In one of their longest and most fraught meetings in recent years, a divided Macon County Board of Education chose to start the school year with a face covering requirement.
There was ample drama leading up to the meeting. After the board said last month that they’d start the year without masks, the news that they’d be reconsidering drove dozens of concerned citizens to sign up for public comment.
On Friday it was announced the meeting would be moved to the Macon County Courthouse to make room for everyone, only to change to a virtual format just hours before the meeting on Monday. Macon County Public Health suggested the virtual meeting because of social distancing implications (prudent, given that more than 200 people would tune in to watch the virtual meeting) but that wasn’t the only safety concern. Board Chairman Jim Breedlove said multiple people who planned on attending had suggested they might get violent, a problem that has occurred at other school board meetings in the region.
“It got to the point where confrontations were being threatened against people of opposing ideas,” Breedlove said. “That probably bothers me the worst of everything that’s going on.”
Residents were unhappy that they couldn’t voice their opinions in person, but they took advantage of the option to send in their comments via email. Legal counsel John Henning Jr. spent almost an hour and a half reading emails from parents, teachers and other concerned community members. Like last month, most of them were opposed to requiring face coverings. Their reasons included the incomplete effectiveness of cloth masks, the discomfort they cause children, the importance of recognizing facial cues for small kids and the fact that many of them aren’t wearing their masks properly anyway. Many even said that masks are a greater health risk than they are a disease deterrent.
“What will this do to the social and emotional growth of our children when they cannot see the faces of adults and peers and learn to read facial cues and then they cannot express their own emotions?” wrote Rebecca Tipton in her public comment.
Many others took the opposite stance. Some pointed out that even though masks don’t completely stop the spread of droplets, they stop enough of it to substantially stem infections, or that making masks optional won’t do enough to protect kids who do wear masks since they’re meant to keep the wearer from spreading disease more than catching it. A lot of parents said they won’t feel comfortable sending their kids back to school if the school system isn’t taking all available measures to protect them.
“I have two children in our schools and one of them is high risk,” said Tina Richardson, who also submitted a comment. “I am begging you to protect them by voting for a mask mandate.”
Even Congressman Madison Cawthorn popped into the meeting via Zoom to discourage the board members from requiring masks. Cawthorn views the debate over masks as a move by the government to more strictly control the lives of citizens and smaller communities and urged Macon County Schools to take a stand against it, even if larger governing boards disagree.
“I understand that you may get some backlash, but surely the people in Raleigh can’t arrest all of us,” Cawthorn said. “They can’t come shut all of our schools down.”
In the end, however, the words that swayed the board’s decision the most may have come from local healthcare officials. Macon County Public Health Director Kathy McGaha made it clear that COVID-19 is getting worse in Macon County. There were 21 active cases of COVID-19 in the county when the School Board met less than a month ago, but that number had ballooned to 207 by Monday. The positivity rate has climbed alongside the case numbers, with an alarming 51% of tested individuals showing positive as of Monday. For comparison, the Centers for Disease Control reported a national 9.7% positivity rate between Aug. 6 and Aug. 13.
“This Delta variant is different than the virus that we saw last year,” McGaha said. “We’re seeing younger people actually admitted into the hospital. It’s very concerning as we’re starting the school year.”
None of this was enough to generate a unanimous decision from the board. Some members saw the numbers coming out of the Health Department and couldn’t justify taking chances on lax safety precautions, especially if it could make the difference in whether classrooms stay open.
“When I hear that we can keep our kids in school by them wearing masks, that they will not have to quarantine, that sets very deep with me,” board member Hillary Wilkes said.
Others weren’t convinced that the additional grief a masking mandate would give school system families would be worth the trouble.
“I don’t want a child or anybody to die or get sick from this, but it’s not been proven to me that it’s as deadly as we think it is,” board member Tommy Cabe said.
Cabe would eventually make a motion to proceed without a face covering mandate at the beginning of the school year. That motion failed, with Cabe and board member Melissa Evans voting for it, and Wilkes, Breedlove and board member Carol Arnold voting against it. The next motion was to begin the school year with a face covering requirement on school busses, indoors on school campuses and at sporting events when not directly engaged in competition. That motion passed along the opposite voting lines.
Superintendent Chris Baldwin agreed it was a suboptimal situation, but with all of the data the board had seen, he said they had plenty of reasons to be concerned. He mentioned that the schools already account for too many local cases and quarantines and that gathering everyone in schools will likely worsen matters.
“If school were to open tomorrow, we would need 27 substitutes across the district,” Baldwin said. “We have 11 students [with COVID-19] out of 207 cases. That’s 5% of those cases that are students. I don’t know how we’ll keep schools open… we’ll lose teachers.”
The board members also promised to lift the mandate as soon as they found it viable. To that end, they recessed their meeting and will convene again to re-evaluate the situation on Monday, August 23, which is also the first day of school.