Educators grapple with how to enforce California mask mandate
LOS ANGELES — California will embrace one of the nation’s most stringent school mask mandates next fall, but is leaving enforcement to local educators, who are proposing a range of consequences for students who don’t follow the rule — such as issuing warnings or barring them from campus. Some even suggested they may ignore the order because they don’t believe it’s needed.
The state’s hands-off position on enforcement comes after several days of rapidly evolving policy announcements at the state and federal level.
The movement was especially swift on Monday, when state officials mandated that students who refuse to wear masks be prohibited from campus. Hours later, the enforcement rule was deleted, and the office of Gov. Gavin Newsom said enforcement would be left to local education officials.
School administrators must now contemplate how to keep students and staff in line, especially as vaccinated people no longer have to wear masks in many other situations.
In Lodi Unified, a school will contact a student’s parent or guardian if the student refuses to wear a mask, district spokesperson Chelsea Vongehr said on Wednesday.
“The school will follow normal procedures with regard to students following on-campus rules,” Vongehr wrote in an email.
Adding to concerns are increasing coronavirus infections from the Delta variant — and the knowledge that students younger than 12 are ineligible for vaccines and not all older students are getting inoculated.
The Los Angeles Unified School District intends to enforce a mask mandate — in the spring, administrators did not hesitate to send home students who refused to submit to a coronavirus test. But in Glenn County, in Northern California, Hamilton Unified Supt. Jeremy Powell said he is opposed to the rule.
“As a public educational leader, I can not continue enforcing policies not only I do not support but rather feel are bordering on child abuse,” Powell wrote Monday on Twitter.
“The school will contact the student’s parent/guardi an. The school will follow normal procedures with regard to students following oncampus rules.”
LUSD’S CHELSEA VONGEHR ON HOW SCHOOLS WILL ENFORCE MASK MANDATE
On Tuesday, Newsom suggested he was personally involved in the rapid removal of the language about barring students without masks from campus.
“All I did was clarify the local responsibility, which is consistent with all the prior rule-making that’s been in effect going back to last year,” the governor said at a Los Angeles appearance. The lack of specifics on enforcement aligns with what the state was doing “last year and last quarter,” he added. “As it relates to enforcement, it’s always been the local responsibility.”
The underlying goal of California’s rule, he emphasized, is to get all students back on campus for full-time, inperson instruction: “We made that crystal clear.”
Despite the abrupt change, the mandate puts California among the states with the strictest mask policies.