As a dental hygienist of 30+ years, I oppose this idea of providing substandard care to patients to solve a workforce problem. I can’t believe that this passed! If the general public doesn’t understand that a dental cleaning should ALWAYS include subgingival scaling, certainly licensed dentists should! Is this purely ignorance on the part of dentists who support this, or it motivated by greed or simple convenience? 
I understand the shortage, but why not expand the education of dental hygiene training in Virginia? Can we not add more programs, or utilize our dental clinics more effectively by running 2 classes a year, staggering the use of the dental clinics we already have? 
What other healthcare profession that has a shortage have we decided to lower the standards of training or scope of what is provided in a procedure to a meet a workforce need ? We have a serious shortage of physicians in our area of Virginia. Do we really want to start training other medical positions to do the job of someone who has formal, regulated, licensed training with accountability by passing a bill that enables them to do so?  I’m sure I could be trained on the job to do minor surgeries for overworked surgeons. Just give me enough hours and I’ll take that job. Who will be my first patient?  Does this sound ridiculous? Of course it does!
The true problem lies with the lack of respect for the dental hygiene profession or a true understanding of what is actually done during a routine cleaning. If I spent the last 30 years only scaling above the gum line ( which is exactly what we are proposing will happen with this new class of clinicians), then I would guarantee that a large percentage of my patients would now have some form of periodontal disease with bone and attachment loss. A perfect example of this is what happens in the military when techs are trained in an 8 week program to do dental cleanings on our military members. I have seen more times than I can count when the service member detaches from the military and sees a real dental hygienist in the civilian world, they have some stage of periodontitis that requires more extensive and invasive services to return their mouths to a state of health;
Or how many times have I seen a patient who has been getting their teeth cleaned by a dentist for the past 15-20 years in an office that didn’t utilize a hygienist to save money ? These patients are in shock when they find out how much bone loss they have and that they need deep scaling and bone grafting at a periodontist; And these are the same dentists that will be training assistants to do cleanings? I’m not surprised they only want to train them to do “above the gum line” scaling when that’s all they ever do when they clean teeth themselves. 
Let’s please reconsider allowing this to go on. If this does go forward, I propose the dental hygiene profession launch a massive public awareness campaign through social media and other resources to reach the public with this information. Let the public decide what standard of care they want. Unfortunately it will perpetuate distrust of dentists and their motivation for supporting inferior care of their patients while still charging the same amount of money. This is just sad.