By Samantha Connelly
After the Texas Supreme Court blocked a mask mandate on Aug. 26, the AISD Board Members with a 3-2 vote decided to not act on mandating masks at a board meeting Monday night, but continue to highly recommend wearing them at school.
“When we went through the original issue last year, excluding the delta variant, we didn’t look to our politicians for how to handle this,” board member Dr. Danny Wheat said. “We didn’t look at our governor. We didn’t look to the legislature, we looked to our physicians. We asked them what would be safe, and they told us.”
In May of earlier this year, Governor Greg Abbott passed an executive order that banned any governmental entities, for example, school districts, from requiring mask-wearing. Organizations could be fined up to $1,000. However, some districts have gone against this order, including Dallas and Austin school districts which are two of the largest districts in Texas.
“From an observational point of view, I would tell you that our student mask percentage if you take the district as a whole, is around 25 percent that are choosing to wear a mask in school,” Superintendent Dr. David Young said.
On Wednesday, Aug. 25, AISD school sent out parent and faculty electronic surveys questioning whether students should be required to wear masks. Out of 1,394 surveys from staff, 53 percent would like to require masks. However, Young described that through walking through every campus in the district he observed less than 10 percent of teachers wore masks. Statistics from the parent survey came out to 63 to 68 percent of parents wished to mandate masks, with a slight variance due to counting additional votes for parents with multiple children in the district.
During the first days of school, AISD recorded more than 194 cases of COVID, compared to seven cases for the same period last year.
“I tend to think they’re getting infected at home,” board member Derek Hood said. “The spread seems to be minimal at the schools from studies that I’ve looked at. So, therefore, once again, it’s on the parents to do what they can to protect their children.”
Hood urged parents to have their children wear masks and suggested that as a precaution parents could get vaccines to protect their children, explaining that he took the responsibility to get the vaccine to keep his father, who lives in a nursing home safe. Board members discussed the impact of mask wearing and the constraints imposed by the Texas ban on mask mandates.
“I keep coming back to the fact that my basis of supporting the decision that was made last year, that was to follow the law,” President of the Board of Trustees Daryl Zeller said. “That sends a message to all of our community and our kids, that that’s what we’re going to do. I understand the safety, but I think we should still follow what we’re told to do. We have a responsibility to follow the law and we don’t get to pick and choose which ones, as a school board, that we follow.”
Zeller expressed his opinion that mandating masks could lead to legal fees and felt that money that goes to legal fees could instead be used for educational and academic purposes. Board member Rodney Goodman agreed with Zeller in that they shouldn’t vote against the law and risk getting sued.
After community members expressed their concerns in front of the board, Dr. Gustavo Villanueva, Associate Superintendent for Leadership and Student Services, presented current COVID-19 statistics for the district with increased number of cases and discussed the first closed classroom of the district and quarantine procedures.
Remote- learning came into discussion and Young explained that the failure rate of online learners last year was close to 75%. Young said that the academic cost in response to COVID is significant. If cases continue to increase it will become too difficult to staff schools, forcing closures. Villanueva also discussed that remote learning does not have funding from the state this year and is unavailable this year for parents who choose to quarantine or keep children at home. To keep their students in school they will have to attend in-person schooling.
“You know the struggle we’ve seen is not so much about masks but to put them on or to take them off,” Assistant Secretary of the Board Bill Enriquez said. “It’s about ‘Don’t tell me what to do’. How many children do we need to be infected before we take this seriously? Another 200? Another 150? 500 of them? That’s my question. What’s one life worth? If we lose one child in this incident what have we gained? There are more serious things than that’s the law. I mean civil disobedience sometimes has to be done.”
Enriquez made a motion to mandate masks and Wheat seconded that motion. However, in the end, after Hood, Zeller, and Goodman voted no, the board concluded with the decision to not act on the mask mandating. Two other board members, Vice President Cindy Earles and Secretary Angie Wiley, abstained from voting.
“I can’t vote against what I believe, and I can’t put our district in a position of going against the law,” Wiley said.
Prior to the meeting, legal counsel advised board members to not mandate masks, following the Texas Supreme Court decision to uphold Abbott’s ban on mask mandates.
“We have a right to protect these children,” Enriquez said. “Whether they belong to me or belong to you.”
