Missouri attorney general sues to block mask mandates issued by public school districts
Attorney General Eric Schmitt is seeking to block Missouri school districts from mandating masks for students and teachers as the state continues to struggle with a wave of COVID-19 cases.
Schmitt filed a lawsuit Tuesday against Columbia Public Schools arguing the district’s mandate is “arbitrary and capricious,” a charge he has leveled against mask orders in Kansas City and St. Louis. The class action suit, in Boone County Circuit Court, goes beyond the local district, however, and asks the court to strike down district mask directives statewide.
The lawsuit marks an extraordinary escalation in the war against mask rules being waged by the Republican attorney general and U.S. Senate candidate. Schmitt has already sued Kansas City, Jackson County and other localities, but in filing a class action suit, he is effectively taking the legal fight to dozens of school districts.
Most districts in the immediate Kansas City region are mandating masks for everyone this fall. On the outskirts of the metro, such as in Cass County, some smaller districts have kept them optional. On the Kansas side in Johnson County, districts are requiring everyone to wear masks, except for Spring Hill, which is requiring them only for younger students.
Outside of vaccination, public health experts have promoted masks as the single most important protection against COVID-19. Among health authorities, they are widely seen as a reasonable, modest step to help cut transmission of the virus while keeping public spaces open. Masks are also favored in school settings because students under 12 are not currently eligible to be vaccinated.
But Schmitt has painted mandates as an attack on freedom and individual choice.
“We filed this suit today because we fundamentally don’t believe in forced masking, rather that parents and families should have the power to make decisions on masks, based on science and facts,” Schmitt said in a statement. “I am committed to fighting back against this kind of government overreach. Americans are free people, not subjects.”
Columbia Public Schools spokeswoman Michelle Baumstark said the district was “extremely disappointed” to learn of the attorney general’s litigation and noted that numerous other districts across the state and nation had made the same decision to require masks to protect the safety of students, teachers and staff.
The decision to require masks is not a forever decision. It is something currently necessary to keep our scholars safely learning in our schools. The health and safety of Missouri citizens, especially its youngest citizens, should always be the first priority of our great state’s elected leadership,” Baumstark said in a statement.
“The decision to file suit against a public school district after a local decision is made in the interest of safety and keeping students in school will waste taxpayer dollars and resources, which are better spent investing in our students,” the statement says. “Columbia Public Schools intends to aggressively defend its decision to keep its community and its scholars safe.”
Kansas City Public Schools board chair Nate Hogan declined to comment. Officials in other districts didn’t immediately comment.
“It’s clear that the attorney general is doing all he can to get his name in the press to run for U.S. Senate at the expense of public health and kids being safe as they return back to school,” Kansas City Public Schools board member Manny Abarca said.
Abarca said he doesn’t believe the lawsuit has any real legal basis and said Schmitt was abusing the authority of his office to score political points.
The attorney general’s lawsuit contends children are at significantly lower risk of serious illness due to COVID-19 and generally don’t spread the virus. The World Health Organization said in September 2020 that fatalities among children under 18 are lower than in other age groups, but as the highly-contagious delta variant spreads through the United States, more children are falling ill.
While pediatric COVID-19 hospitalization rates are lower than those for adults, they have surged in recent weeks, reaching 0.41 per 100,000 children ages 0 to 17, compared with 0.31 per 100,000, the previous high set in mid-January, according to an Aug. 13 report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Schmitt is among a growing number of Republican officeholders — often governors — across the country fighting mask orders, including in schools. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has threatened to withhold pay for school superintendents or school board members who are planning to require masks. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott in May issued an order banning schools from issuing such rules.
The lawsuit comes after President Joe Biden last week announced a memorandum instructing the U.S. Department of Education to explore possible legal action against state officials who seek to block local school districts from enforcing mask requirements.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki called out Schmitt’s action Tuesday.
“We’ve seen, including recently I think today or yesterday in Missouri, additional steps taken that in our view put more kids at risk. The president thinks that’s completely unacceptable,” Psaki said.
She added that Biden has directed Education Secretary Miguel Cardona “to use all his authority to help those school districts doing the right thing to ensure every one of their students has access to a fundamental right of safe in-person learning.”
Responding to Psaki, Schmitt said on Twitter that he “won’t let Washington dictate what we do in Missouri.”
Schmitt’s lawsuit attributes an array of harmful consequences to mask wearing by students, including headaches, impaired learning, fatigue and “less happiness.” Several of the claims stem from an October 2020 survey of thousands of German parents, who reported observations about their children to a website.
An abstract of the survey results, published in English, cautions that a bias “with respect to the preferential documentation of particularly severely affected children or persons who are fundamentally critical of protective measures cannot be ruled out.”
Natasha Burgert, an Overland Park pediatrician, said Schmitt was cherry-picking weak evidence instead of using current data reflecting the severity of the delta wave.
“Specifically, we know the Delta variant is more contagious and transmissible, children do spread the virus to each other and throughout the home, face masks are one cheap and easy layer of successful disease mitigation strategy, and there is no evidence that mask wearing has negative effects on child development,” Burgert wrote in an email.
Burgert said that both as a parent and a doctor, she’s thankful the death rate in children from the virus has been low. Still, she noted that COVID-19 was the 9th-leading cause of death in children in 2020, before the current delta surge.
“Minimizing the loss of life years to a stark percentage is unfathomable to anyone who cares for the future of our State,” she wrote. “And this percentage does not include the children who suffer — and will continue to suffer — the long-term effects of this COVID illness. Death is not the only outcome.”
The American Academy of Pediatrics and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have both urged universal masking for schoolchildren this fall. In addition to preventing infection of students and teachers, health officials have recommended masking in schools in hopes of preventing community transmission of the virus.
“We also know now we know we’re dealing with a much more transmissible virus, and we have, of course, seen outbreaks where children are transmitting to other children,” CDC Director Rochelle Walensky said Tuesday. “So, and certainly with the Delta variant that we know that that transmissibility is increased somewhere around two fold. So the reason to mask in schools is not necessarily only to protect our adults but also to protect our children from transmissibility from one child to another.”
The Associated Press contributed reporting.
This story was originally published August 24, 2021 at 12:29 PM.
