Editorial: Putting schools in the middle of mask controversies

Last year, superintendents and local school boards were put in the middle of intense political debates about whether classes should be open or remote in the midst of the pandemic.

This year, there is no debate any more about whether classes should reopen, but superintendents and local school boards nevertheless are being in the middle again - this time about whether students should be required to wear masks.

Despite anyone's best efforts and intentions, there is unlikely to be an end to the debates.

If you're a parent who is concerned that your child's health or that of your family could be compromised by a student attending the same class without a mask, you're not apt to accept a ruling that allows the decision to be voluntary.

If you're a parent who feels your child's "freedom" is being infringed, you're not apt to accept a ruling that makes masks mandatory.

So, no doubt, the controversies will continue, as they did last year right on up to the April school board elections.

Why does it have to be this way?

The matter is a public health issue.

The last time we checked, school administrators are not health experts. Nor are the vast majority of school board members. Their jobs, and their expertise, are mainly education.

Granted, we live in an era where expertise is widely disdained as some sort of elitism, but shouldn't public health experts decide what is in the best interests of public health?

Given the rise of the highly transmittable delta COVID-19 variant, those experts are now universally "recommending" that students and teachers in areas with substantial infections wear masks, even those who have been vaccinated.

That being the case, why do we have this hodgepodge system where individual school boards debate the recommendation as if they somehow know better?

Keep in mind, it is not just the health of the students that it is at stake; because students interact so closely and so intensely - much more so than adults - they have a dramatic effect on spreading communicable diseases to the general population.

We understand that like anyone else, public health experts can suffer from tunnel vision, that good decision making should include broader perspectives. But should not the decision on school masking then be worked out jointly between the state departments of public health and education -- one decision, layered for individual circumstances, that we all live by?

Politics certainly has complicated all of this, but we need less "recommending" and more standards. And we need to take local superintendents and school boards out of the middle of it.