School districts in Texas, Florida, and Arizona are suing over Republican governors’ bans on mask mandates for students and staff.
A coalition of six school districts in Texas’s Rio Grande Valley filed a lawsuit Thursday afternoon against Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, arguing he exceeded his authority in a May order that prohibited local school boards from requiring students and teachers to wear face masks on campuses.
“It seems to me [that the governor] is trying to use a disaster declaration to prohibit anybody from responding to the disaster … which is odd,” said Kevin O’Hanlon, the attorney representing the school districts.
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Meanwhile, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s administration faces legal action from parents across several counties over an order issued in late July that forbade school districts from taking away the parents’ rights to decide whether their children need to mask up in class. Two different suits argue the option for parents to opt out of masking policies renders them useless. They also call the ban unconstitutional because the power to operate and supervise public schools belongs to counties.
Several central Florida counties filed a federal lawsuit in the District Court for the Southern District of Florida, arguing DeSantis’s order discriminates against students with disabilities who are at greater risk of becoming sick due to COVID-19 infection. According to the lawsuit, students with disabilities unable to return to schools in person safely “because of continued health concerns, are being excluded from the public school system in violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act … and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act.”
A separate suit filed by parents in Miami-Dade, Palm Beach, Orange, Alachua, Hillsborough, and Pinellas counties argues DeSantis’s prohibition on masking requirements in those hot spot areas violates the rights of students, their family members, public school staff, and the surrounding communities to protect “their basic human needs for health and safety.” Leon County Circuit Judge John Cooper took up the case on Friday.
In Arizona, education and nonprofit groups — such as the Arizona School Boards Association, Children’s Action Alliance Inc., Arizona Education Association, as well as several individuals and lawmakers — filed a lawsuit Thursday evening to challenge Republican Gov. Doug Ducey’s ban on mask mandates in public and charter schools. The lawsuit did not extend to private schools.
Parents involved in the suit argued his order “unfairly discriminates against Arizona’s public and charter school students as compared to their private school peers regarding their right to a safe education, a fundamental right under Arizona law.”
Other school districts in Arizona that have enacted mask mandates despite Ducey’s order have had their budgets threatened by state GOP lawmakers who are pressuring the governor to withhold public school funding.
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The highly transmissible delta variant has caused alarming spikes in new cases and hospitalizations in the three states, primarily in unvaccinated populations. In Texas, where about 56% of adults have been fully vaccinated, hospitalizations have increased by about 94% over the past two weeks, reaching their highest point since February.
Arizona, also with 56% of adults fully vaccinated, saw hospitalizations increase by 57% over the past two weeks. In Florida, where 60% of adults have been fully vaccinated, hospitalizations have exceeded record highs from previous surges to a weekly average of nearly 15,000 patients being treated at a time.
More than 71% of adults in the United States overall have received at least one shot to date, and over 61% have been fully vaccinated, federal data shows.
