School board considers requesting mask mandate variance

The Hot Springs County School District will wait until after receiving the results of a survey of certified and classified staff on March 30 before its board of trustees votes on whether to apply for a mask variance from Wyoming Public Health.

Board Chair Jennifer Axtell opened the discussion on March 18 by noting the other districts who’d been granted such variance after applying for it, and both she and Board Trustee Will Farrell noted the amount of correspondence they’d received from the public on the issue, which had prompted Axtell to add it to the meeting’s agenda.

Farrell expressed concerns that inconsistent enforcement of masking standards was serving as a distraction to students while failing to accomplish its ostensible goal, as he cited certain students whose parents have signed letters exempting them from wearing masks, while other students’ parents have not, creating an additional complication for school staff to navigate.

Farrell and Axtell were among the board members who pointed out that, if the district were granted a mask variance, it would not equate to anyone being discouraged from wearing masks at school.

Axtell cited the Weston County School District’s letter to Wyoming Public Health, noting that its district had been granted a variance due to that county’s numbers of positive COVID cases over the course of a 14-day period.

“We’re right within that number,” Axtell said. “Two has been the most we’ve had for more than 14 days.”

Board Vice Chair Sherman Skelton acknowledged the importance of the discussion to the community, as well as the need to ask, “What are the criteria and metrics that are being used to measure when we can return to normalcy?”

At the same time, Skelton expressed a number of reservations about moving toward such a mask variance, starting with his preference that “professionals in the field,” rather than school board members, should be making “evidence-based” evaluations on whether the district would qualify for such a variance, much less how that prospective variance should be drafted.

Skelton was likewise concerned with students and staff who may choose not to attend school in the event of a mask variance, and suggested that the district “get a pulse” of how comfortable staff members would be with such a measure, all the better to prepare for the implementation of a mask variance.

“We need to have those strategic plans in place, just as we did when we moved into the ‘Start Smart’ plan at the beginning of the year,” Skelton said. “We need to take the same methodical approach when we move out of the plan, and if we took action tonight, I don’t feel like we would have those plans in place, or we would be able to do it as efficiently as we should.”

Axtell noted that a health professional would make the decision whether to grant the Hot Springs County School District’s application for a mask variance, while Superintendent Dustin Hunt pointed out that the school district’s funding shouldn’t be affected, so long as it’s a health official who makes such a decision, and added that he’d already prepared a survey to disseminate among school staff, pending the board’s approval.

Although Hunt voiced his own concerns about how many without masks would be subject to automatic quarantine after having exposed to others who turn out to be COVID-positive, Axtell countered that this vulnerable number would be minus those who had either tested positive for COVID earlier in the year or already received their vaccine shots.

Hunt and Axtell also debated prospective accommodations for students who might not wish to attend school with a mask variance in place, since Hunt speculated that the accommodations are vaguely defined enough that, “if somebody asks for accommodations and you apply for this variance, you’re probably going to have to accommodate them,” while Axtell recalled that students who stayed at home because they didn’t want to wear masks were not offered the accommodation of learning online.

“A mask is absolutely no big deal in my world,” said Board Clerk Nichole Weyer, who estimated that Wyoming schools are at half their regular attendance levels, whether because students are attending classes on alternating days from their peers, attending half-days of school or even divided between those being taught in-person versus online.

Echoing Hunt’s worries about the potential for school-wide quarantines — a precedent already set over the winter holidays — Weyer declared, “It’s not worth it if our kids don’t get to be in school, learning.”

When Board Trustee Rick Engelbrecht asserted that the rights of students and staff who wish to avoid COVID exposure are being overlooked in favor of protecting other students’ freedom not to wear masks, Axtell reiterated that the students and staff concerned with COVID risks may still wear masks and practice social distancing.

“Does a teacher have the right to say, ‘If you want to come up and talk to me, I want you to put a mask on’?” Engelbrecht said. “It’s better if both people wear masks, face-to-face. We’re not looking at both sides.”

“We’re getting into the weeds of whether masks are good or bad, and that’s not a discussion we can have, because we’re not qualified to have it,” Axtell said. “From the beginning, the rules have been set on levels higher than ours. We now have a chance to listen to our constituents and do what they want. It’s the first time we’ve actually been able to take action on anything.”

Although Engelbrecht and fellow Board Trustee Clay Van Antwerp endorsed Skelton’s calls for a survey of school staff on the issue, Engelbrecht also voiced his support for applying for the mask variance.

“I think our district has done a marvelous job dealing with this entire issue,” Van Antwerp said. “I don’t think we’re asking too much to wear a mask.”

Skelton likewise observed “how blessed we’ve been to get to this point,” which was why he saw soliciting the staff’s input as “a way to give back, since our staff has given us so much this year,” a condition that he and Van Antwerp agreed would make them more likely, as board members, to approve applying for a mask variance.

Although Farrell joined the consensus that “staff should have their say,” he also pointed out that, in spite of how many members of the public had contacted him about the mask variance, not one had asked him to vote to retain the school’s mask mandate.

Board Treasurer Joe Martinez spoke of Gov. Mark Gordon’s decisions over the past year, both in enacting and lifting the mask mandate, because they precluded the district’s board of trustees from “acting on our own, as a governing body.”

“I don’t have a problem with applying for a variance,” Martinez said, even as he suggested it would be “prudent” for the district’s administrative staff to look at statistics such as vaccination rates within the county, beyond just the number of currently active COVID cases.

A special meeting of the school board will be held at 5:30 p.m. on March 30 to vote on whether to ask Public Health Officer Dr. Vernon Miller to apply for a mask mandate variance.