‘These are not your enemies.’ Protesters urge Wake to stop requiring students to mask.
Some Wake County parents lobbied school leaders on Tuesday to join the growing number of North Carolina school districts that are dropping face mask requirements.
A crowd of around 100 people rallied outside Tuesday’s Wake County school board meeting in Cary demanding that the district immediately stop mandating that students wear masks. Rally participants wanted the school board to vote Tuesday or to call a special meeting by next week to vote on making masks optional.
“These are not your enemies, Wake County,” Brian Groesser, a Wake parent said at the rally as he stood with a group of students. “This is your future. What future are you teaching these kids? To live in fear, to live scared of each other?”
Some speakers though, in both verbal and written comments on Tuesday, urged North Carolina’s largest school district to continue the mask mandate. Wake has 159,000 students.
“I cannot reiterate enough that the parents of Wake County support this,” Melanie Mottershead, a parent and substitute teacher, told the board. “We support the school board’s decision to keep all 180,000 of our students, staff and their families safe by requiring masks in school.”
Board will wait 2 weeks to vote
The majority of North Carolina school districts still require face masks. But multiple districts have voted to go mask optional since state health leaders eased school requirements around COVID-19 quarantines and contact tracing.
Last week, the state Department of Health and Human Services revised the N.C. Strong Schools Toolkit to say that schools no longer have to do contact tracing to identify who may have been exposed to COVID-19.
DHHS also revised quarantine requirements to say students and school employees who’ve been exposed to COVID-19 no longer have to quarantine unless they tested positive or are showing symptoms.
Chad Stall, a parent, told the board, that it’s lost its “crutch” to require masks.
“The toolkit is no longer going to restrict access to education on an optional versus a required mask setting, so what now?” Stall said.
Under state law, school boards are required to vote at least monthly on their face mask policies. Wake school board member Karen Carter had asked that the March 1 mask vote be moved to Tuesday’s meeting, but the request was rejected.
Wake board chairwoman Lindsay Mahaffey said at the board table Tuesday that district staff is closely reviewing the new DHHS guidelines heading into the March 1 meeting.
Superintendent Cathy Moore said that district staff will get guidance from local, state and federal health officials and the ABC Science Collaborative before making its mask recommendation on March 1.
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Protesters say ‘unmask our kids’
At Tuesday’s rally, signs such as “Unmask our kids” and “I do not co-parent with the government” were held up by protesters. Several Republican candidates for county, state and federal office spoke at the rally, including former U.S. Rep. Mark Walker, who is running for U.S. Senate.
The protest was organized by Moms for Liberty and the Carolina Teachers Alliance, which was formed by conservative activists to become an alternative to the North Carolina Association of Educators.
Groesser said that the board is beholden to NCAE. He urged parents to ignore the school board and to send their children maskless if the board doesn’t lift the mask mandate.
“The board is not your boss,” Groesser said. “The board is not your dictator. The board is not the parents, so are they going to stop all your kids If you send them to school without one?”
Some of the rally participants also spoke at the school board meeting. Citing COVID-19 health concerns, the school board has limited the number of people in the board room and capped the number of public speakers at 20 people.
Some parents and community members have consistently been showing up at school board meetings since the start of the school year to urge Wake to drop the mask mandate. But nearly two years into the COVID-19 pandemic, support for mandating face masks may be waning.
Several states have announced over the past two weeks that they are dropping their statewide school mask mandates. There’s no statewide mask mandate in North Carolina, but House Speaker Tim Moore says legislation will be filed to allow families to opt out of their school’s mask requirements.
DHHS recommends that schools continue to require masks if they’re in an area that has a high or substantial COVID-19 transmission rate. All 100 counties, including Wake County, have high or substantial transmission rates.
“The lockdowns, virtual school and mask mandates all made sense two years ago when we were in the dark,” Kim Oley, a parent, told the board. “We didn’t have any developments on our side but now we do. And so new decisions can and should be made.
“Parents should now have a choice as to whether their children will or will not wear a mask.”
Support for requiring masks
Some speakers, though, told the board that it’s not yet time to make masks optional.
“We trust you,” Renee Sekel, a parent, told the board. “ We have been trusting you. Please, I beg of you, to keep earning that trust and keep those masks for all of us.”
School board member Jim Martin gave a passionate defense of continuing to require face masks, saying it’s helping to keep students safe.
“I am tired of politics making decisions about science and education,” Martin said. “My vote will always be, and I encourage everyone at this table’s vote, to follow the guidance of the public health department.
“If we do anything else, we’re letting politics — not data and science — determine how we operate.”
This story was originally published February 15, 2022 at 6:23 PM.
