Two large public school districts, in Dallas and Austin, have decided to defy Abbott and require all students, teachers and visitors to wear masks while on campus. The Houston school board will vote on the issue this week and is expected to do the same. Other medium sized and smaller districts may well make the same decision this week and next. The same thing is happening in Florida, incidentally — school districts defying their governor’s ban on mask mandates, even at the expense of losing their state aid.
Beaumont ISD Superintendent Shannon Allen is on their side, saying, “I certainly wish that school districts had the flexibility to require masks.”
Abbott could get stubborn and begin a nasty, costly court fight with every school district that wants to protects its personnel as much as possible from Covid 19. It’s not even clear that he would prevail. A sensible judge could easily decide that the desire by local school boards to promote public health is more important.
No Texan should be misled by Abbott’s claim that he is merely trying to let people make their own decisions on masks. We don’t let Texans decide how fast they can drive on a city street, or whether they will purchase a license before hunting or fishing. We are in the middle of a pandemic, and one that is starting to get worse again after initially declining during the spring. Masks can help reduce this spread, especially among large groups of people indoors.
This is common sense, not a sneaky government plot to take away anyone’s liberty. Only about half of Texas adults have been vaccinated against Covid 19, and children under 12 can’t get vaccinated yet. The combination of those two facts means that most Texas schools have lots of people inside them who could be infected by the new delta variant of the coronavirus that is causing the scary surge in cases.
And that surge is real, in Southeast Texas and in many other parts of the country. Jefferson County now has more than 200 people hospitalized because of Covid, with more than 30 put on ventilators just to try to keep breathing. Baptist Hospital has surpassed its own record for Covid hospitalizations and recently had to erect a mobile triage area outside to direct some emergency patients without the virus to other areas to receive care.
With conditions like this, schools are justified in requiring masks on their premises to slow the spread of the disease. Abbott doesn’t have to issue a statewide mask mandate, but he can let superintendents make the decisions that are right for the people on their campuses.
The school districts that have defied him are not going to back down, and again, they are probably going to be joined by others in the coming days. It’s time for the state’s highest elected official to put public health over politics and amend his order. It will cause fewer Texans to contract this terrible disease, and right now we can think of nothing more important.