The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Texas schools, stores split on mask mandate’s end
President Biden calls Gov. Abbott’s action ‘Neanderthal thinking.’
The end of Texas’ mask mandate is giving Lucy Alanis second thoughts about one of her occasional indulgences during the coronavirus pandemic: dining in at restaurants.
“I guess I’m a little scared,” said Alanis, 27, a florist in Dallas.
Republican Gov. Greg Abbott’s repeal of most COVID-19 restrictions — saying it was “time to open
Texas 100%” — reverberated across the state and to the White House on Wednesday, a day after one of the country’s most dramatic rollbacks of rules intended to slow the spread of the virus.
Businesses in Texas shed rules, city leaders plotted new safeguards and the state’s 5 million schoolchildren largely remained under orders to keep wearing masks, at least for now.
President Joe Biden reacted to America’s second-largest state winding down virus restrictions for nearly 30 million people, calling it “Neanderthal thinking.”
The mask mandate and occupancy limits on restaurants and retail stores end March 10. Some stores announced they still won’t allow maskless customers, while social media users began tracking evolving policies on crowdsourced spreadsheets.
Houston police Chief Art Acevedo said his officers will continue wearing masks. He blasted Abbott over the repeal and worries about more aggressive encounters like one in December, when a customer confronted over a mask at a Houston bar smashed a glass over an employee’s head.
“We can see conflict coming, sadly ,” Acevedo said. “And I think that a lot of this is going to be self-inflicted.”
State education officials Wednesday gave local school boards the ability to set their own rules.
The tiny Rogers school district 80 miles north of Austin said Tuesday its 850 students would no longer need to wear masks or undergo temperature checks. But by Wednesday morning, Superintendent Joe Craig backpedaled, saying he needed to explain the ramifications to parents.
Under the district’s current protocols, if everyone is wearing a mask, a positive test doesn’t trigger an automatic quarantine of everyone in the same classroom.
“If we go to a no mask thing, that part of it changes,” Craig said. Most parents would probably not want masks, he said, “but they’re missing a piece of information they’re not considering.”