Parents have clashed with school boards about masking requirements in classrooms this fall, indicating the contentious debate about how to return to a pre-pandemic normal is far from settled.
“A lot of it is a microcosm of what you see nationally … it’s either you are for masks and you think they help, or you think they’re very harmful and they do no good,” said Tucker McClendon, member of the board for Hamilton County schools in Tennessee. “That’s the spectrum we’re on. There’s no, ‘it worked, and now it needs to be gone’-type thing. It’s ‘they’re ineffective, it harms children.’”
FULLY VACCINATED PEOPLE DON’T NEED TO WEAR MASKS INDOORS, CDC SAYS
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention abruptly changed mask-wearing guidelines last week to say that fully vaccinated people do not need to wear face coverings, and many governors responded by lifting their states’ mask mandates. But the agency said over the weekend that schools should require universal mask-wearing, sparking conflict among board members and parents over what the next academic year should look like.
Several Republican governors have already taken steps to prevent schools from making masks compulsory for students, faculty, and staff. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, for example, banned local governments and school districts from issuing mask mandates on Tuesday. Abbott’s new executive order stipulated that all mask mandates currently in place in Texas schools will be nullified after June 4.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, meanwhile, repealed all COVID-19 emergency ordinances imposed by local or county governments via executive order last week. DeSantis has been a staunch critic of federal coronavirus guidelines. For instance, he announced last month that he would file a lawsuit against the Biden administration for its continued pause on cruising, which cost Florida 49,500 jobs paying more than $2 billion in wages, as well as $3.2 billion in lost economic activity. He also outlawed vaccine requirements for colleges welcoming students back to campuses in the fall. The order will not, however, “impact any school district’s policies for the remainder of the 2020-21 school year.”
“The Governor is confident that, by the time students return to the classroom in August, it will be back to normal – and any further masking would not be required, but may be a personal decision made by families,” Christina Pushaw, DeSantis’s press secretary, told the Washington Examiner.
As for the fall, individual school districts will decide for themselves whether to continue mask mandates. Richard Corcoran, Florida’s education commissioner, pressured school boards to make the face coverings optional, telling superintendents last month that “broad sweeping mandatory face-covering policies serve no remaining good at this point in our schools.”
At the local level, parents have mounted challenges against school boards over possible extensions of masking requirements in schools come fall.
The school board in Hamilton County, which sits in southeast Tennessee on the border with Georgia, has held several public meetings both virtually and in person since the 2020-2021 school year began in person last fall. The parents who have challenged board members over the question of whether to require face coverings next fall are the same parents “who were wanting us to open in August on time, and we did, [after] we had to consult medical professionals and use CDC guidance to do it,” according to McClendon.
“Masks are part of that, and so we’ve made it the whole school year,” with the exception of temporarily shifting to fully remote learning in the winter, when cases in the county surged, McClendon said. Still, parents have argued vociferously over the past month to make face coverings optional through the end of this school year, which lasts another week, during the summer school session, and during the next academic year. They were largely successful. While the school board will require students to finish out this school year wearing masks, students and staff will be given the option to discontinue mask-wearing as of June 1.
MANY STATES AND CITIES ARE WARY OF LIFTING MASK MANDATES DESPITE CDC BLESSING
Meanwhile, board members of the Wausau school district in central Wisconsin reached a similar compromise last week to mandate masks through the end of this school year, which is June 4. Masks will then be optional for summer school students and students returning to school in the fall. The debate about whether masks should be mandatory as a condition for bringing students back to classes in person “has been consistent all along since last fall,” according to Patrick McKee, a member of the Wausau school board.
“We as a board have heard strong, compelling arguments from parents, staff, and students on either side of the issue … but the parents were typically pointing to the data available at the time that was indicating the virus was not significantly impacting school-aged kids,” McKee said.
Indeed, epidemiologists maintain that children are less likely to experience severe illness from the coronavirus. The CDC reported in March that “less than 10% of COVID-19 cases in the United States have been among children and adolescents aged 5–17 years,” adding that “multiple studies have shown that transmission within school settings is typically lower than – or at least similar to – levels of community transmission” when they adhere to social distancing and other mitigation strategies such as mask-wearing.
Pfizer’s two-dose vaccine is the only one so far to be authorized for use in children 12 through 15, but whether the shots are safe and effective in younger children remains to be seen. Moderna and Johnson & Johnson have also initiated trials of their shots in children but have yet to be authorized by federal regulators. Pfizer plans to petition the Food and Drug Administration for an expanded emergency use authorization to cover children 2 to 11 in September. To date, over 56% of people 12 and older have received at least one dose of vaccine, according to the CDC. More than 44% are now fully protected from COVID-19.
