MASK POLICY MINEFIELD
Charter schools face same legal conflict as traditional districts
Charter schools get more flexibility than traditional public school districts on curriculum and other state rules and standards — but not when it comes to the coronavirus pandemic.
Charters in San Antonio, large and small, are in the same political and legal conflict as all public schools, somewhere between Gov. Greg Abbott’s order forbidding mask requirements and the local health authority’s order — backed by a lawsuit against the governor by the city and Bexar County — that they mask up.
Neither state nor local governments are enforcing either directive. The lawsuit’s outcome is uncertain. That leaves superintendents and school boards in control of their own COVID-19 safety protocols, for now.
And not every parent is happy with the results.
“Of course, we have had some people say, ‘I don’t want to adhere to (mask-wearing)’ ” said Allen Smith, the superintendent of KIPP San Antonio Schools, one of the area’s largest charter networks. “But I’m not in the political space, nor do I want to be. I’m interested in keeping students safe.”
KIPP safety protocols and contact tracing look mostly similar to last year. Students are required to wear masks, screen for symptoms and social distance.
Up until Friday, masking was also required at Great Hearts San Antonio, a charter network with six campuses. The requirement was issued Aug. 22 in response to the surge in COVID-19 cases across the region, but Wednesday, Great Hearts’ board voted to make masks optional.
The move pleased most parents and community members who attended the meeting and voiced their dislike of the mandate. It also angered and frustrated some parents watching it online, who said the mandate had resulted in a drop in coronavirus case numbers at the schools that was now at risk of reversal.
“The climate overall is just not good,” said a parent who praised Great Hearts’ teachers and “amazing curriculum” but had hoped it would keep its mask requirement. The parent spoke on condition of anonymity out of fear of risking a child’s spot there, which took a year and a half to secure.
The parent said Great Hearts had offered an online option for $8,000 and that “if the environment deteriorated, we could shift to that and there would be a heck of a hole in my pocket.”
Great Hearts officials declined an interview request but provided a letter issued to families recently in which Superintendent Dan Scoggin stated that the mask requirement was always intended to be re-evaluated.
“As we assess current conditions, we are pleased to see the significant decline in cases at our campuses over the past 14 days,” Scoggin wrote. “At its peak, our number of active cases in San Antonio was 190. As of this morning, that number is down to 25, across over 5,000 faculty and students. We are also encouraged that over the past week, our seven-day rolling average is down to 1.7 cases per day in Bexar County.”
Many charter networks — including KIPP, Great Hearts and IDEA Public Schools — have online dashboards where parents can keep track of COVID-19 cases reported in their schools, information all public school districts are required to report to the Texas Education Agency.
“It is our belief that we need to be transparent with our parents because the goal is to help parents make informed decisions to keep their kids healthy and safe,” KIPP’S Smith said.
Under TEA guidelines, students who test positive for the coronavirus must quarantine, but the requirement for students who are exposed to someone with the virus varies by school. KIPP highly encourages students who are considered a “close contact” to quarantine at home for at least seven days, even with a negative test.
IDEA, the largest local charter network, with more than 16,500 students at 15 area campuses, also chose to keep masking optional at its schools statewide. It strongly recommends masking, a message that has been repeated to staff and parents through direct messaging and social media campaigns since the school year began.
The network ended last school year with about half its student population still learning online, but this year, the state requires classroom learning, bringing in numbers that don’t allow for 6 or even 3 feet of social distancing at all times, said Layne Fisher, vice president of auxiliary services at IDEA.
“We know that wearing masks is one of the most effective ways to prevent a spread,” Fisher said. “We are seeing that, although there is not a mask mandate, that our messaging and ask of parents and staff to wear masks has been resonating, and we are seeing a high mask adherence.”
Safety investments since last year include air purifying and filtering systems and additional cleaning protocols. This year, IDEA is looking to fill temporary positions that would supplement these efforts at every campus, including additional custodial staff and a health and safety monitor at each campus to evaluate conditions and help with contact tracing efforts.
“We are also trying not to change a lot of our protocols because we also know that the more we change, the more confusing it gets for parents and students,” Fisher said. “So we are trying to be as consistent as possible.”
At Jubilee Academies, which has six area campuses, mask-wearing is strongly encouraged but not required.
“About 85 percent of our parents have kids wearing masks and are happy about it, but about 15 percent of our parents are saying, ‘You can’t make my kid wear a mask,’ ” Superintendent Kevin Phillips said.
“We aren’t arguing with them on that. If you don’t want your kid to wear a mask, OK, fine. We are asking the kids if they don’t have a mask if they need one. But if they say, ‘No, I don’t need one,’ we say fine,” Phillips said. “If a kid says ‘Yeah, I forgot it,’ we will get them one.”
Jubilee is hoping to empower students to take responsibility and choose to wear a mask as part of building character, said Gianna Recio, its director of health services and a registered nurse and certified health coach.
“We are blessed with good parents,” she said. “You have some that say, ‘I have a right,’ but not nearly what we are seeing … compared to other charters and ISDS.”
Jubilee also makes quarantining optional for students exposed to someone with the virus, and many parents are not doing it, school officials said. Recio said the TEA allowed flexibility on it “because it just wasn’t feasible for everyone to be quarantined over and over again.”
“I had a conversation with a parent who was relieved when she found out she had that opportunity, because last year she said her kid had to quarantine three or four times and her kid never had symptoms,” Phillips said. “And she’s a working mom.”
Royal Public Schools, a small charter that opened this year with just 250 students from kindergarten to second grade, requires masks and tests its students once a week.
“The whole thing is just to try to keep everyone that is on campus negative (for the virus) and as healthy as possible,” said Rebecca Hines, the principal. “Because I know it is important for our students to be here because they are really behind with where they should be (academically), from the pandemic.”
At the Gathering Place, a charter school focused on art and social justice that opened two years ago, students are spread out across a 7.5-acre campus and see other students indoors only within their one class of about 26. It provides peace of mind to Deja Pegues, with a son in second grade who has autism, because she knows he isn’t interacting with a whole school throughout the day.
“I’m so grateful we have in-person (learning). My son is not able to sit in front of a computer for an hour, or even five minutes,” Pegues said.
Parents are not required to quarantine a child if exposed, but about 80 percent do so, according to Asia Klekowicz, co-founder and CO-CEO of the school.
The Gathering Place plans to take advantage of limited state funding made available under recently passed legislation for public schools to teach up to 10 percent of their students online. Previous inability to offer it had hurt enrollment, Klekowicz said in an email.
“We have multiple families who are more cautious: who have newborns, family members who are immunocompromised, families who have a member who has respiratory illnesses,” she said. “The bulk of these families have un-enrolled and are home-schooling as virtual learning has not been an option for them.”
One parent at Founders Classical Academy of Schertz, a charter school in the Responsive Education network, was so disappointed in its safety protocols that she is actively searching for a different school and considering home schooling. She asked for anonymity out of fear that her daughter might be ostracized for her parent’s outspokenness.
The daughter had been successful with virtual learning since March 2020 but was “forced back to campus” this year by the state policy sharply limiting schools’ ability to offer online options, and it “was like she never left,” her mother said.
“It is a PRE-COVID campus,” the mother said. “There is no mask mandate and there is no encouraging of masks and no distancing. She is so close in the hallway that her mask is in someone else’s hair eight times a day. She can touch a shoulder in four directions sitting at her desk.”
Responsive Education has posted guidelines online that strongly encourage students to wear masks, social distance and screen for symptoms. A spokesman for the organization said all schools are required to follow those guidelines.