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For the second time this month, a South Bay elementary school sent grade-schoolers home for refusing to wear COVID masks in class.
San Jose’s Alum Rock School District among the few in the Bay Area that still requires students to wear face masks in an effort to reduce spread of COVID-19.
The father of two boys in 6th and 4th grade at Adelante Dual Language Academy school said they find the masks irritating and distracting. The older child, he said, hasn’t been allowed to attend classes since school started last week and his younger brother since Thursday because they wouldn’t wear masks.
“They’ve hated the masks, they’re extremely uncomfortable, it irritates their faces, it’s just a huge distraction for them in school,” said the boys’ father, who did not want to be identified, fearing his wife and sons would be harassed by mask mandate supporters. “My son calls me crying because he’s been sitting in the office for his last two or three classes.”
Alum Rock School District Superintendent Hilaria Bauer said the district offered the boys’ family alternatives — their sons could wear a plastic face shield, or they could enroll in independent study — but that they refused.
“We offered multiple choices to allow the student to be comfortable and respect our mask requirement and stay in school, but the student and the parent were not interested in any other choices,” Bauer said.
The fights over face masks and other pandemic school mandates that had divided school communities over much of the last school year have largely abated as state and local health officials have shifted from mandates to recommendations for wearing the face coverings.
Most districts including San Jose, Oakland and San Francisco unified have adopted that mask-optional policy as classes resumed this month. But there have been exceptions.
Mountain View Whisman School District required masks in class for the start of school, tying its policy to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s COVID-19 community risk level, which recommends indoor masking for everyone when their county is at the highest level.
The father of a 4-year-old transitional kindergartener complained last week his son was repeatedly removed from class for refusing to wear the mask, which he too found irritating. The mask mandate lifted last Thursday after the CDC reported Santa Clara County was no longer at a high risk level, but not before the boy’s dad posted video to social media of his unmasked son being removed from class. The video outraged parent groups opposed to mask mandates and drew rebukes from the district’s superintendent and board members.
In the Alum Rock district, superintendent Bauer insisted they boys weren’t “disciplined” for not wearing masks.
“The parent chose to take his student home,” Bauer said.
The boys’ father sharply disagrees, arguing that face shields would make his children look ridiculous and embarrass them and that independent study is a poor substitute for in-person learning.
The boys’ father said he’s talking to a lawyer with California Parents Union, a group that helps advocate for parents on such issues and represented the father of the Mountain View boy. Tracy Henderson, the group’s president and lawyer, argues schools lack authority to enforce such mask mandates now and have a legal obligation to teach kids in class who aren’t sick.
Though most neighboring districts have declined to mandate face masks, Bauer said Alum Rock’s policy is in response to high virus levels.
“The decision to keep masks indoors was made based on the contagion level data in our community,” Bauer said. “Although we have a few individuals that don’t agree with the mask requirement indoors, the great majority of our parents and staff are very supportive of this measure. This decision is not about what we like, it is about what allows our community to feel safe in our schools.”
Bauer added that she monitors “the incidence of the contagion in our community twice a week in hopes it subsides. Unfortunately, it hasn’t. We have the highest contagion rate in the county.”
Though Santa Clara County is in the CDC’s medium community risk level, which reflects the disease burden on the local health care system, transmission rates remain high, as they are for more than nine out of 10 counties in the U.S.
Bauer said the attendance rate since the start of school has been 88%, “super low for the beginning of the year,” and that “many of the missing staff and students were reported sick with COVID. That is the data I use to make this kind of decision.”
“I hope and pray that our community in Alum Rock will be able to have fewer levels of contagion and that we can go back to a better normal,” Bauer said. “Until then, my responsibility is to keep supporting safety measures for everyone.”
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