Mount Vernon grade school students will be required to wear a mask at school until a vaccine is available for children under 12, following action by the school board Tuesday.
Grades 7-12 will remain at the status quo with no mask mandate and no further restrictions on activities. Masks are recommended for this age group but not required.
With 175 in attendance at a special school board meeting Tuesday night, Sept. 21, in Mount Vernon High School’s Commons, the school board on a 4-3 vote passed a mask mandate for pre-kindergarten through sixth grade beginning Thursday, Sept. 23. The requirement will be removed 60 days after a vaccine is available for students under 12 years old or when the district’s new Metrics Review Team (the superintendent, the two school nurses, one principal, and three district parents–the seven together representing a cross-section of beliefs on mask wearing) recommends it’s safe.
Exceptions will be given for medical, social-emotional or religious reasons.
The board met after Federal Judge Robert Pratt, representing the United States District Court for the Southern District of Iowa, issued a temporary restraining order prohibiting enforcement of the state’s ban of mask mandates in the schools. Gov. Kim Reynolds signed House File 847, Section 280.31, into law in May, which prohibited school districts from mandating masks.
Voting “yes” were board members Denise Brannaman, Nannette Gunn, Jeremy Kunz and Lance Schoff. School board president Sherry Grunder and board members Lori Merlak and Rick Elliott voted “no.”
The vote came after a half hour of public comments followed by one and a half hours of school board discussion.
During the public comment period, the board heard eight comments, alternating between for and against a mask mandate in the schools. Still waiting to speak when the public comment period ended were seven additional residents against a mask mandate, six residents for a mandate, and two residents who were “middle of the road,” Grunder said.
During school board discussion prior to the vote, superintendent Greg Batenhorst said the major decisions to be made were what does the district have to do to keep kids safe, and what do the experts say the district has to do to keep kids safe. He said that since Monday, Sept. 20, when a temporary mask mandate was allowed, he had checked with all the medical professionals, and their consensus was that masks work.
Therefore, a mask mandate is needed to keep kids safe until the metrics say the district can drop it, Batenhorst said, and the district could do that with a PreK-12 mandate or a PreK-6 mandate.
He said that before deciding on his recommendation, he had also studied the actions of other school districts and talked with their superintendents. What jumped out, he said, is there have been 500,000 COVID cases in kids the past two weeks; 2,000 schools have moved to remote learning because of COVID outbreaks; it’s been a little harder finding substitutes in the past two weeks; there is still no vaccine for part of the district’s student body (under 12 years old) and there won’t be until possibly late October or November; the COVID transmission rate in Iowa and Linn County is high; and a high school Mustang Moon newspaper poll of 128 high school students found that 69.5 percent have been fully vaccinated.
So the students who are most vulnerable to COVID, Batenhorst said, are those in grades PK-6, who can’t be vaccinated, while many students 12-years old and older, who can be vaccinated, have been.
— Chris Umscheid contributed to this report