruptions aren’t still existing in school, when we pretend our kids aren’t still experiencing the hardship that they’re experiencing as a result of this pandemic, we aren’t opening our eyes to what kids and teachers and schools and parents are actually experiencing, and in doing so, we create a disconnect and we make things worse.

I’m an optimist. I think the omicron surge ending is a really good thing and it may mean we have a time of lower cases and normalcy for a while. That’ll give us a longer time of more calm and more stability and school, which is going to help kids and teachers feel more calm and more stable in their bodies and their classrooms to rebuild the community and do the work that we need to do.

But in the long term, this isn’t a blip. I mean, this is now part of our collective experience. It’s been a quarter of my younger son’s life. It’s not just a thing that happened. It’s the world. So, we’re going to be making sense of that forever.

We want to go back to normal, but we also always have to ask what normal even was. This moment, cataclysmic as it is, has to be a time when we rebuild the world in a better way. And I really think that people, schools, teachers and their kids and the parents they work with are doing that work classroom by classroom.

Chris Delmas/AFP via Getty Images

Chris Delmas/AFP via Getty Images

Kerry Dingle is a mother of two. She thinks masks should be optional for kids in schools and child care. And that makes her feel pretty lonely in Silver Spring, Md.

“As soon as you question ‘Is it a good idea to put a 2-year-old in a mask all day?’ you’re suddenly a psychotic, anti-vax right-winger,” she says. “Which really couldn’t be further from the truth.”

Dingle says she loves vaccines and thinks everyone should have them. “And the fact that high-risk people can protect themselves with vaccines and boosters now is fantastic and means that they should do that. And we should stop burdening little kids with protecting other people.”

Her 3-year-old son is in a preschool that mandates masking, although the children are almost always outdoors. “He keeps the cloth mask on, but he sucks on them and he chews holes through them,” she says. “Really, within five minutes of him putting it on, it’s wet.”

Her 6-year-old son, a first-grader, has a tic disorder that she says is exacerbated by a mask. “He makes facial movements that pull it down.” He kept getting in trouble for it until Dingle asked his pediatrician for a letter explaining that, but she says his teachers still correct him all day long.

Across the country, about two-thirds of large school districts currently require students to wear masks. Most commonly, those masks are cloth. And cloth masks, experts say, are insufficient to contain the spread of the omicron variant.

Where one goes with those two pieces of information is, increasingly, a pandemic Rorschach test.

For some, the answer is obvious: upgraded masks, stricter rules. On Jan. 21, the Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation’s second-largest school district, updated its mask policy to exclude cloth masks. California has distributed tens of millions of N95 masks and kid-sized KN95 masks to schools. And in districts as disparate as Boston, Denver and Round Rock, Texas, student activists have been demanding respirators in the name of safety.

For others, resisting school masking along with other pandemic restrictions remains a largely political stance. For example, the newly elected Republican governor of Virginia wasted no time in ending the state’s school mask mandate by executive order, setting off a flurry of opposition.

What’s different about this moment is that there is a third camp — call them pro-vaccine, anti-mask. And they’re getting louder.

Total cases and pediatric hospitalizations are still high. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the American Academy of Pediatrics continue to recommend universal masking in schools as they have since the start of the pandemic.

Yet as the omicron wave begins to peak in some parts of the U.S., some pediatricians, neuroscientists, special education teachers and parents like Dingle are talking more about the potential negative impacts of prolonged masking.

Drawings of children wearing masks adorn a hallway at Stark Elementary School on Sept. 16, 2020, in Stamford, Conn.

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Drawings of children wearing masks adorn a hallway at Stark Elementary School on Sept. 16, 2020, in Stamford, Conn.

John Moore/Getty Images

Even mask proponents, who point to the many studies associating mask mandates with lower COVID-19 rates in schools, acknowledge the difficulties of masking children.

Others are questioning the fairness of continuing to require masks for children indefinitely, especially when they are less often required in many of the places adults gather, such as restaurants and bars.

Good masks are hard to find

Jeremy Howard, a data scientist, is the lead author of a widely cited review of evidence supporting masking against the coronavirus. He thinks schools should absolutely continue to mandate masks, citing the still-emerging science of long COVID.

His issue is that good masks are rare.

“It’s very hard to even find pediatric KN95s or pediatric KF94s. And there’s no such thing as pediatric N95s.”

That’s because standards for N95 masks were created for occupational and workplace safety. According to the Food and Drug Administration, “N95 respirators are not designed for children … a proper fit cannot be achieved on children.”

Howard’s read of the evidence is that cloth and even surgical masks are much less useful against omicron. Yet while there are some recommended, high-quality, child-size respirators on the market, many, he adds, are of lower quality than the adult versions. “They work much less well most of the time,” he says. “So, yeah, it’s a huge issue. Kids are being left unprotected.”

Danny Benjamin is a pediatrician with Duke University and the ABC Science Collaborative, which has long advised school districts that masking can be highly effective against COVID spread. “If you’re in a school district that masks, the risk of COVID is much less at school than it is outside of school, because school is one of the few places where people actually enforce mitigation measures.”

But in his view, while respirators offer superior protection, mandating them for children is impractical: Some kids find them uncomfortable, they may not fit small faces well and they need to be replaced often. For the nation’s 55 million schoolchildren, Benjamin says, “now we’re talking about 100 million masks that you’re mandating each week. And that’s kind of the best-case scenario, where you reuse most of them, no child ever loses their mask and no child ever soils their mask, which, I don’t know what planet that is.”

It’s hard for children to wear masks properly

Teachers and parents often report that proper mask-wearing is difficult and requires constant reinforcement by teachers. That’s especially true for young children and those with special needs.

