What are they thinking? Kansas City area school districts lower masks as COVID is up
COVID-19 cases are going up and masks are coming down in Kansas City. Ending school mask mandates right now makes zero sense unless officials are making political rather than public health decisions — which they are.
Olathe and Blue Valley districts foolishly removed mask mandates in secondary schools right after Thanksgiving family gatherings. As could’ve easily been predicted, the Kansas City Health Department reports a 90% spike in cases, from 714 to 1,357 in the week after the holiday.
Those Olathe and Blue Valley mandates also expired at a time when the positivity rate in Johnson County has soared to 11.4%. Not surprisingly, Olathe schools saw a record 184 new cases, while Blue Valley recorded 108.
Alarmingly, the highest case rates, according to Kansas City Public Health Statistician Dr. Alex Francisco, are among 15-to-19-year-olds, 10-to-14-year-olds and those 40 to 44.
School officials should’ve seen this coming, with the new COVID-19 omicron variant and the Thanksgiving holiday. Surely they can now see the writing on the blackboard, or at least the numbers on area COVID dashboards: It was simply too soon to lift mask mandates in schools.
It would have done absolutely no harm, and might have prevented many of these cases, had area school administrators and board members done what the Shawnee Mission school board and the Kansas City Council did earlier this month — which is to extend their school mask mandates through the end of December.
In fact, even that is unlikely to be long enough. With community spread still so high and the omicron variant newly arrived, the Christmas holiday is certain to produce yet another spike in January.
Blue Valley claims the two factors driving its COVID-19 policies are the safety of staff and students, and keeping students in school. Eliminating mask mandates the Monday after Thanksgiving does the exact opposite. It puts students and staff at heightened risk, and makes it less likely they can remain in school.
That’s not just common sense. It’s scientific fact. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention this fall released three studies proving that schools without universal masking are more likely to experience COVID-19 outbreaks. In addition, the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services concluded in analysis — performed at the behest of Gov. Mike Parson — that mask mandates slowed the spread and undoubtedly saved lives in the state during the worst of the COVID-19 delta variant surge.
Scandalously, that lifesaving, policy-altering information was never made public until an investigation by the Missouri Independent news site. Why? You know why. Because it was embarrassing to a Parson administration that has fought masks at every turn. Yet, it is precisely the kind of information that elected officials at every level of government desperately need, in order to convince their still-skeptical constituents that mask mandates are necessary particularly, but not exclusively, in schools.
Even without such political backing, school boards and administrators should have the courage of their convictions to follow the science — which is right under our children’s noses.