URBANA — As school districts around the state drop mask requirements, the Urbana school board voted Tuesday to keep its requirement, at least through spring break.
“If we see a big increase in positivity due to spring-break travel, it will be way harder to say, ‘Hey, we’ve taken our masks off, let’s put them back on,’” Superintendent Jennifer Ivory-Tatum told the board. “Once we take the toothpaste out of the tube, we cannot put it back.
“We’d like to have that time to watch the positivity rates, to give our community a little more time,” she added. “We are really just on the downswing of omicron, and we just feel like it’s too soon and that we need a little more time to watch what is happening and how this is playing out in our community. After spring break, we’d like to re-evaluate, assess our position and look at the big picture.”
Ivory-Tatum said she’s been in close contact with the Champaign-Urbana Public Health District, specifically about the new omicron BA.2 variant and its prevalence, and has gotten positive feedback about the district’s plan to move forward.
In addition, the district will still require students and staff members who test positive to stay home for five days, and they will still be required to wear a mask for five days after that.
Ivory-Tatum said Awais Vaid, deputy administrator at the health district, indicated to her “that what we’re doing is smart … and that we’re giving our community a couple more weeks to see what this variant is going to do.”
She said the district hasn’t had an issue with requiring asymptomatic students and staff to stay home because of the district’s rigorous testing procedures. That testing availability won’t change.
A few weeks ago, Ivory-Tatum said, the district was having a hard time procuring all of the testing materials it needed. Now that many districts have stepped away from their mitigation procedures, she said the district is able to get all the tests it needs. It also participates in a program in which it uses the University of Illinois’ SHIELD saliva test.
Only one board member, Brenda Carter, pushed for a need to move toward removing the mask requirement after spring break.
“If we are going to be revisiting this conversation in three weeks, that’s going to need to have a very specific road map for that to happen,” board member Lara Orr said. “Otherwise, we know the parameters … we have the tests, we have masks, let’s get to the end of school.”
For board member Brian Ogolsky, the decision was clear after seeing results of a survey of teachers that showed that a majority prefer masks and hearing from the board’s student ambassadors Tuesday, who said a majority of his classmates would prefer to keep the requirement in place.
“For me, what it boils down to is, ‘How do we minimize disruption in schools,’” Ogolsky said. “When I listen to 57 percent of the teachers saying they’d prefer to see out the rest of the year with masks on, that is an extremely compelling piece of data saying that this is going to minimize disruption to the schools. When I listen to our ambassadors saying that they talk to other students and more are wanting masks than aren’t.
“To me, we want our schools open and not be disrupted, and we need teachers in those buildings. I appreciate, though, that we’re willing to have these conversations.”
