Wolf Announces School Mask Mandate: Here's Who Has To Wear Them

PENNSYLVANIA — Pennsylvania will require students and staff in all schools to wear masks to start the 2021-22 school year, Gov. Tom Wolf announced Tuesday.

The declaration came just a week after Wolf asked Republican leadership to confer in Harrisburg and pass a mask mandate into law. Republican leadership refused.

“The aggressive delta variant has changed everything for us,” Gov. Wolf said Tuesday during a news briefing. “Doing nothing to stop COVID-19 is not an option…This (mandate) is a necessary step to keep out students and teachers safe, and in the classroom.”

The order applies to K-12 schools, public and private, for all students and staff, regardless of vaccination status. It will go into effect on Sept. 7.

It only applies to indoor activities, and does not apply to school sports.

Early learning programs and child care providers for children ages 2 and older also fall under the mandate.

Officials said that delta impacts children in a way that previous variants did not. They pointed to a 277 percent increase in cases reported by child care facilities in Pennsylvania between mid-July and Aug. 28. Total cases among school aged children rose by more than 11,000 in August, and by more than 79,000 from January to the end of this month, according to the Department of Health.

Republicans, who maintain that the decision should be left to local districts, were quick to point to the May 2021 primary during which Pennsylvanians voted to restrict the governor’s power to issue emergency orders.

“…This is exactly the kind of government overreach voters opposed when they stripped Governor Wolf of the authority to unilaterally extend emergency declarations in May,” State Senate President Jake Corman said in a statement.

This order’s authority comes from the state’s Disease and Prevention Control law, Acting Secretary of Health Alison Beam said.

“We know there will be objections to this action,” Beam said. “We ask folks to keep things in perspective.”

Dr. Trudy Hecker, a pediatrician with the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, noted that the preventative measure was needed to ensure that schooling remains in-person.

Increasingly, health experts believe that vaccinations alone will not stop the spread of the delta variant. Even though vaccines provide a significant degree of protection, individuals with no symptoms can still spread the virus. And children under 12 still cannot receive any COVID-19 vaccine.

“Children under the age of 12 simply don’t have the choice (to receive vaccines)…so it falls to us to protect us,” Hecker said, arguing that masking helped keep cases down in schools during the height of pandemic.

Along with pediatrics groups, Pennsylvania’s teachers union welcomed the mandate it’s been after for months.

“Reports of schools in other states shutting down or quarantining large numbers of students because of the more contagious Delta variant show that it is just too risky to teach students in person with dramatically fewer protections than we used last year,” Pennsylvania State Education Association President President Rich Askey said. “This isn’t a choice between masking or not masking. It is a choice between keeping schools open for in-person learning or forcing far too many students to learn from the other side of a screen.”

This is a breaking story. Check back for details as they become available.