Students, staff in Fort Smith to keep masks

Board approves extension of mandate another month

FORT SMITH — Students, staff and visitors in the School District will continue wearing masks in district buildings and vehicles with two or more people well into the fall season.

The School Board voted 4-3 to approve board member Talicia Richardson’s motion to extend the district’s mandatory mask policy 30 days during its meeting Monday.

This time will allow the district to create for the board’s consideration another policy tied to Arkansas Center for Health Improvement data for the School District for a specific timeframe, according to Richardson.

Superintendent Terry Morawski said this could allow a mandatory mask requirement to be “on or off” depending on the rate of covid-19 infection in the community. The Arkansas Center for Health Improvement collects data representing known covid-19 infections per 10,000 residents in a school district over 14 days.

The School Board authorized Morawski to implement a 60-day mask requirement effective immediately Aug. 9. This was followed by the board voting to certify an emergency regulation for school staff to wear masks Aug. 12.

The policy, which would have expired Oct. 8, allowed Morawski to make exceptions to the mask requirement using his discretion and information provided by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Arkansas Department of Health.

Morawski said the district had 464 new positive cases of covid-19 from Aug. 16 to Sept. 26. This included 388 students and 71 staff members who were exposed to covid- 19 outside school. Five students were exposed to it in school while no staff members were affected in this way, he said.

Morawski said Dr. Joe Thompson, president and CEO of the Arkansas Center for Health Improvement, suggested Aug. 5 a school district have no more than 30 new known infections per 10,000 residents for a 14-day period before a mask requirement is removed.

Fort Smith’s new, known infection rate has been well above this, ranging from a low of 61 on Sept. 20 to a high of 93 on Aug. 30.

The Bentonville, Fayetteville, Little Rock and Pulaski County school districts have

mask requirements for their student and staff populations while the Cabot and Rogers school districts only have them for their pre-K through sixth- graders and staff, Morawski said. Masks are optional in the Rogers School District in seventh grade and above.

In the River Valley, the Greenwood School District has a mask requirement whereas the Alma and Van Buren districts don’t, according to Morawski. Greenwood is also an example of a district using Arkansas Center for Health Improvement data, with it deciding to remove a mask requirement when its new known infection rate reaches less than 20 per 10,000 residents over 14 days.

School Board members Ryan Gray, Susan McFerran, Dee Blackwell and Yvonne Keaton-Martin voted for extending the mask mandate. Members Troy Eckelhoff, Matt Blaylock and Dalton Person voted against it. One resident expressed support for extending the mask mandate prior to the School Board’s vote while another two spoke against it.

The mask mandate issue is expected to be discussed again at the board’s Oct. 25 meeting.