Tuscaloosa City School Board Approves Temporary Mask Order

TUSCALOOSA, AL — Tuscaloosa City Schools will now require students and employees to wear masks while indoors, at least temporarily, following approval by the City Board of Education during its regular meeting Tuesday night.

The 2021-2022 school year is set to begin Thursday for TCS.

For TCS, the mask mandate will be in place from Aug. 12 - Sept. 10 and is in line with current recommendations from the Alabama Department of Public Health. Per federal directive, masks were already required on buses for students and employees.

The current action states masks will become optional after Sept. 10 and will once again be taken up by the Board of Education prior to that end date. This is where the biggest debate took place among elected officials, as they worked through how the board would approach the guidelines moving forward after the end of the current mandate.

The matter will be taken up once again at the board's next meeting on Sept. 7.

"We don’t want any configuration other than five days in school from Aug. 12 to May 2022," said TCS Superintendent Mike Daria. "We plan to get in school and stay in school."

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Parents, community members and medical professionals showed up primarily in support of mask requirements and were met with cheers following their statements during the meeting, as community members pleaded with school board members to tighten public health restrictions for daily operations within the school system with the return to in-person learning.

Dr. Bruce Petitt, a longtime Tuscaloosa pediatrician, was one of several physicians to speak out in favor of implementing mask requirements, pointing out that he has noticed children are excellent mask wearers and tend to not display problems with wearing them.

Click here to watch the full meeting.

"This is very concerning to us in the pediatric community," Petitt said. "The science is clear on this and I think that masks work and I think that children do a good job with wearing them."

Others, such as Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Alabama employee Sam Reynolds, spoke little about the practical application of public health guidelines for schools and instead compared vaccination efforts to compulsory sterilization and euthanasia efforts by Nazi Germany, while calling into question much of the science that has now become widely accepted across much of the political spectrum.

"They are also citing Nuremberg ... People went on trial for crimes against humanity because the Nazis were actually trying to vaccinate the Jews and kill them off," Reynolds said during the public comments portion of the meeting. "That vaccine that they are actually pushing right now is not FDA approved, it's only approved for emergency use authorization."

The vote also comes as DCH Health System reported 115 total coronavirus inpatients on Tuesday — the highest number of hospitalizations seen in Tuscaloosa since Jan. 29 — a detail many detractors at the meeting attempted to short sell or cast to the side as misinformation.

Of those patients, 30 are receiving critical care in the system's intensive care unit, underscoring another stark milestone for the three-hospital system that has not been seen since the peak of the last major surge around the holidays.

While city schools will now require masks for students and employees, Tuscaloosa Mayor Walt Maddox stressed that he will leave masking requirements up to different departments, due to their varying level of personal engagement with the public. He also said a citywide mask mandate or lockdown is unlikely, as Gov. Kay Ivey has yet to issue a statewide emergency declaration.

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