Hall County School Superintendent Will Schofield explained the district’s decision to continue making masks optional for students and staff during a video update Monday morning.
He referenced several reasons for the decision, including experiences from the previous school year and the decision to make masks optional during summer classes and events.
“We have eighteen months of experience dealing with COVID and trying to mitigate the effects of COVID with over 31,000 people,” said Schofield. “We have masked, we have hand-washed, we have watched traffic patterns and we have limited the number of people at indoor and outdoor events…quite honestly we had a fairly successful run dealing with COVID last year.”
Schofield said data collected from the school district itself suggested that masking had a negative impact on students. Earlier this year, the school district distributed an emotional impact survey to parents.
“We asked the families that attend our schools whether or not those mitigation practices had an effect regarding emotional wellness on our families own children…46 percent of our families said yes it did, it had a negative or extremely negative effect on our students’ emotional wellness,” said Schofield. “20 percent of you, almost 21 percent of you, said those practices actually had a positive effect on your students.”
Schofield also referenced a study published in May by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention as part of the district’s decision. The large-scale COVID transmission study looked 169 schools and 90,000 students in Georgia.
Some of the findings from the study include that masking unvaccinated teachers and improving school ventilation led to fewer cases of COVID-19 among the adults. However, mitigation strategies such as distancing, hybrid class models, classroom barriers and student masking were each found to have no “statistically significant benefit.”
Despite this data, Schofield said each school within the district is treated on a “case-by-case” basis. As of this report, seven schools within the Hall County School District have instituted a mask mandate due to the number of COVID-19 cases among students and staff.
“We think in certain situations masking has been effective,” said Schofield. “We will continue to use it on a case-by-case basis…we also believe that masking, chaos, mitigation and anxiety have very negative effects on our children’s ability to learn and on their emotional wellness.”
He added that every parent reserves the right to require their child to wear a mask in school, despite what guidance the school may be under at the time.
