School Board Likely to Revisit Masking Policy as Covid-19 Cases Surge in Transylvania

As the rate of new cases climbs to near that of the pandemic's peak, some Transylvania County School Board members say they want to discuss the current mask-optional policy at Monday's meeting.

A sign outside Rosman High School informs residents that Monday is the first day of the school year. A School Board meeting at the school, scheduled for later that day, will likely include discussion of the masking policy.

By Dan DeWitt

BREVARD — The agenda for Monday’s meeting of the Transylvania County School Board includes a “re-entry update” — time set aside to discuss any new information related to the students' return to school that morning.

Such as, perhaps: a recent outbreak of five Covid-19 cases among students and teachers in a summer program at Pisgah Forest Elementary School, the positive Covid-19 test of a Brevard High School football player that forced the cancellation of this week’s practices, and the surge in new cases that, while not quite matching the pandemic’s local peak in January, closely mimics the run-up to that peak.

In its weekly Covid-19 update released Wednesday, Transylvania Public Health reported 125 new cases in the previous seven days, up from 53 new cases two weeks ago.

“Our numbers right now look very similar to what they did in the first few weeks of December,” said Public Health Spokeswoman Tara Rybka.

That data — as well as mounting opposition to the board’s Aug. 2 vote to make mask wearing optional for students — forms the backdrop to the upcoming meeting and a likely revisiting of that decision.

“I feel certain that as we discuss re-entry guidelines on Monday that, yes, the (masking) issue will come up again,” said the board's vice chair, Ron Kiviniemi.

The meeting, scheduled for 6:30 p.m., has been moved to the roomy media center at Rosman High School to accommodate the expected large crowd. 

Kiviniemi was one of two board members, along with Marty Griffin, who spoke out in favor of a mandatory mask policy at the earlier meeting. He said he based his information on recommendations from county Health Director Elaine Russell, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the American Academy of Pediatrics and his son, a professor at the University of Kentucky's School of Public Health.

“Their consensus was all the same, that students should go back with the mask mandate,” he said in an interview this week. “Unfortunately, this has become more of a political issue, and if we look at it completely as a public health issue, masks need to be mandated.”

Board member Kimsey Jackson and Chair Tawny McCoy, on the other hand, said they were influenced by the arguments of several parents who spoke out against the mask mandate at the Aug. 2 meeting.

“I feel like it is the parents’ responsibility to make that decision,” one of those parents, Leah Woods, said this week. “I don’t think as parents we are here to co-parent with the government.”

Her 12-year-old son, a student at Rosman Middle School, “struggles with asthma,” she said, and “has issues with understanding other people’s emotions” without facial clues.

“Last year was really tough and I had to pick my child up multiple times from school because of the mask issue,” she said.

Jackson said he received many similar emails from parents before the Aug. 2 meeting, relaying problems masks caused among children, including rashes and headaches.

“They were pretty adamant they wanted the masks off. Most of them felt it was their decision whether or not their child should wear a mask,” Jackson said.

“Many parents who had reached out asked us to allow parents to choose — they could mask their children or not, and that’s what guided me,” McCoy said.

Also, she said, “the transmission rate between school-age children has been very low and I would like them to be in school and find as much normalcy in school as possible.”

The masks-optional motion that passed Aug. 2 included a provision to revisit the decision in September, and both Jackson and McCoy said that they would be open to considering new information about their earlier vote — which Jackson said, “ignited a firestorm.”

He has received roughly 300 emails about masking since late July, and while they overwhelmingly supported an optional policy before the vote, he said, the trend since has been dramatically reversed.

“Most of them have been respectful,” he said of the recent emails, “but four or five have not been respectful . . . (and) two or three said if a child dies, the blood will be on our hands.”

Woods said she is not against masking, just against forced masking.

“If you want to wear a mask, wear a mask, to each his own,” she said. “That’s the greatest thing about living in the greatest country of all times, we have the freedom to choose.”

But masking not only protects wearers, Rybka said, but people they come in contact with, which is why the state Department of Health and Human Services recommends masking as part of a “layered” approach to Covid-19 control that also includes hand washing and social distancing.

“In classroom settings, what we found based on the data — (Covid-19) is much less likely to spread if children and staff are appropriately masked,” she said.

John Hogan, who teaches, among other classes at Brevard High School, American history, also spoke at the Aug. 2 meeting.

“Freedom doesn’t mean you have the right to do whatever you want,” he said this week. “You also have responsibilities to your fellow citizens.”

Another of his concerns, he said, is the increased rate of contagion of the virus’s rapidly spreading Delta variant. While serious illness and death from Covid-19 remain rare among children nationally, hospitalizations of young Covid-19 patients is on the rise across the country, and 23 percent of the cases recorded in the county this month have been among children 17 and younger, Rybka said.

The school will also install kiosks to monitor temperatures when students enter schools, said Superintendent Jeff McDaris, who added that it was not clear whether the football player who tested positive contracted the virus at practice or outside of it, and that no other positive cases have been recorded among players or coaches.

One other precaution already being put in place — signs outside of schools that urge all who enter to wear a mask, which Griffin recommended. He was the only board member who joined Kiviniemi in supporting an initial motion to mandate masks at the earlier meeting.

Though he strongly supports a mask mandate, he changed his vote to join the 4-1 majority supporting the optional policy, he said, to help ensure his sign recommendation would be implemented.

“If you come into the building, I think you should have a mask on,” Griffin said, “to me that should just be protocol.”

He pointed out that other Western North Carolina school boards, most recently the one in Swain County, have reversed course to make masks mandatory, and he agrees with Hogan that personal freedoms are limited by the rights of fellow residents.

“We’ve got to take care of each other,” he said. “We have one group that is willing to make others sick, and that just doesn’t sit well with me . . . We are our brother’s keeper.”