At this point, only about a third of parents say they’ll get their 5 to 11-year-olds vaccinated as soon as possible, with about a third saying they’ll wait and see, and a third saying they won’t, or will vaccinate only if it’s mandated, according to September figures from the Kaiser Family Foundation’s Covid-19 Vaccine Monitor. As one commenter on a Times Opinion guest essay put it, “Literally the only thing motivating me to get my kid vaccinated is removing mask mandates.”

First, we should talk about where there is widespread agreement among experts: Every person I spoke to said children 5 and up should get the vaccine. The other point of significant agreement was that masks can be useful tools in our Covid prevention kit, along with measures like proper ventilation and widely available rapid testing.

Out of these 11 experts, two felt it was too soon to start talking about removing masks. “We will need to see the level of vaccine uptake in kids to have a more informed conversation about masking in youth-based groups and organizations,” said Nia Heard-Garris, an assistant professor of pediatrics at Northwestern University and a pediatrician at the Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago.

Of the nine others, there were a range of responses, which I’ll place into two major buckets.

Set a Date

Monica Gandhi, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, and associate chief of its infectious disease division, said in an email that with vaccine authorization for children 5 to 11, “it makes most sense to me to lift mask mandates in schools (and for adults) once children have the ability to get both doses of the vaccine” — which, in an ideal world, likely means around eight weeks after shots become widely available. Gandhi said, “I am a firm believer in positive motivation and messaging and think making this metric explicit will convince more parents to vaccinate their children.”

Marr, the engineering professor, tweeted that two weeks after school restarts in January should be the earliest date under consideration, because children may pick up the usual non-Covid bugs during the holidays. She also said that she liked the idea of data-driven mask policies based on the level of virus spread in communities. Some experts, like Aaron Carroll, a professor of pediatrics and the chief health officer at Indiana University, was wary of setting specific dates, in case another highly infectious variant like Delta hits. Which brings me to …

Create Unmasking Metrics, and Make Them Local

Many experts I spoke to mentioned Nevada as a model for how schools might think about creating off-ramp policies for masks. What’s nice about the state’s policy for indoor masking is it also provides a ramp back on if there are Covid surges — “an on-and-off switch based on local transmission rates,” as Boston University’s Julia Raifman and Alexandra Skinner described it.

The state uses the C.D.C.’s Covid-19 County Check Tool to assess whether there is low, moderate, substantial or high transmission. If there is substantial or high transmission in a county, masks are required in indoor public spaces. If there is low or moderate transmission, masks can come off. (Experts don’t agree about what level of community transmission should prompt a move toward unmasking in schools — some think the level can be higher than in the broader community because Covid-related illness in children tends to be less severe; others think the level would have to be lower because many schools have outdated HVAC systems.)