Fall mask rules draw controversy in State College Area School District. Here’s the plan
When the new school year starts next month, wearing a mask within the State College Area School District will depend on vaccination status, following board of directors approval Monday night of the district’s health and safety plan.
Tension has been high across the nation as schools prepare to welcome back students, and Monday’s board of directors meeting was no exception. The 7-2 vote came after more than an hour of public comment on the plan, with some parents calling for universal masking and others asking for no masking requirements.
“When district policy is made to incentivize vaccination, and make it harder for the unvaccinated to stay unvaccinated, the district is overstepping the responsibilities for student safety and are now participating in partisan public policy by rewarding the vaccinated and punishing those that have made medical decisions not aligned with what the district wants,” Michelle Young of Ferguson Township said.
The health and safety plan calls for optional masks indoors for those with proof of vaccination. Masks will be mandatory indoors for all unvaccinated individuals, and masks are optional outdoors for all K-12 students. Masks will be required for everyone while on district transportation, though drivers will not need one while they are alone. Three feet physical distancing will be done indoors.
Mark Kissling, a parent of two Radio Park Elementary students, asked the board to maintain masking requirements for all students, teachers and staff inside schools until COVID-19 is “under control.”
“Today when I asked my third grader for his thoughts about the proposed plan to allow those vaccinated to go unmasked in his school, he said two things. First, remember, vaccinated people can still get COVID, and second, it might be hard for students to understand why they have to wear masks, but teachers don’t have to. Both points are salient,” Kissling said.
Conflicting guidance with kids and masking
Prior to the board voting on the plan, it heard from Jeanne Knouse, director of SCASD student services and chair of the health and safety team, Dr. Joy Drass, pediatrician with Geisinger Gray’s Woods and medical director for the Geisinger Pediatrics Western Region and Matt Ferrari, professor of biology and director Penn State’s Center for Infectious Disease Dynamics, both of whom are also members of the district’s health and safety team. They answered several questions from board members about the coronavirus, variants and masking.
Board member Lori Bedell asked how The American Academy of Pediatrics recommendation for universal masking in schools during the 2021-22 school year fits in with SCASD and how much the board should think about the recommendation, which differs from Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidance.
“I think the pediatrician group as a whole, the thought process behind that is, for school-aged kids, there is still an extremely large proportion of those kids who have not had the opportunity to get vaccinated yet,” Drass said. “Vaccines still aren’t approved for kids under 12 ... that makes it challenging to start talking about lifting the mask recommendations.”
Drass said COVID-19 has fewer side effects and deaths in the pediatric population, but the complication and mortality rates are not zero.
“As a pediatrician, any kid who dies of a, at this point, preventable illness in most cases, is one too many,” she said.
Mental health concerns also came into account while advising on the health and safety plan, Drass said.
“I feel really, really strongly that schools need to be open everyday and we need to do it in a way that is safe for all the students to come, because in a lot of ways I feel like the kids are paying the price for adults not being responsible enough in terms of COVID,” Drass said.
Board Vice President Amy Bader said the school has to take public health into consideration, too. The polio vaccine was first administered in American schools, she said, and schools have been integral to public health for decades. Schools also provide things like dental and physical exams for children who are unable to obtain them on their own.
“We continue to play that role for the health of our students and for the health of our entire community,” Bader said.
Divided parents speak out
Ashley McDonald, of Ferguson Township, has four kids at SCASD. She said a petition to cease the mask mandates had been given to the board with at least 360 signatures.
“Here we have a proposed plan before us tonight, that will not only mandate masks for unvaccinated individuals, but in turn will create a discriminatory, segregated community filled with increased bullying incidents,” McDonald said.
Lori Miraldi said she supports the plan because her daughters are too young to be vaccinated and masks keep those who are unable to be vaccinated safe.
“We’re going to have a much larger population of students in the school buildings starting this fall … and that increases the chances of transmission,” she said. Masking worked last year in keeping incident rates low and should be continued, she said.
Public comment was not the only portion of Monday’s meeting that was contentious. During discussion, board president Amber Concepcion called for order several times in reaction to shouting and disruptions.
“I would like to say at this point ... over 600,000 Americans have died of COVID over the past year and a half, and there’s nothing funny about this topic. And it’s not a joke. And if we can’t have an orderly discussion, it really makes me feel bad about our community’s empathy for people who have suffered in this pandemic,” Concepcion said.
Board members Bader, Lori Bedell, Gretchen Brandt, Concepcion, Daniel Duffy, David Hutchinson and Jim Leous voted yes on the plan and members Scott Fozard and Laurel Zydney voted no.
Zydney said she didn’t vote no because of the plan, per se, but because there wasn’t time between the presentation of the plan and the voting meeting for changes to be made or for questions to be answered.
During the question and answer portion, Fozard said he did not agree with vaccination passports or tracking vaccinations.
“Personally, I don’t agree with it, I don’t support it in general, but definitely under no circumstance would I support that when the vaccine is still in emergency use, you know, we’re essentially participating in the largest clinical trial in history,” Fozard said. “And I got vaccinated, so I’m not an anti-vaxxer or anything like that, but it just concerns me, when we start to track information on something that isn’t an approved vaccine.”
