Danvers School Committee Delays Mask Vote Amid Passionate Debate

DANVERS, MA — The Danvers School Committee Monday night voted to delay a vote on a district indoor mask mandate ahead of the state's expected implementation of a one-month mandate for all public schools on Tuesday.

The School Committee said the delay was to gain more information on resident opinion after 16 often-impassioned statements during the public comment portion of the 2 1/2-hour meeting. Members also sought more data on how the coronavirus delta variant affects school-age children and how that translates into symptomatic cases, hospitalizations and community spread.

"The only reason why I would agree with (tabling the vote) is that it would give us time to be more transparent and develop a plan," School Committee member Alice Campbell said. "I think all the parents in this room are still are getting over what happened last year. Someone had brought up the idea that (parents) had no clue what was going on. There was no transparency. This can provide us an opportunity to share with the community what our plan would be.

"Should we start school without masks, once it gets to this (specific) point we would institute masks (and vice versa). What I am hearing loud and clear from the community is that we need a plan in place where we can be more proactive rather than be reactive like we were last year."

A survey of teachers and teacher aides reported that while the majority prefer universal masks to start the year, about 40 percent of staff thought it should be a personal choice, especially for older grade levels.

The public comment was skewed in the other direction with the overwhelming majority of speakers (11 out of 16) saying they believed it should be family choice, while the minority argued that the public good outweighs personal choice and for masks to be effective their use must be universal throughout the schools, except for medical and behavioral exemptions.

"The truth is that we're trying to balance people's individual rights vs. the community's right for a safe school environment," Danvers School Committee Chair Eric Crane said. "That's a continuum. It's a continuum of almost everything we do. We already have rules in place when you come to school about which vaccines you have to have. You have to have a physical if you're going to play sports. There are things that are already 'mandatory.'

"In our daily lives, there is a lot of limitation in what we might consider our personal freedom in an effort to create a society that works for everybody and keeps the majority of a community safe. This is a continuum that we're doing here of: Where does one person's right to decide (what they want) for their own child start to encroach on other people's families?"

Giving the Danvers School Committee extra time is the expected state Department of Elementary and Secondary Education vote on Tuesday to grant Director Jeffrey Riley authority to impose the one-month statewide indoor mask mandate to help ensure a smooth opening to schools and allow more time to increase vaccination rates.

According to the DESE guidance released last week, a recommendation for lifting the mask mandates would be tied to a school's vaccination rates with rates among all students and staff needing to reach 80 percent.

Numbers given at the beginning of the School Committee meeting said Danvers currently has 64 percent of students ages 16 to 19 with at least one vaccine dose (55 percent fully vaccinated) and 50 percent of those ages 12 to 15 with one dose (39 percent fully vaccinated).

Two parents who spoke said any non-mandatory masking should be done purely by family choice and not by vaccination status since families who choose to remain unvaccinated could be unfairly stigmatized.

Gov. Charlie Baker last week said reaching an overwhelming vaccination level "really is the only way out of this."

"People are tired of the pandemic. I completely get and understand that," he said. "It's been a really long, rough, tough period filled with all kinds of awful things.

"But one thing that's abundantly clear at this point is the way out of this — most fundamentally — is to get everybody vaccinated."

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(Scott Souza is a Patch field editor covering Beverly, Danvers, Marblehead, Peabody, Salem and Swampscott. He can be reached at Scott.Souza@Patch.com. Twitter: @Scott_Souza.)

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