Murphy – It looks like local parents are going to get their way, as masks will remain optional for Cherokee County Schools students following a special called board meeting Friday.
After discussion, the board voted to keep face coverings optional at the beginning of the school year. However, Superintendent Jeana Conley will have the authority to call another special meeting to discuss the issue should the district’s COVID-19 situation change.
Conley will also have the authority to shut down classrooms or similar units if small clusters of cases arise. School districts in Clay and Macon countries have also made masks optional.
She said the school’s summer program, which served nearly 1,000 students, saw almost no disruption from COVID-19.
“We didn’t have any positive students over the summer,” Conley said. “We ended up quarantining about 20, and as of (July 29) we had five (students) and one staff member.”
She also said the protocols the district had been using seemed to be working.
“There are a lot of things that COVID taught us that are just good practices,” Conley said.
Some school board members said they have received calls and texts from constituents, with some even going so far as to threaten to pull their children out of the district if masks were mandated.
“I started being contacted on July 21, and actually through today, I have received 94 text messages, seven messages through Facebook Messenger, 10 phone calls and three emails,” said board member Keesha Curtis. “That’s a total of 114 people since July 21, and of the 114, I have 113 people that want to say let the parents make the decisions.”
She said the majority of those who reached out were middle school and high school parents.
“Almost every parent that reached out to me who has a child going into high school said, ‘If a mask is mandatory, I will pull my kid out of Cherokee County Schools,’ ” Curtis said.
Board member James Ellis said he received similar comments from constituents leading up to the meeting. His two sons went to school in Georgia, where they had a much more normal school year than his daughter, who remained in Cherokee County.
“Sports were regular, the classroom was regular, they didn’t have any outbreaks,” Ellis said. “My sons were never quarantined.”
Board vice chair Jeff Martin, a physician, said while he didn’t believe masks to be a bad thing, it would be difficult to enforce, especially among elementary-age students. He added that he reached out to a pediatrician colleague and was referred to American Academy of Pediatrics guidelines, which stress the importance of children being in school.
“What we see in the smaller kids is that they don’t keep it on, they drop it, they step on it, they put it back on and then they lick it,” Martin said.
Cherokee County Health Director David Badger said he thought the district should follow U.S. Centers for Disease Control & Prevention guidelines, which strongly encourage face coverings in schools and other indoor settings.
“I do feel like there are a lot of unknowns out there, especially as we come back and bring a lot of people in,” he said.
However, Badger thought the district would be diligent even without mandating masks in the classroom.
“We’ll work closely with them, and we’ll collectively get through this in one way, shape or form, but there’s just a lot of unknowns that are continuing to rear their ugly heads,” he said.
With the emergence of the more contagious Delta variant and resulting increase of cases, Gov. Roy Cooper announced last week that the state would require those working in cabinet agencies to either be vaccinated or submit to at least weekly COVID testing and mandatory face coverings. The new rule affects about 50,000 state employees.
“At the end of the day, more people getting vaccinated is going to help as far as the mechanisms of it,” Badger said. “It’s up to the state to determine, but probably at the end of the day more pertinent to make sure we get people vaccinated.”
He added that he was seeing an increase in testing and a slight increase in the number of vaccines administered in the county, as the Delta variant remains the most dominant.
“It’s still out there, and from all indications the vast majority of cases would be the Delta variants that’s based on both federal and state epidemiological studies and information,” Badger said.