Parents talk about CCSD mask mandates

By VERNON ROBISON

The Progress

A group of about 60 local parents gathered at the Old Logandale School on Saturday evening, July 31, to discuss school mask requirements placed on children at school this year. The informal gathering was billed as an Emergency Parent Meeting to discuss an appropriate opposing response to the new mask mandates.

Earlier in the week, a statement from the Clark County School District (CCSD) was released announcing that all students and staff be required to wear face masks indoors at school and on all CCSD buses. The statement said that the change was due to current high transmission rates of COVID-19 throughout Clark County, and to bring schools in alignment with recommendations from the CDC.

Focused purpose
Logandale parent Shelly Stolworthy, who organized Saturday night’s meeting, explained that the purpose was to discuss appropriate ways parents could “stand together and make it possible for students to attend school without being forced to wear a mask.”

Stolworthy is a newly-appointed member of the Moapa Valley Community Education Advisory Board (MVCEAB). But she emphasized that this gathering was not being held under the auspices of that organization.

“I am just coming here as a concerned parent, the same as a lot of you,” Stolworthy said. “I know that a lot of people are frustrated and angry that we are back to the masks. So I wanted to have a discussion and try to coordinate our response in a constructive way.”

Stolworthy proposed two primary goals for local efforts on this issue. The first was to eliminate mandatory school mask requirements. But the second was to support the local public schools and not put the school administrators, teachers and staff in an impossible situation, she said.

“Ultimately, I’m assuming that all of you here would prefer to put your kids in school,” Stolworthy said. “If you were all gung-ho to home school your kids, you probably wouldn’t be here at this meeting. So we want to send our kids to school, but not be mandated that they wear a mask.”

Strategic leverage
Stolworthy admitted that her initial reaction to the mandate had been to focus on the negative emotional and psychological issues that masks cause to the kids at school. Another gut reaction was to assert that the district has no right to circumvent parent choice and mandate that all kids wear masks, she said.

“I definitely don’t feel like they have the right to do that,” Stolworthy said. “Unfortunately, these approaches don’t gain much leverage with CCSD officials. No matter how much I storm the castle and yell ‘This is wrong!’, they don’t really listen to that. And that gets even more irritating.”

“So with a small community like ours, we have to use strategic leverage points to get our message across,” Stolworthy said. “And we have to be unified in that. Otherwise we are just screaming into the wind.”

It is all about infection rates
Stolworthy said that there are community organizations already engaging with CCSD on this issue in a strategic way. Foreseeing that this issue would arise, the MVCEAB had been working for the past couple of weeks on drafting a letter to CCSD central to make a case for relaxing the mask mandate in Moapa Valley schools, Stolworthy said.

That letter uses similar logic that was used last year to keep Moapa Valley schools open with a live instruction hybrid model while all other CCSD schools offered only online learning options. That argument leverages the fact that infection rates in the Moapa Valley community have stayed significantly low compared to Clark County as a whole.

“This has been the big fight all along for MVCEAB,” explained Logandale resident Lindsey Dalley who is a long time MVCEAB member. “There is no distinction drawn at CCSD between Las Vegas and the outlying rural areas. The district can’t recognize that our community has less than one percent infection rate because they’ve got 400,000 urban students at much higher risk to deal with. So we just get absorbed and swallowed up. We have fought that battle on many different fronts; including this one.”

The MVCEAB letter focused exclusively on this difference in infection rates between rural and urban because that was the issue that has gained the most traction in the past, Dalley said.

“Going through this process, you learn how to be politically effective and learn what levers to pull in the district to reach the desired results,” Dalley said. “While there may be a lot of other arguments against the mask mandate, and they all might be valid, this is the one that will take us down the field.”

What parents can do
Dalley urged parents to contact elected officials and write letters of opposition to the mandate.

“The role of parents is, you can relate personal experiences on how your child is harmed in wearing the mask,” Dalley said. “In doing that you can help soften the target so the administration in Las Vegas, and other politicians will hear the cries of parents and realize that there might be something to this.”

“But there needs to be a formal body that moves things forward politically,” Dalley said. “That is what MVCEAB is doing.”

Dalley said that some headway had already been made. There had been talk from CCSD central that some considerations be made as a pilot project, to separate out local schools based on low infection rates in the community.

“We understand that there are CCSD nurses looking at exceptions,” he said. “Those are some positive things because of what MVCEAB and the School Organizational Teams (SOTs) have done to get the message across.”

The problem with protest
Dalley discouraged the idea of staging protests outside of local schools, or of sending kids to school without masks in an act of civil disobedience. These ideas could backfire and cause more harm than good, he said. Worst case, these tactics could result in disciplinary action upon local principals or teachers.

“If we make demands and put our principals in danger of disciplinary action for non-compliance, they could be transferred out to Vegas,” Dalley said. “Then, and we’ve seen this before in this community, the district will send somebody out that is a hard-nose. And they will be sent to ‘clean up’ the problem in an even stricter way.”

“So the anger and frustration needs to be focused in the right area,” Dalley added. “Because if we gore our own, even though we are justified, we may end up with something even worse.”

Dalley suggested that parents wishing to protest ought to join a regional demonstration being coordinated by the state-wide Power 2 Parent organization on Wednesday, August 11 beginning at 6 pm outside of the CCSD administrative office at 5100 W. Sahara in Las Vegas.

“That focuses the attention on CCSD central administration where it belongs and not on our local administrators whose hands are tied on this issue,” Dalley said. “So if you want to poke the beast, that would be the most effective way to do it.”

How to send a message
Another tactic that could cause more harm to the community than good is pulling children from school over the mask mandate, said Mack Lyon Middle School teacher Casey Kowitz at the meeting.

“A lot of people think, ‘I will send a message to the district by just pulling my kids out of school!’,” Kowitz said. “But that doesn’t really send a message. We are a small community. And a lot of people at the district don’t really care if we drop our kids because that is actually more money for their students in Vegas.”

Kowitz explained that pulling kids out of school merely deprives the local school of the funding that would have come with that student. This tightens the school’s budget and can result in a loss of teachers and programs at the school.

“When the mask mandate is over and you’re ready to send the kids back to school, things may not be the same,” Kowitz said. “The programs you loved before; like art or music or whatever; may not be there anymore. And once they’re gone, those programs are hard to bring back.”

Kowitz said that parents who stay engaged at the school are in a stronger position to send a message. “You have more influence and more power to sit at the table and talk to this issue when your kids are enrolled in school,” Kowitz said.

Stolworthy encouraged parents to be involved by attending MVCEAB meetings as well as SOT meetings for their children’s schools. These are public meetings which are posted according to Open Meeting Law.

Comments can also be made at the CCSD Board of Trustees meetings, she said.

Finally letters can be sent to the Trustees via email. Email addresses for the CCSD Trustees may be found at ccsd.net.