Monongalia County’s school district is making masks optional for its students, teachers and other employees beginning March 3.
Superintendent Eddie Campbell Jr. delivered the news during Tuesday night’s Board of Education meeting.
“We wanted to make sure we were in a good position, numbers-wise,” he said to the overflow (and largely mask-wearing) audience that filed into the BOE meeting room of the district’s central office on South High Street.
Dr. Lee B. Smith, the medical director of the county health department who was also in attendance, said he was comfortable with the decision – as Mon’s active COVID cases are down.
Smith has been consulting with Campbell regularly during the past 700 days (and counting) of the pandemic.
The medical director lauded the county for having one of the lowest infection rates in West Virginia as related to COVID and its variants.
Mon presented with 151 active cases Tuesday, as reported by the state Department of Health and Human Resources and was showing yellow on the agency’s county alert map.
So were neighboring Preston, Marion and Harrison counties in north-central West Virginia.
A total of 23 of the state’s 55 counties presented with green on the map that morning, with none sitting in red.
The call to continue with masking through next week, Deputy Superintendent Donna Talerico said, is as easy – as it is complicated.
Call it the pandemic-dynamic, she said.
More than a few students, she said, might not be willing to do a Happy Dance on the facial covering that’s been part of their wardrobe for the past two years. Younger students, in particular, she said, who might not even fully remember was life in school was like before COVID began acting up in the back row.
There’s also peer pressure, she said – with parents holding the key to the cure.
That’s why she’s urging moms and dads to turn the district’s new policy into lessons of compassion and empathy.
“We want our students to feel safe and comfortable, no matter what decision they make.”
The district’s decision, meanwhile, short-circuited most of the pre-prepared comments of the parents who spoke at the meeting. Many at the microphone generally retooled their remarks in the moment, to thank the BOE for its call.
Masks or no, however, the contagion is still in fashion here.
Another 36 West Virginians were still reported dead of the virus between Monday and Tuesday morning, and another 575 people were still handed positive diagnoses in that same time frame.
The school district meanwhile, will continue stress the other protocols of hand-washing and social-distancing, once masks are optional.
In-school clinics for booster shots are also ongoing through Thursday.
Smith said those three, in particular, should be doctor’s orders – which is why the medical director and former emergency room physician prescribed a succinct directive concerning COVID, near the close of his remarks Tuesday night.
“Our advice: Don’t get it.”
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