These Kansas City area school districts to drop mask mandates after Missouri AG order
Two Kansas City area districts have decided to drop their mask mandates and ease up on quarantine rules after Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt threatened legal action against them.
While some districts have so far defended their right to enforce such COVID-19 mitigation policies, the school boards in both the Smithville and Kearney districts in Clay County agreed Monday to drop their mask requirements.
Schmitt had sent letters to dozens of districts demanding they cease and desist from enforcing COVID-19 mitigation policies. Schmitt, who is running for U.S. Senate, has encouraged parents to report to his office any districts that continue to enforce the restrictions.
Both Northland boards met in special session to discuss last month’s Cole County court ruling that stripped local health authorities of their powers to issue disease-control measures. The attorney general is calling the school districts’ mitigation measures illegal in the wake of that ruling.
The Smithville school district will make masks optional in early January, when students return from winter break. And Kearney will drop its mask mandate on Dec. 23, officials decided. Masks will continue to be mandated on school buses, per a federal requirement.
Officials said that several factors contributed to the decision to roll back restrictions, and that they were already considering changes before the court ruling.
Both districts also will ease up on their quarantine rules, but not eliminate them. Students and staff who are showing symptoms of COVID-19 or who test positive for the virus will be excluded from school.
If students and staff are identified as a close contact to someone with COVID-19, they will not be excluded from school as long as they do not have symptoms, or are fully vaccinated, or had COVID-19 within the previous three months.
Asymptomatic and unvaccinated individuals previously didn’t have to quarantine as long as everyone involved was wearing masks properly, per health official guidance. But now those rules will apply regardless of whether masks were worn.
“I think in order for this to work starting in January, we are going to need to be able to trust our families to keep their kids home if they’re sick or if they think they might be sick,” Smithville school board member Sarah Lamer said. “We’re letting up on our guidelines quite a bit. We’ve got to be able to trust each other, and that we’re going to be doing the right thing for our families and our school district.”
Smithville officials said that they will now rely on the Clay County health department to do contact tracing, although officials in both districts said they will continue to identify close contacts to notify families when their child has been exposed to someone who is ill.
“Public health authorities provided an exception that said if everyone is wearing a mask, then they would not qualify as a close contact. That matched up well with our goal to have in-person classes,” Kearney Superintendent Todd White said. “What has changed in that timeframe is the ability of a local health agency to mandate a quarantine.”
A growing number of local health departments, including Cass County, are ending their COVID-19 response after Schmitt demanded the agencies comply with the ruling.
The Cole County judge wrote that a decades-old state health department administrative rule, allowing it to delegate disease-control authority to local health departments, was unconstitutional because it gave rule-making powers to unelected officials.
Late Monday afternoon, Jackson and St. Louis counties filed a legal action aimed at overturning that court order, accusing Schmitt of creating “chaos” across the state with what they call a “campaign of litigation terror.”
Several Kansas City area school officials say Schmitt does not have the authority to enforce his demand on districts because their rules were created by locally elected officials.
Joseph Hatley, an attorney for the Lee’s Summit district, for example, wrote a scathing reply to Schmitt’s cease and desist letter, saying the attorney general had no legal authority to order districts to drop their mitigation measures.
“Your invocation of ‘rights’ untethered to an obligation to exercise them responsibly invites lawlessness. This is especially pernicious coming from your office, because of the outsized weight some may attach to your opinions,” Hatley wrote to Schmitt.
Schmitt replied, ordering the district to “come into compliance with state law immediately,” saying that Hatley had a “constitutionally problematic reading of state law.”
Schmitt’s office has said the court’s ruling still applies to all schools’ COVID-19 rules, regardless of who enacted them.
Kansas City Public Schools, as well as the North Kansas City, Park Hill, Liberty districts and others had yet to release an official response on Monday, although they previously defended their health orders and said they would remain in place.
Meanwhile, several area districts are reporting record numbers of COVID-19 cases this school year, as infections among children rise and vaccinations lag. Health officials have urged districts to continue requiring masks, especially as holiday gatherings are expected to lead to more cases.
The Kearney district reported that as of Dec. 9, 36 of its students were isolated due to COVID-19. Smithville reported 14 new cases last week.
The Star’s Jeanne Kuang contributed reporting.
This story was originally published December 13, 2021 at 8:45 PM.
