SchoolBoard210
The school board voted 5-2 Thursday to get rid of the district’s mask policy requiring students and staff to wear masks if the percentage of people with active COVID-19 cases in the district was at 2% or over.
This means once the county mask mandate ends, the school district would no longer require students to wear masks at that 2% point.
However, board member Mark Chrislip said the trigger point policy could be reimplemented if needed or things change.
This decision came out of a discussion surrounding the county’s recent decision to extend its mask mandate through March 2. Many of the board members were disappointed with the county’s decision and thought it would go in the other direction.
“It shifted, because the health officers had recommended that it fall off, and the county decided to go in a different direction,” Superintendent Stu Moeckel said.
As of Wednesday, the average positivity rate in Douglas County was 12.3%. There were 3,256 active cases in the county, and 20 COVID inpatients at LMH Health.
The extension of the mask mandate comes as Douglas County experiences a decline in COVID-19 cases from a peak in early January. However, the rolling 14-day average of new cases is nearly twice the previous peak in 2020, according to a community update from Rebecca Smith, vice president of LMH Health strategic communications.
However, school board member Eric Votaw, who brought the motion to the board, said he is frustrated with the county’s decision to extend the mask mandate and wanted to offer at least some solution.
“It is nothing but a burden to the administration. It is nothing but a harmful evil to our kids,” Votaw said. “There are adults, including people who are fully vaxxed and boosted and who have followed this to the letter of the law since day one, who – last night was the last straw for them.”
Board member Becky Plate, who voted no on the motion, said she doesn’t think the district should remove something like the trigger point policy completely from their tool kit.
“Now that we don’t do any social distancing and we’re, at least temporarily, not doing contact tracing and things like that, this was sort of the one last tool we had in our tool kit for if cases started to climb,” Plate said.
Board member Joe Hurla said he wholeheartedly disagreed with the mask mandate extension, but that they could not set the example as a governing body that they can pick and choose which rules to follow.
“It’s an absolute no-win situation, and I think the County Commission just misread the room, just entirely, and it’s very frustrating,” Hurla said. “And I don’t think it’s been a service to this community at this point.”
Board member Heather Whalen, who voted yes on the motion, agreed with Hurla about this being a “no-win situation.” She said everyone in the district from students to staff and administration are frustrated with having to enforce a mask mandate.
“They’re exhausted from the last year and a half,” Whalen said. “This is a health decision, and it’s going against the health leaders of the county.”
Whalen also said she would be in favor of going against the county’s mandate altogether.
However, board member Claire Harding, who also voted no, said the county extended the mandate after talking to health officials and deciding it was the wisest decision.
“It’s three weeks. We’ve had to deal with a lot of things that have been very difficult,” she said. “So, I would hardly agree that this is quite burdensome in a different way than the last three weeks have been.”
Ultimately, the board passed the motion, but will continue to follow the county’s mandate.
Moeckel said most of the schools in the Greater Kansas City area that also had a trigger point mask policy have either increased their trigger point percentage or gotten rid of it altogether.
“As we approach the spring, the numbers should go down, but there’s always instances or something may come up that we can look at later on without having trigger points,” Moeckel said.
In other news, high school football coach Sean Hayden’s resignation was accepted at the meeting. Hayden told The Eudora Times that he was stepping down from the role to spend more time with his family and declined additional comment.
Reach reporter Alyssa Wingo at [email protected].
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