Masks in school a hot issue for parents, teachers
Alissa Hill, of Bethany, says her daughter Mackenzie misses her friends at school.
But because of mask requirements in the governor’s plan, Hill won’t decide until mid-August when a definite local plan is in place whether to send her daughter to first grade at Bethany Community School.
Hill believes in masks to help stop the spread of COVID-19, but since she gets hot and uncomfortable in a mask after 30 minutes, she can’t imagine how it will work with young students like Mackenzie and doesn’t want her in a mask all day.
The need for children to be in a mask all day “makes me wonder whether it’s safe at all” to return to school, Hill said. She has no problem with masks while entering and leaving or for bathroom breaks.
“It’s stressful not knowing what will happen,” Hill said. “She wants to be with her friends.”
And what might the mask situation look like in a lower grade when kids are sneezing and coughing during cold and flu season?
“It’s going to get crazy,” Hill said.
While there are many components to Gov. Ned Lamont’s plan to reopen schools — social distancing,
eating lunch in place, not mixing with students in other classrooms — parents across the state appear focused on the mask issue. The governor’s plan calls for students and staff to wear masks.
Commissioner of Education Miguel Cardona has called the reopening plan a road map, allowing districts some flexibility to create reopening plans that most effectively will serve their individual communities.
Many districts already have formed committees to map out their plans. All school districts must submit a plan by July 24, addressing how they will carry out the reopening requirements. Under Lamont’s plan, parents can choose to continue distance learning and those children with certain medical issues can be exempt from face masks.
While there are many looming questions about what schools will look like in fall, many parents in Facebook groups and in the community appear most worried about what masks will look like in classrooms, especially with young children, speculating the masks will become sling shots, tissues for blowing noses, toys that will dropped and put back on without washing, as well traded and shared.
Nicole Meyer of Stratford, whose 4-year-old daughter is supposed to enter kindergarten, has concerns.
“I 100 percent think the mask requirement is ridiculous,” Meyer said in an email. “I could bet money on it that my daughter will be touching that mask all day and at least once a day that mask is going to fall on the floor and then they expect my daughter to wear a germ-infested mask all day long it’s going to do more harm than good. Just go back to school normal with frequent hand washing.”
But some parents are quick to speak out in favor of masks, such as mom and teacher Jeanne Baldwin of Middletown, who believes students should be required to wear masks throughout the school day. She has two children, ages 15 and 17, in high school.
“I fear that any of us can bring it (COVID-19) home and then we will all need to be quarantined,” she said. Baldwin said she is worried about how the schools will enforce the mask protocol, “especially in areas where there is not room for 6 feet apart.”
New practices
Many are asking: How will already overworked teachers do with both teaching academics and monitor mask wearing?
Teachers are raising the issue of wearing masks all day in schools where air quality already is poor and they want specific policies to avoid problems.
Medical and academic experts, who are in favor of masks from a scientific perspective, say there likely will be issues with compliance, but much can be done to prepare before school starts.
Alvin Tran, assistant professor of public health at the University of New Haven, said having students wear masks in school is the way to go because the virus is spread through respiratory droplets.
“The more kids wear masks, the safer schools will be,” Tran said. “Masks can be uncomfortable, but it’s a new norm.”
He said it will be a “challenge,” like it was years ago conditioning kids to wear bicycle helmets. He also noted that in many Asian cultures masks are the norm and people make a “fashion statement” through them. He said many professions in the
United States are known for wearing masks — doctors, firefighters — and masks can be promoted through that approach.
Lessons begin at home
While teachers would bear the brunt of some of the education around masks, as well as the enforcement, there’s no better place to start than at home, said Nurse Practitioner Charles Wetmore, owner of Pediatric House Call Solutions, a mobile pediatric service based in Milford, but which serves a wide area.
Wetmore, who is thrilled that in-school education once again will be an option, said it all starts at home and that children and teens can start practicing wearing masks now, while they’re watching television or playing video games.
“One of the things that’s essential is the parent has to project the image this (masks in school) is a good idea,” even if they have to pretend, Wetmore said. “If parents think it’s stupid the kid isn’t going to do it.”
Ideas for getting buy-in from kids, Wetmore said, include having the child pick out masks, decorate masks, or taking funny pictures of the kids in masks.
He said it even can be done in groups of neighborhood kids or as a family project.
Kids in sixth grade and up will have an easier time adjusting to masks, he and other experts said, because they can be swayed by lessons they are wearing them for the greater good of others — the vulnerable population — in their family and society.
Kristen Record, a physics teacher at Bunnell High School in Stratford, said she worries that as a high school teacher she will become part of the “maskwearing police,” and she hopes the administration will have a “unified message” for students and staff.
While Record said she worries about compliance, she knows a lot of her students are by now used to wearing face masks at their jobs.
“I think one of my disappointments with the state plan is that it leaves a lot of unanswered questions,” such as a lack of commitment to funding for more teachers as class sizes will change with social distancing and what PPE the district is responsible for.
She said some schools don’t have air-conditioning or have poor air quality and that could affect maskwearing.
Wetmore said he’s noticed in his practice a huge uptick in outbursts from kids who don’t usually have them and even in teens cutting themselves.
“Getting these kids back to school is going to solve a lot of these problems,” Wetmore said. “School does a lot more than teach you academic stuff.”
Judy Falaro, assistant professor of education at Quinnipiac University, agrees. “It’s going to be a challenge to get kids to wear them, especially if they don’t wear them at home.”
Falaro said younger children may refuse to wear them “in silly ways,” such as playing with the masks.
