Sowing

 

Schools across the nation find themselves in an impossible situation, as they are stuck between increasingly dire medical advice, frustrated parents, and tricky political realities. A school board in northeast Texas, for example, temporarily added facemasks to its dress code to get around their governor’s enforcement ban on them in public places. In Florida, where COVID numbers are surging in large part due to the Delta variant, the governor has threatened to withhold salaries from school leaders if they go against his rule to forbid a mask mandate. Meanwhile, here in Illinois, schools that ignore our own governor’s mask mandate risk the loss of funding, sports, and even accreditation itself.

In our local area, schools that are following the governor’s unpopular mask mandate, as difficult a decision as that was, chose the right long-term decision for their students. I’ll explain my reasoning shortly to give folks a chance to grab the pitchforks, but before doing that let’s try to clarify the main purpose of a school district in the first place.

            A local board of education has many responsibilities, but most of them can be condensed into one basic idea: to offer the students who live in its district the best education that resources allow.

            So, what in the world does that have to do with masks?

            Well, in a normal year – nothing. As a veteran teacher and as a parent myself, I would suggest that wearing a mask on your face would actually be a detriment to education for all kinds of reasons that you’re undoubtedly already very familiar with. In 2021, though, I would argue that masks are an unfortunate necessity to give school district’s the best opportunity at doing their main job, which—again—is to keep the doors open for as many students as possible.

            Masks will help keep students in school because they help decrease the amount of germs that a potentially infected person exhales. Masks aren’t foolproof, of course, and they are less useful for keeping germs out, but multiple studies do suggest that they help slow down the spread of most viruses, including COVID-19.

            Effingham Unit 40, for example, among other schools, kept its doors open five days a week last year with the help of universal masking. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends universal masking in schools, including for those who are vaccinated. Considering that the CDC recommends indoor masking for schools and that area hospitals have even asked local school boards to follow those guidelines, one might assume that the decision to implement this mitigation strategy, particularly for students who haven’t had the opportunity to get vaccinated, would be an easy decision, as it was in many parts of the country.

 Which brings us to my second point.

            Masks will also help keep students in school because if masks aren’t worn, schools might literally have their doors shut. Now, I’m about as much a legal scholar as most folks on Facebook, but I do know that at the end of the day, controversial issues like this are not decided in the “comments” section. At some point courts will decide if the ISBE has the legal authority to do what the governor has threatened to do: cut funding, stop sports, remove accreditation. Punitive governing is not good governing, of course, and Governor Pritzker will likely suffer political consequences for his decisions, but the reality is, those threats are very steep hills to die on.

Granted, if a school district wants to risk those privileges to protect students from what they consider the tyranny of mask wearing or to even make a political gesture toward an unpopular governor, that’s really no one’s business outside the district. By the end of this calendar year, however—perhaps sooner—this may no longer be a hypothetical discussion, anyway. With some school districts throughout the nation masking up and some not, we’ll have plenty of evidence in the form of quarantine numbers, for example, to decide if wearing masks was a good idea. We’ll also know whether or not our own governor is bluffing.

I’ve never been on a school board, but I imagine that sitting down to make masks optional when it’s decided that they aren’t really needed is much easier than sitting down and figuring out how to generate the five million dollars that’s been lost from state funding, or figuring out what to tell the school’s seniors who are trying to apply for college without a diploma that’s recognized by the ISBE. It seems that for the sake of a child’s education—to say nothing of the health of the community at large—we ought error on the side of caution, as annoying as mask wearing can sometimes be.

In closing, this is a hard time for everyone, and it would be easy for me to shrug my shoulders, huddle up with my “tribe” and share memes all day that mock those who disagree.

But that’s useless. It’s careless at this point, and perhaps even dangerous. For the sake of our schools and everyone in them—students and staff—we must ignore the impulse to make this a civil rights issue, because it’s not.

Masking is simply a mitigation strategy we will someday not need; it’s a small piece of cloth that we’re sewing into Fort Sumter.