No more masks required at school. Manatee County School Board ends mask mandate

The School Board of Manatee County voted unanimously to end a district-wide mask policy on Friday morning, a major step toward opening under “pre-COVID” operations in August.

Manatee’s five School Board members indicated on Tuesday that masks would soon be voluntary for students and district employees. However, after publishing a notice of intent to change the policy on April 30, the board was forced to follow its own bylaws and wait 28 days after publication to make a change.

That moment came on Friday morning. Shortly after casting the unanimous vote, board members Mary Foreman and Scott Hopes removed their masks, while Vice-Chair James Golden and Chairman Charlie Kennedy kept theirs on.

“Some people are celebrating today and other people still need that protection,” Kennedy said, urging people to respect personal choice.

“We still have a virus in the community,” Hopes said.

On Thursday, one day before the vote, students completed their last day of school. The latest board decision will affect summer classes and the upcoming 2021-22 school year.

Masks will also be optional during high school graduations at LECOM Park, the school district confirmed in a news release on Friday.

“When the mask mandate was initiated in August, I firmly believe it was the right thing to do, and I think the mandate helped us complete this school year without missing a single day of school,” Superintendent Cynthia Saunders said in a prepared statement.

“To me, the decision today represents the closing of one chapter, and the beginning of a new one,” she said.

The board vote followed mounting pressure from state leaders and Manatee County residents. Florida’s education commissioner, Richard Corcoran, sent a memo to all superintendents in early April, urging them to make masks optional in the upcoming school year.

And over the past two weeks, dozens of people packed the School Board chambers and demanded an end to the mask policy. Some of the protesters had children in local schools and others described themselves as taxpayers who opposed masks.

There were no vaccines when the School Board added a mask requirement to its existing policy on disease prevention last year, Golden noted.

The mandate was meant to save lives, yet some anti-mask protesters hurled insults at board members during recent meetings, he said, sharing his disappointment before moving forward with the vote to remove that section from the policy.

“I, for one, am not buying that it had anything to do with masks,” Golden said of the mask debate, which has become highly political and oftentimes personal. “It has a lot to do with how we define our humanity, and many of us define it in an exclusionary way.”

In turn, Kennedy said past weeks were the “roughest public meetings any of us have ever been or will be a part of.”

Friday’s decision was made easier by recent vaccination efforts, along with changes to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines.

Fully vaccinated people can now forgo a mask in most settings, the CDC reported. And in Manatee County, just over 45% of people received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine as of Thursday.

While it was a hopeful sign, that number was still short of the benchmark for herd immunity, which ranges from 70% to 85% of people being vaccinated, according to estimates from Dr. Anthony Fauci, an adviser to President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump.

The lack of vaccines for young students, Kennedy said, was still a concern. Of the three vaccines available in the U.S. as of Friday morning, Pfizer was the only vaccine available to children as young as 12.

“We are leaving a certain number of kids vulnerable with repealing the mask mandate,” he said. “That’s our youngest who are, at least as of today, 11 and under. Even if they want a vaccine, they have no access.”

In response, Hopes said that students and families would still have the option to wear a mask, providing them with a valuable layer of protection. The other layer was a growing number of people who were being vaccinated in Manatee and throughout the state.

He also said the School Board would know by August — after months of summer classes and programs — whether schools could safely move forward without the stringent safety measures of the past year.

“I’m confident that we’ll have a number of researchers, as well as our own health department, monitoring what occurs after this date,” said Hopes, who holds a master of public health degree in epidemiology.

This story was originally published May 28, 2021 at 10:25 AM.