Bernadette Ngoh, who runs an in-home day care in West Haven, Conn., spends time almost every day sitting down with children and telling them why masks are important. She calls it “The biggest challenge … What do we do with all the kids that are unable to wear the mask and stay with the mask?”

Brittany Gonzalez teaches special education to Florida second- and third-graders in Lee County. Her students aren’t required to wear masks. Those who do “take it off all day,” she said. “It is a foreign piece of cloth on their face. And not all of them have the level of understanding as to why we’re doing it and what it means and how to wear it.”

Masks can interfere with young children’s brain development

Numerous scientific papers have established that it can be harder to hear and understand speech and identify facial expressions and emotions when people are wearing masks. (Some of these studies also suggest workarounds, which many practitioners are using).

These are critical developmental tasks, particularly for children in the first three years of life.

The United States is an outlier in recommending masks from the age of 2 years old. The World Health Organization does not recommend masks for children under age 5, while the European equivalent of the CDC doesn’t recommend them for children under age 12.

Manfred Spitzer is a psychiatrist and a cognitive neuroscientist in Germany.

He published a scientific review of evidence on how masking could impact children’s development.

Spitzer says the negatives of masking are particularly clear for very young children. He believes that young children’s caregivers should be unmasked as well.

“Kids need to train up their face recognition,” he says, and they need to see full faces to learn to identify emotions as well as to learn language. “Babies were never designed just to see the upper half of the face and to infer the lower half; even adults have a hard time doing this.”

Masks can make it harder to hear and understand speech

Kerry Dingle, the mother in Silver Spring, says her nearly 4-year-old son has a speech delay that had been resolving, with treatment, before the pandemic, but has now gotten worse again. “He doesn’t make back-of-the-throat sounds. So cookie is tuttie.“

Diane Paul is with the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, the national professional association representing speech therapists. She says referrals of children to speech therapy have increased since the pandemic began.

But, Paul adds, there are no studies to prove — or disprove — that this is due to masking rather than, as she believes, the lingering effects of remote learning and other factors of the pandemic.

Donna Smiley is an audiologist — a hearing-impairment specialist — also with ASHA.

“We all use visual input to help understand the message,” she says — watching a speaker’s lips and mouth, which are covered by masks. “By putting on a mask, you’re also making the teacher’s voice less loud.”

CDC guidance allows for the use of masks with clear plastic when interacting with people with hearing impairments, young children, those who are deaf or hard of hearing, those receiving speech therapy, students learning to read or those learning a new language.

Smiley says she’s found those pose problems. “The material that it is made out of … fogged up pretty easily.” And she says that at least one study found that the plastic blocks even more sound than cloth does.

Like Spitzer, Smiley and Paul believe masking should continue as long as necessary for public health, but teachers should be aware of the limitations. They say masking’s challenges are real but manageable with adjustments that improve communication for everyone.

Masks can inhibit social interactions

For school-age children, Spitzer, the psychiatrist, is most concerned that masking interferes with nonverbal communication and emotional bonding.

Gonzalez says her students who are on the autism spectrum withdraw behind masks. “They have almost started adopting the masks as their face. It’s part of their identity, it’s their security blanket. I almost have to be like, ‘Hey, you are allowed to take it off right now.’ Like, say, if they’re going to run the lap at P.E. or going into lunch to sit down — they want to eat a bite, put it back on, eat a bite, put it back on.”

Mothers of typically developing children, like Stephanie Avanessian in Los Angeles, are worried about their kids, too. “They can never see their friends smile,” she says. “They can never see their friends frown! They’re not developing empathy. It’s taken six months for my fifth-grader to make friends because it’s so hard to tell what people are doing.”

For Spitzer, these potential problems with masking can be overcome for older children. For example, by saying “That’s funny!” to make up for the hiding of a smile. “This can all be compensated to some extent.”

But for younger children, he doesn’t support masks. Germany doesn’t require masks for children under age 6.

“When speech no longer happens, when communication is interfered with, I think if that happens for a week, that’s OK,” he explains. “But if that happens for half a year, that’s eternity when it comes to brain development, at a very young age.” He points out that COVID-19 is usually mild for young children, but it’s a critical period for development.

Balancing children’s needs and pandemic safety

A post-masking consensus may be closer than it appears.

In November, before the omicron variant had emerged in much of the U.S., Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, wrote a letter to U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona and the CDC director, Rochelle Walensky, asking for a masking off-ramp. She said classroom teachers were reporting “that the constant use of masks impedes the learning process” and that parents “have expressed dismay about their child’s overall well-being after wearing a mask continually for well over a year and a half.”

AFT spokesperson Andrew Crook told NPR that the national teachers union still supports a path away from school mask mandates. “You can’t do it right now because of omicron, but yes, with a metric and guidance you can have an off-ramp.”

Danny Benjamin at the ABC Science Collaborative also believes that mask mandates can be safely relaxed, post-surge — assuming high vaccination rates — meaning 100% for adults and at least 70% for students. “Any family that wants to protect their child should simply vaccinate their child, and at that point the risk of COVID is substantially less than the risk of flu,” he says.

On Jan. 25, a group of physicians and scientists announced a national campaign to “restore normalcy” in children’s lives by putting them first in line for the lifting of restrictions, including mask mandates, once the omicron wave has subsided.

Dr. Jeanne Noble, who directs COVID-19 response for the UCSF Emergency Department at the University of California, San Francisco, is part of the coalition. “Kids don’t need to be masked. Full stop. They have minuscule risk of serious illness or death from COVID,” she says. She and colleagues are suggesting that especially vulnerable children continue to mask while other vaccinated children can safely go without.

Students will take the SAT on computers and tablets at testing centers. The test will shrink from three hours to two, include shorter reading passages and allow calculators for the math section.