In a continuation from their meeting last week, the Macon County Board of Education reevaluated their policy on requiring face coverings in schools, but they came to the same conclusion as before.
Because this meeting was a continued session after last week’s meeting was recessed, the board was not required to hold an additional public comment period. Instead, this was the board’s chance to sit down with local health professionals and set the record straight on the science of masks. Dozens of speakers at last week’s meeting offered competing sources of information that came to very different conclusions about the safety and efficacy of cloth face coverings, but Public Health Director Kathy McGaha says the evidence points to a clear consensus.
“We know that mask wearing, for many diseases that we’ve had, has prevented disease transmission for respiratory transmissible diseases,” McGaha said. “There’s plenty of misinformation that is out there. We try to promote that people go to reputable sites that we know we can count on.”
Public health resources such as the Centers for Disease Control and the World Health Organization suggest mask wearing as an imperfect but important step towards preventing the spread of disease. Studies on outbreaks of COVID-19 over the last few weeks support the idea that areas where more people are vaccinated and masked are better protected from the worst effects of the pandemic. Macon County, like most of North Carolina, is in the red zone for COVID-19 risk. McGaha said there are currently only 27 open ICU beds across all hospitals in Western North Carolina, and while none of Macon County’s hospitalized COVID-19 patients are children, kids are starting to account for more local cases.
“We’ve seen an increase in the number of children 0-17 that are testing positive out of our cases,” McGaha said. “Last week, we were at around 11%. This week, we’re up to 16.3%.”
Last school year, 224 students and 117 staff members tested positive for COVID-19. Intensive prevention measures limited the number of students infected at school. Contact tracing only found 27 transmissions at schools last year, although it’s possible that there were a few more they didn’t find.
“When you’re contact tracing, there’s no definite as to where a transmission took place,” lead school nurse Julie Rogers said. “There may be more, but that’s what we know for sure.”
There have also been some new real-world warnings to play it safe since last week. Haywood County Schools began the school year without mandatory masks last week, but after two days of school filled with new isolations and quarantines, the school board called an emergency meeting to adopt a mask mandate.
Macon County Superintendent Chris Baldwin feels the school system bears an unfair amount of responsibility for preventing the spread of disease (other county agencies aren’t mandating masks despite public health guidance) but said the mask mandate was an important measure for keeping kids in school.
“Our main goal is to keep schools open,” Baldwin said. “We don’t want to go to a virtual scenario. It’s not in the best interest of our students, and I don’t think it’s in the best interest of our community.”
No motion was offered to reverse the mask mandate decision from last week, which requires face coverings inside school buildings, on school busses and at sporting events when not actively participating. Board member Tommy Cabe chose not to force the issue, but he stood by his previous stance that masking should be a choice and said that many of his constituents were unhappy with the mandate.
“Of all the people I’ve talked to, one or two have liked the idea, but most of them don’t,” Cabe said.
McGaha said she could recommend that the schools make masks optional when the CDC moves Macon County to at least the yellow tier on its COVID-19 spread map, which requires that a community experience less than 50 new cases per 100,000 people over the past seven days. Right now, Macon County is in the red zone, indicating more than 100 new cases per 100,000 people in the last seven days. Based on Macon County’s population in the latest US Census, getting to the yellow tier would require no more than 18 new cases in seven days. As of Sunday morning, Macon County has had 142 new cases in the last seven days per CDC data tracking.
The Macon County Board of Education will meet again at 6 p.m. on Monday, Sept. 27 at the Macon County Schools Central Office.