With schools about to re-open and face-to-face instruction set to resume, school officials throughout Orange County are hearing from parents who hold opposing views about a state mandate that requires most students, teachers and staff to wear masks when indoors at a California public school.
On one side are parents who welcome the safety of masks, especially with COVID-19 spiking again in Southern California and around the country. These parents argue that the driver of the new surge, the Delta variant, is more transmissible than previous versions of the sometimes fatal disease and the masks-for-all rule helps protect kids and figures to slow community spread.
UPDATE: Orange County Board of Education will sue Newsom over face masks
Other parents are frustrated by the mandate, saying they believe masks pose a risk to their child’s mental health and their ability to learn. Many of these parents argue that they, not the government, should decide if their child does or doesn’t wear a mask at school.
A new group called “Let Them Breathe” has helped anti-mandate parents express their view to school boards, organizing recent rallies outside Orange Unified and Tustin Unified districts. And at least three county school districts – Capistrano, Placentia-Yorba Linda and Saddleback Valley – have formally asked state health officials to kill the mandate and make face masks optional on campus.
It’s unclear if those requests will gain traction. As case rates jumped in recent weeks, the federal Centers for Disease Control changed its guidance, urging masks indoors for all students and teachers, regardless of their vaccination status. That mirrors California’s mandate.
With the state leaving enforcement of the mandate to school districts, one question remains: What will happen if students show up to school and refuse to wear a mask?
Confusion
School district officials say one thing is certain – they don’t have the legal authority to unilaterally opt out of the mask mandate.
“We must comply with face masks, and local boards cannot adopt less restrictive measures than what is mandated,” said Los Alamitos Unified Superintendent Andrew Pulver.
School district officials, including Pulver, say the California Department of Health confused parents on July 13, when it issued two statements about masks at school. Early in the day, the agency said schools “must exclude” students if they come to class without a mask and refuse to wear one provided by the school. But later in the day, the agency issued a second statement that kept the mandate in place – and gave individual districts leeway on how to enforce it – but removed the words “must exclude” from its guideline.
The result, said Pulver, was confusion.
“They issued the guidance, and they suddenly put the enforcement on the backs of local school boards, with really no information on what that means.”
Since then, some school administrators have asked the Orange County Health Care Agency if their districts can let students on campus if the student wears a face shield instead of a mask, or if the district could simply separate un-masked students from their peers. Both requests were rejected, Pulver said, but the earlier statements from the state might have left some parents believing that school districts have a say in such rules.
“Some parents think school boards and districts can make those decisions,” Pulver said. “Some parents are saying ‘uphold the mask mandate.’ Others are saying ‘don’t enforce it.’”
“I don’t know if we’ll get further guidance,” he added. “But the state confused it, making it sound like districts have options. When in reality we don’t.”
Though Greg Franklin, superintendent of the Tustin Unified School District, agreed that the state “created confusion among a lot of people,” he doesn’t view the current mask rules as dramatically different from last year.
“School districts have always been in charge of enforcement,” Franklin said. “But (that) doesn’t lessen the mandate.”
For now, it looks like kids who show up without masks won’t be allowed to sit in classes with kids who are wearing them.
Fermin Leal, spokesman for Santa Ana Unified, said the district will divert non-masked students to “virtual learning classes, or independent study, or something similar.”
“We are not turning away anyone from our schools,” Leal said. “But we are also requiring masks for all individuals, during all times, at all indoor activities in schools. This is a mandate from the state that we have to follow.”
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Still, that mandate comes with a flip-side: School districts in California must offer students who refuse to wear a mask the opportunity to do an independent study program. And parents who expect a repeat of the virtual instruction that was offered during the height of the pandemic might be disappointed, depending on where their child goes to school.
Schools this year won’t offer hybrid instruction, combining at-home and online learning. And while some districts, like Tustin Unified and Capistrano Unified, plan to continue the virtual schooling that they offered even before the pandemic, others will cut back on online instruction. Los Alamitos Unified, for example, will contract with the Orange County Department of Education to offer independent studies to students who wish to remain online.
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Fight goes on
The mask debate isn’t unique to California. Across the country, some states are promoting in-class mask wearing while others are lukewarm or hostile to the idea. In Oregon, for example, students in K-12 schools will be required to wear masks in the coming year. But in Florida – currently experiencing the nation’s biggest coronavirus surge – Gov. Ron DeSantis on Friday signed an executive order blocking schools from mandating face coverings.
In California, the answer to the mask mandate debate might happen in court.
On July 22, two groups, Let Them Breathe and Reopen California Schools, filed a lawsuit seeking to overturn California’s school mask mandate.
“It’s harming (children’s) mental health, their academic progress and their social development. They need to have that choice to unmask and every family should be able to make medical decisions themselves,” said Let Them Breathe founder Sharon McKeeman.
“The government should not be parenting,” said McKeeman, a mother of three students in the Carlsbad Unified School District in San Diego County.
Placentia resident Amber Schubert said she is pleased that her school district, Placentia-Yorba Linda Unified, is taking a stance in favor of mask choice. One of her 8-year-old twins has a heart condition.
“He cannot medically wear a mask and he’s autistic,” she said. Her other boy suffered anxiety from wearing his face mask.
The incoming third-grader with the heart condition was allowed to forego the mask last spring, but school officials insisted he wear a face shield, Schubert said. Her other son, she said, was “shamed” into wearing one.
Schubert said educators focus a great deal of attention on students’ social emotional development, but that has seemed to go by the wayside when it comes to face masks. “Learning their ABCs is important,” she said. “But what is most important is what they learn and see on the playground.”
But for parents like Kambiz Shoarinejad, who has two sons enrolled at Tustin Unified, the face masks make sense.
“It’s for everyone’s benefit to control this virus. And the tool we have at our disposal, besides vaccinations which are not available for younger kids, is masks,” he said. “It’s not like we have another choice.”
“Life is full of chances. The question is how do you manage risks,” Shoarinejad added. “The only way is to stick with masks, stick with science, and with sensible cautionary protocols, like hand washing and social distancing.”
Anaheim Hills resident Claudia Gallegos, a mom to five children, including two at Placentia-Yorba Linda schools, said she’s disappointed some school districts are “caving to the pressure of some parents.”
“At the end of the day, all of us want our children to go to school. We want our children to be healthy.
“Yes, it’s a little uncomfortable to wear the masks for several hours a day. But if it helps you and your classmates and your students stay healthy, why is it so hard to do that?”
Gallegos, a pre-school teacher at Magnolia School District, said she’s looking forward to children – her own and her students – returning to campus.
The hybrid schooling model, which last year had students many students around Orange County working partly from home, “is not the same as being in the classroom and working collaboratively,” Gallegos said.
But if there’s one thing that last year taught her, she said, was that “everyone needs to be understanding and be flexible.
“Be grateful. Give grace,” she said.
“We’re still in a pandemic.”
