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Texas school boards are wrestling with whether to continue to require students and teachers to wear protective face masks on campuses as a statewide mandate ends Wednesday.
On Monday, a handful of Dallas-area districts started taking a stand on the issue, grappling with balancing public health concerns with personal freedoms.
In the Fort Worth-area Birdville school district, trustee Kelvin Dilks told his colleagues that he struggled with the topic all weekend as he researched the health implications.
“I’m scared for the teachers and for the kids, their safety,” Dilks said. “I think about if we lost one kid because we didn’t wear a mask, would it be worth it? We’re so close to the end of the school year.”
The heated debate over mask requirements has resulted in screaming matches at grocery stores and the organized burning of face coverings. It now falls to local school leaders after Gov. Greg Abbott last week announced the end of several COVID-19 precautions. The Texas Education Agency gave school boards discretion over mask policies on their own campuses.
For some school leaders, maintaining a mask requirement was an easy decision. A day after the TEA issued the new public health guidance, several districts — including Dallas, Richardson and Garland — said the status quo of requiring the face coverings would remain.
TEA guidance requires any district wanting to modify existing policies to take formal school board action. Meanwhile, Melissa and Anna ISD officials made face coverings optional. Agendas show trustees in Pilot Point and Krum will discuss the matter this week.
Elected officials in Birdville ISD, a 23,000-student district in Tarrant County, received 74 responses from people urging the board to maintain, modify or eliminate the policy.
“I think it would be really unfair to ask a teacher who is COVID-cautious to go to work daily into a classroom with a large amount of students who aren’t required to wear a mask,” a Birdville High School teacher wrote. “This is a true risk to health at this time, as many teachers are not vaccinated yet, and this virus isn’t truly under control.”
About 80% of Birdville’s teachers who provided feedback asked for the mask mandate to remain in place. A similar percentage of public commenters encouraged the board to keep the face-covering requirement.
A handful of Birdville ISD residents wanted small modifications — allowing kids to remove masks when at their desks or easing the restrictions on younger students. Less than 20% of commenters asked trustees to eliminate the policy.
“It is time to end this mask mandate nonsense in our schools,” one district parent wrote. “Those who want to wear masks should be free to do so, but there should not be policies compelling people to wear mask coverings in our schools.”
Guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention notes that the correct use of masks and physical distancing allows schools to safely reopen and remain open for face-to-face instruction. Health experts have critiqued recent attempts by states, including Texas, to roll back COVID-19 precautions before the pandemic is under control.
The country shouldn’t relax mitigation strategies until the number of new coronavirus cases falls below at least 10,000 daily, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease official, said in an interview with CNN last week. Texas reported nearly 3,000 new cases and the country reported more than 41,000 on Sunday.
Birdville trustees ultimately decided to ease requirements for students in third grade and below.
Trustee Joe Tolbert said he supported requiring masks on campuses because so many teachers — many of whom are required to provide in-person lessons — are concerned.
“They’re still showing up every day and one of the reasons they’re doing that is because there are masks in place and there’s social distancing,” Tolbert said. “The vast majority would like those protections to stay in place so they can feel comfortable coming to work.”
The best place to educate kids is on campus and the best way to ensure schools remain open is to require masks, trustee Whitney Harding said. Birdville students have fewer than 11 weeks of instruction left this school year and the district could discuss some changes in the future when more of the community is vaccinated, she said.
No trustees argued for a complete elimination of the policy, but Dilks, Harding and trustee Ralph Kunkel ultimately split from their colleagues who voted 4-3 to only require masks for the district’s youngest students in common spaces, as determined by school administrators.
“Everybody’s worried about one life,” board president Jack McCarty said. “If we worry about one life, we’re going to outlaw balloons because there were people lost from balloons last year?”
After trustees voted, McCarty remarked that it was probably the first time in 10 years that the board had such a close vote. The remarkably uncommon fracture foreshadows what is likely to be a heated debate among trustees across the state.
The Carroll ISD board saw the full spectrum of opinions on mask requirements Monday night as some families claimed science supported the elimination of the mandate and others cited the many deaths linked to coronavirus.
One district father referred to masks as muzzles. Another told trustees a story of parents coaching their kids to forgo masks and be rude to teachers when asked to put one on.
Superintendent Lane Ledbetter acknowledged the heightened emotions around the issue but recommended the district continue requiring them for the time being.
About 78% of teachers asked the district to maintain the requirement. With vaccines for educators on the way and the county’s health authority recommending Carroll schools keep mandating masks, Ledbetter said eliminating the policy wouldn’t be prudent.
Carroll trustees plan to revisit the policy in about a month when more teachers are vaccinated and students have returned from spring break.
“At the end of the day, we’re making decisions that impact 8,500 kids and over [15,000] to 20,000 parents in this community,” Ledbetter said. “We are not experts in this. We haven’t been through this before. I know that some are going to think that we’re not making the right decision and we’re not stepping up.”
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The DMN Education Lab deepens the coverage and conversation about urgent education issues critical to the future of North Texas.
The DMN Education Lab is a community-funded journalism initiative, with support from The Beck Group, Bobby and Lottye Lyle, The Communities Foundation of Texas, The Dallas Foundation, Dallas Regional Chamber, Deedie Rose, The Meadows Foundation, Solutions Journalism Network, Southern Methodist University and Todd A. Williams Family Foundation. The Dallas Morning News retains full editorial control of the Education Lab’s journalism.
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