Legal Preparedness for Emergency School Closures

In response to national pandemic preparedness priorities, The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention asked the Centers for Law and the Public’s Health to review the state-level legal framework for reducing the density of school classrooms, with specific focus on the closure of schools, as a social distancing or social mitigation measure to slow the spread of an H5N1 influenza pandemic or similar highly contagious infectious disease.

CDC and the Centers at Johns Hopkins and Georgetown Universities announced the availability of the a new report:

Legal Preparedness for School Closures

in Response to Pandemic Influenza and Other Emergencies

Available online at http://www.publichealthlaw.net/Projects/panflu.php.

The Centers’ Report is focused on state-level laws that expressly address school closure (as contrasted with general communicable disease laws or other laws that may generally authorize or allow for school closure). The Report presents a summary description of these express school closure laws for all 50 states and D.C. (as of December 2006) in an informative Table (with hypertext links to many states’ laws) and accompanying analyses based on the authors’ observations.

The report is also accessible via CDC’s Public Health Law Program and the federal government's comprehensive pandemic influenza website (http://www.pandemicinfluenza.gov/).