Jessieville district to weigh mask rules

JESSIEVILLE — After the covid-19 delta variant made its mark on the Jessieville School District last week, causing the cancellation of Friday’s senior high football game at Mount Ida and Thursday night’s junior high game, Superintendent Melissa Speers said the School Board will review new survey information during its meeting Monday night before deciding whether to implement a mask policy.

Though the district does have strict guidelines and protocols in place to help prevent the spread of covid-19, Jessieville remains the only one of the seven public school districts in Garland County — plus the Arkansas School for Mathematics, Sciences, and the Arts — to have not made mask-wearing mandatory.

The week’s uptick in cases and quarantine numbers led the senior high team to cancel, while Mount Ida’s own issues with the virus forced the junior high game to be canceled.

As of Thursday afternoon, out of the Jessieville district’s 816 students and 127 staff members, 16 students and three staff members were considered as having active cases of covid-19. The district had 74 students in quarantine, but no staff members.

While Speers did not share how many from those numbers were either players or from the coaching staff, she said that based on the numbers for both cases and quarantines, the district needed to cancel the game for safety reasons.

She noted that the student population as a whole is doing well in following safety guidelines and that the buildings and classrooms continue to be regularly cleaned and sanitized.

“Right now we’re just strongly encouraging and strongly suggesting [the wearing of masks],” she said. “And we’ll go in and you’ll see some students in the classrooms and out on campus who are wearing masks, and then you’ll see some who are not.”

Regarding a possible implementation of a mask mandate, Speers said that if the board decides to approve a policy, it would likely be some form of one where certain statistical thresholds had to be met. She said that so far, the general consensus from the community has been to make wearing masks optional while strongly encouraging it.