The Department of Education (ED), in partnership with officials from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), on Wednesday hosted a webinar aiming to highlight how institutions of higher education should approach potential campus reopenings for the fall semester and how campuses can help in national vaccination efforts.
The discussion, which focused on the Biden administration’s school reopening guidance, aimed to provide stakeholders with the most up-to-date guidance for reopening campuses and how institutions can best mitigate health concerns stemming from the pandemic’s potential prevalence in the months ahead.
The conversation follows ED’s recent release of a handbook to aid higher education institutions and the communities in which they operate reopen for in-person instruction safely and equitably. In a notice, ED said it worked with public health officials to create the handbook, following CDC guidance to prevent and mitigate the spread of the coronavirus on campuses and in communities.
Jonathan Yoder, who serves as lead of the Community Intervention & Critical Populations Task Force for CDC, stressed the importance of vaccination and talked about how students on campuses that are fully vaccinated can resume in-person learning.