August 4-10, 2021
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Jackson County School Board Chairwoman Alli Laird-Large (left) and Superintendent Dr. Dana Ayers during discussion of masking options for the upcoming school year.
School boards make different decisions on masks
BY HANNAH MCLEOD STAFF WRITER ue to an increase in COVID-19 cases and transmission rates following the spread of the Delta variant, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has updated its guidance for public schools to recommend universal masking for students, staff and visitors in grades K-12. North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper had already announced new health guidelines for North Carolina public schools on July 21, which suggested schools should require masks indoors for all students and staff in grades K-8, and students and staff in high schools who have not been vaccinated should also be required to wear masks indoors. Those guidelines from the Governor’s Office however, gave local school boards the power to decide what their local mask policies would be. “Local school districts should continue to protect students and staff by requiring masks and testing as outlined in the guidance,” said Cooper. “The most important work our state will do next month is getting all of our children back into classrooms safely for in-per8 son learning. That’s the best way for them to
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learn, and we want their school days to be as close to normal as possible, especially after the year of disruption they just had.” With the start to the 2021-22 school year just around the corner, and COVID-19 cases surging, North Carolina Health and Human Services updated the StrongSchoolsNC Public Health Toolkit for the second time in one week. The Toolkit provides guidelines for North Carolina Public Schools to operate safely during the COVID-19 Pandemic, according to the latest guidance from CDC and the American Academy of Pediatrics. The latest update, made July 29, proposes universal masking indoors for students, staff and visitors to schools with grades K-12 due to the current rapid increase in COVID-19 cases, caused by the Delta variant. According to the Public Health Toolkit, while the original virus spread from one person to an average of two or three people, the Delta variant is spreading from one person to an average of six people.
HAYWOOD COUNTY Following contentious public input, and relatively little board discussion, Haywood
County School Board decided to begin the 2021-22 school year without a mask mandate. This is not the first time the Haywood County School board has taken on the issue, having previously attempted to do away with the state’s mask mandate in Haywood schools last summer. Board attorney Pat Smathers warned the school board that such a move would be illegal. The board took his advice and instead passed a motion stating that the board publicly opposed the mask mandate. Haywood County Health and Human Services Director Sarah Henderson and Haywood County Medical Director Dr. Mark Jaben presented information to the school board at the special called meeting July 27. Both health officials recommended to either start the year with the guidelines laid out by the state or devise standards of transmission and infection rates that would determine the need for temporary mask mandates in the future. “Tonight, the conversation’s around mask or no mask in school, but this might not be the actual question we should be asking,” Jaben said. “Rather, to achieve both learning and safety, the better questions might be, what is the threshold of infection above which we get neither learning nor safety? What must we do to provide that margin of safety? And where are we right now?” Jaben said that in his view, making masks optional is essentially like having no masks, in terms of the risk of someone’s choice upon someone else. In his presentation to the board, he stressed the need for flexibility in decision making to be able to require masks if cases are surging to dangerous levels and pivot away from masks if numbers come down within the margin of safety.
The board did not discuss what would be done in the future if case counts or transmission rates continue to rise. Henderson outlined the consequences of making masks optional. Without masks, all students in a classroom will be considered close contact if another student in the classroom tests positive for COVID-19. According to Henderson, during the last 53 days of the school 2020-21, there were 62 positive COVID-19 cases in the school system. If the same number of cases occurred while not wearing masks, over 1,000 students would have had to quarantine for 14 days. Henderson expressed the concern that if students returned to school without masks, the number of students that would be required to quarantine due to close contact would be extremely high. “It’s about healthy children and that’s why we’re here. We all have the same goal and it’s to keep our kids in the classroom,” said Henderson. According to Henderson, around 9 percent of Haywood County residents age 12-17 are vaccinated. In addition to county health officials, 16 parents spoke during the public comment portion of the meeting. Of those, 14 asked the board to start the year without a mask mandate, or allow them to be optional, and two pleaded with the board to continue requiring masks. Parents asking the board to make masks optional most often cited the pain and hardship mask wearing puts on children. Some said that if masks were only required for unvaccinated students, unfair segregation would ensue. Many claimed that wearing masks didn’t serve any protection against the virus, and that since children had not been wearing masks at summer camps, sports and church activities, they shouldn’t have to wear them to go back into the classroom. “Standard cloth surgical masks offer no protection. The particle that comes through is 60 to 140 nanometers or one micron. The pore size in a surgical mask is 200 to 1,000 that size. They are basically nothing. They don’t help our children whatsoever,” said Stephanie Bell, a parent who has spoken at several of the most recent board meetings imploring the board to stop requiring masks. Kay Miller, chairwoman of the Haywood County Republican Party, also spoke at the meeting. “This is a liberty issue, and don’t let anyone tell you that if you don’t support this, that you’re selfish or you don’t care about your neighbor or your family member, it’s liberty. It’s about liberty. This whole exercise this last year has been about control and compliance. It’s time to stop the compliance, and we’re not going to put up with the control,” said Miller. “If Gov. Cooper reinstates a mask mandate, don’t do it. I encourage you to not do that. Listen to the parents of the children that are in the schools and those of us who pay taxes. We have a voice.” Several parents that asked the board to make masks optional blamed the board for children having to wear masks over the past year and a half. However, until July 30, masks were state mandated and local school boards had no power over the decision. Despite that,