John Dick made his position crystal clear about the mask mandate at the Oct. 26 Monroe County School Board Meeting.
“I want to see this district get back to normal,” said Dick, the board chair.
And after a presentation by Florida Department of Health administrator Bob Eadie with good news about fewer COVID cases over the past couple of weeks, and a vigorous discussion among the board members, a vote about the mandate was conducted. Up until Oct. 26, masks were required on school property with parental opt-out only. But the board voted 4-1 in support of making masks completely optional for everybody in the school district. The sole opposing vote was cast by Sue Woltanski.
At times, the talk among the board members about the issue was passionate.
“Remember this: A lot of districts went mask optional from the very beginning. And nobody had any problems with it,” said Dick during the discussion before the vote. “Let me tell you, wearing this mask is tiring. It’s part of the problem for the teachers. We have far more things to be doing than spending school board meetings over masks. You heard about all the ELL and all the problems we have. How far we’re behind on things. And we’re busy talking about masks. There’s no need for that.”
Dick was referring to a presentation that district staff had just made about mitigating learning loss due to COVID. One of the topics discussed was the relatively larger number of ELL students — students who speak English as a second language — who are now in Monroe County this school year and the potential difficulty they have learning English due to masks.
“It just makes me sad because we’re very close to vaccinating those young kids,” responded board member Sue Woltanski. “I feel for the families who have been waiting for the vaccine for the (ages) 5 to 12, and it’s coming in a week. We’re changing our mitigation strategies due to a moderate couple of weeks during a global pandemic.”
She expressed concern earlier in the meeting that even though most children are not in danger of being hospitalized or dying because of COVID, they can carry the virus back to adults whose immune systems are compromised.
“My piece on this is that there are viruses and infections all around us all of our lives for the past however long you’ve been alive,” said board member Mindy Conn. “The key to COVID and the reason it was such a scare was because of hospitalizations and deaths. We all live with a variety of bugs, bacteria, viruses that are out there. In my opinion, as long as hospitalizations and deaths are down, which they’re dramatically down, even though people are still getting sick, like people still get the flu and a cold, and a myriad of other things, I’m comfortable with making masks optional.”
“We’re moving in a positive direction. I think if the board feels like changes need to be made, I can support those from a health standpoint,” said Eadie at the beginning of the meeting.
However, he continued to advocate for vaccinations.
“The news media don’t tell you about the millions of people who have been vaccinated and gone about their lives. They report about the people who have been hospitalized yet vaccinated,” he said. “The vaccinations will ultimately be what moves us to herd immunity.”
