Florida Governor Ron DeSantis said the state will follow a new “symptoms-based approach” to quarantining students, saying it will be up to parents to decide if their children who do not exhibit symptoms should stay home after coming into close contact with a confirmed COVID-19 case.
Governor Ron DeSantis joined by State Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo and Education Commissioner Richard Corcoran announced during a press conference that the Florida Department of Health (DOH) issued a new rule, empowering families to decide whether their healthy child should be taken out of school after exposure to COVID.
“Emergency Rule 64DER21-15 prevents the unnecessary exclusion of healthy students from in-person schooling; safeguards the rights of parents and legal guardians and their children; provide health protocols for symptomatic or COVID-19 positive students, and provides opportunities for parents and legal guardians to choose which protocols to implement when their student has had direct contact with someone who tests positive for COVID-19. It is effective as of today, September 22, 2021, said in a news release.
“Parents have the right to have their healthy kids in school,” Governor Ron DeSantis said in a release. “In-person education is important for a students’ wellbeing, their educational advancement, and their social development. The idea that schools are somehow a big problem when it comes to spread of the virus has been refuted yet again. Not only is the forced quarantining of healthy children disruptive to a student’s education, but many folks in Florida are not able to work from home. With this rule, we are following a symptom-based approach to quarantining students in Florida.”
“The Governor and I share a similar vision of weighing the costs and benefits of public health policies – and our new rule today is an example of that,” said State Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo. “We must make sure that we are doing what is right for parents and for students. There’s not a single high-quality study that shows that any child has ever benefited from forced quarantining policies, but we have seen demonstrable and considerable harm to children. It’s important to respect the rights of parents.”
“What we did over the past year was nothing less than amazing – we gave parents in our state the option to send their children to school for face-to-face instruction with more students, over a longer time than any state in the nation – but we did see massive quarantining,” said Education Commissioner Richard Corcoran, father of 6 kids who missed over 100 days of school last year due to quarantines. “If you take the number of kids that had to quarantine, and added up the days they missed in school, in the education arena, we would call that a chronic absenteeism pandemic. Now we have the data telling us that factually 98% of those children who quarantined never became symptomatic. That’s why the previous policy didn’t make any sense. This is a brilliant change, and I’m so thankful for this new common-sense rule.”
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