If you want to show your face at a Monongalia County high school graduation ceremony today, you’ll have to cover your face — before you can even get through the gate.
That was the word Wednesday from county schools superintendent Eddie Campbell Jr.
Face masks are now mandatory, he said, for everyone who will be involved with today’s 6 p.m. commencement exercises at Morgantown High School, University High and Clay-Battelle.
And mandatory, the school chief said, means just that.
Facial coverings were originally going to be optional for the limited guest list.
Each participating senior has been allocated two tickets for family or friends attending ceremonies on the football field at each school.
The superintendent, though, had to attend to the matter of a senior trip to Myrtle Beach, which changed some things.
A group of about 30 new graduates of UHS and MHS made a post-school pilgrimage to the popular vacation spot in South Carolina.
Which, in turn, meant the district could no longer grade on a pandemic curve, as it were.
That’s because Myrtle Beach is being traced to at least one resurgence of COVID-19 cases in neighboring Preston County.
As of Wednesday, 52 positive diagnoses have been noted in Preston.
Health officials there are monitoring 150 other people who also may be at risk, because of one vacation trip.
When Campbell heard that Mon students had also traveled to Myrtle Beach in recent days, he immediately called Dr. Lee B. Smith, at the Monongalia County Health Department.
Smith is executive director of the department and also serves as the county’s health officer.
“I wanted to report what I was hearing, for one thing,” Campbell said.
“And I wanted to see if the department could offer any additional guidance.”
The school district and health department had already worked together in gridding out the graduation ceremonies.
Both entities have also been talking since January, as the pandemic was looming.
Mon Schools had already laid in big supplies of hand sanitizers for use at all three schools during the ceremonies today.
That includes 3,000 face masks, available for distribution at each ceremony.
Masks were already mandatory for seniors, who will sport theirs done out with the logo of their schools.
Smith said Wednesday he appreciates the work.
“Monongalia County Health Department and Ed Campbell, along with the county commission, have devised a plan that we feel is the most reasonable, given current circumstances, that would allow graduation to move forward,” he said.
“This is based not only on social distancing, hand washing and mask wearing,” he continued, “but also on a reliance of the public to stay home if they have symptoms — or if they have a concern of potential exposure following recent travel.”
Meanwhile, a graduation rehearsal set Wednesday at UHS was also scrapped, at Campbell’s direction.
“University was the only school that had planned a rehearsal anyway,” he said. “That wasn’t a necessity.”
Gov. Jim Justice, meanwhile, said Wednesday during a COVID-19 briefing he wants all West Virginians to consider face masks a necessity — even if he prefers to not make it mandatory.
“It’s almost impossible to enforce,” he said.
“If we stay voluntary, we’re so much better off, because we’re pulling the rope together.”
The governor also echoed Dr. Clay Marsh, the WVU vice president of health sciences and his former COVID-19 czar, who said face masks are cut from amazing cloth, when it comes to infectious diseases.
If 80% of West Virginians began regularly wearing masks, Marsh said, that number would make for enough of a threshold to effectively avoid resurgences of the coronavirus.
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