In the higher grades it may be easier by emphasizing “we’re all in this together,” she said.
“Whenever you can change things around so the receiver feels they’re part of the solution,” that’s empowerment, Falaro said.
“If you can explain it to the child and put it into a good light,” such as, “we all missed coming to school,” that could work too, she said.
Eyes only
Experts wonder what the all-important social cues that might be missed through non-transparent masks will do to learning.
As for instruction, Falaro sees challenges if students and teachers aren’t wearing clear masks.
She said many important interactions between students and teachers involve reading facial expressions and body language. Teachers can see by their students’ faces whether they’re “getting” the lesson or if they need to change the approach, Falaro said.
Young students often get reinforcement from watching a teacher’s smiles or other facial expressions, Falaro said.
But Hill’s mother, Elisabeth Reilly, a nurse practitioner who manages and practices in a school-based clinic at Clinton Avenue School in New Haven, said she’s in favor of masks because “masks are the number one way to keep COVID-19 from the mucous membranes of the face.”
“Are you ready to risk the death of a child” because a mask wasn’t worn, Reilly asked rhetorically.
Reilly said if parents wear masks, kids will “pick it up in a heartbeat.”
One of what might be many difficult-to-predict mask issues could be children with anxiety perceiving that they can’t breathe, Reilly said.
She, too, worries about teachers having too much of a burden.
“The teachers were very stressed before COVID. It’s a stressful climate to be in education,” she said. “Our teachers have 20 kids in a room, they’re trying to teach and now they have to teach ‘don’t wipe your nose with that.’”
She said parents are also quite stressed not only by the pandemic, but with outside forces such as terrorism and controversial politics.
“This is like a mushroom cloud,” Reilly said.
Special education
Stephanie Wazner, a special education teacher at Cooperative Educational Services in Trumbull and president of her local union, said she’s now virtually prepping her 18- to 20-year-old transition students on the wearing of face masks and possibly other PPE.
Wazner said that as both a teacher and union leader she sees “a lot of holes in the state plan.”
She said often there are behavior problems in the special needs population and sensory issues that might make a mask touching a face lead to escalated behaviors.
“My concern is, what if the kids don’t comply?” she said.
She said it’s likely the students will end up in masks, smocks and face guards.
She said staff uses restraints on students when they are dysregulated — and they can’t have their face or mouth covered during restraint because one has to see those structures to make sure a student isn’t in distress.
“Our union position is there has to be a policy — you can’t be wishy-washy on this — you want to protect everybody,” she said. “We’re going to have these wonderful, teachable moments, but what happens when it all breaks down?”
She said many of the special needs students, some with autism, or speech or hearing issues, need to see faces to do their best work in communicating and masks will be a barrier. And while some are hearing over and over about social distancing at 6 feet — even able to say it themselves — many really have no concept of what 6 feet of distance is, Wazner said.
She said the state’s plan, as it stands, appears as if it was created by someone who doesn’t know what schools are like.
Wazner thinks teachers should be offered more protections and said teaching and forcing mask and PPE rules is “going to take a piece away from teaching.”
“Now we have to scramble. … We’re going to put on another hat,” Wazner said.
Around the state
Cat Logan of Torrington said in an email that her daughter, 11, will be entering sixth grade and they are prepared for her to wear a mask during the day.
“However, I firmly believe that if they plan on social distancing the desks in the classroom the kids should be allowed to remove them (masks) while they are seated at their desks,” Logan said. “They should be required to wear them on the bus, hallways and any community space. Also due to cold season arriving shortly after the beginning of the school year no one should be required to wear a mask with a stuffy or runny nose.”
Logan said distance learning should be set up in a way where children will be able to follow the classroom schedule at home anytime, negating excessive absences, whether it be full time or just a few sick days.
“If they are too ill to take part in the distance learning that should be the only days counted as an absence. Masks will make minor illnesses into a required sick day and this must be taken into consideration,” she wrote.
Michele Wasikowski of Woodbridge has a 15-yearold son in a private school who will be a junior and a 19-year-old son in a special education transition program, and doesn’t want her sons wearing masks all day.
“I believe students should only have to wear them entering into school, and in the hallways, once they are in their classrooms and at their desks I think they should be able to keep them off,” she said. “I think teachers should be allowed to choose as well and if they want PPE, a clear face shield seems to make more sense so students can see and hear them clearly.”
Wasikowski, who is adamantly in favor of resuming in-person learning in the fall, said in an email that if the hospitalizations and death numbers in the state are decreasing, “I don’t see why we can’t consider going back to school without restrictions since science shows children rarely get the virus. The virus is not going away anytime soon, so we need to work around it and be creative.”
Lisa Butler of Stamford is fine with masks, she said — her priority is to see school reopen fully for her two teens at Stamford High School, entering 10th and 12th grade.
“I think it might be hard for some kids to keep the mask on all day, but they have to start somewhere,” she said. “My priority is getting them back into the classroom so they can learn, socialize and play their fall sports. I worry more about how the school with keep up with up cleaning protocols, but I am prepared to send me two children in with plenty of hand sanitizer.”
Alyssa Seara, 21, of Stratford, a nursing student, said she believes “masks should be 100 percent required everywhere,” but she doesn’t expect it to work in classrooms because even she can’t keep her hands off the mask.
“I don’t think classrooms and masks are going to do very well together regardless of age,” Seara said. “I’m in college and play with my mask all the time it’s frustrating and disturbing and it won’t be safe to have children in face masks all day in class.”