Gov. Wolf Asks Legislature To Mandate Masks In Schools

PENNSYVLANIA — Gov. Tom Wolf has asked the Pennsylvania legislature to pass a law mandating the use of masks in all K-12 schools in the state, a reversal from his administration's earlier position which left the final decision up to local school districts.

In a letter to the state's Republican leadership, Wolf cited the ongoing increase in COVID-19 cases, as well as the rising hospitalization rate from the more contagious delta variant. "Strikingly," he said, only 59 school districts out of 474 statewide have submitted health and safety plans that mandate masks.

"I have become increasingly concerned about misinformation being spread to try to discredit a school district’s clear ability to implement masking to protect their students and staff," he wrote. "And the premise of local control being usurped by the threat – implicit or explicit – of political consequences for making sound public health and education decisions."

Wolf added that some in the state legislature have been pressuring schools to not mandate masks.

"There has been legislation proposed to take decision-making authority away from school districts, and some legislators have wrongly suggested that schools districts lack the authority to mandate masks," he wrote.

The state's position for months now has been a recommendation of masks, not a requirement. Wolf's administration has shied from issuing mandates of almost any kind after a tumultuous 2020 in which the governor's emergency powers were used to implement economic shutdowns at the height of the pandemic (one exception to this was the state's decision to mandate either vaccines or tests for some 25,000 employees in state healthcare facilities and certain long-term care homes).

Issuance of such mandates became an intensely partisan point, and Republicans were able to strip these emergency powers by putting the questions to a vote on the 2021 primary ballot. Now, the governor must request permission from the state legislature to pass an emergency order.

The move here by Wolf, to request legislation, seems to have been spurred by feedback from parents and teachers, which Wolf said was "overwhelmingly" in favor of masking.

"This is not due to an organized form letter campaign," he said. "Constituents, primarily parents of young children who are not able to be vaccinated, are very concerned about the lack of a mask mandate in their school district. They report that their school districts are either refusing to implement them because of political pressure or false claims about their efficacy."

Other groups, like the Pennsylvania Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics, as well as the state's teacher's union, have been calling for the move. But many Republicans and others stand against it, and school board meetings across the state have erupted into contentious debate over the point in the past several weeks.

And it remains murky whether Wolf's request of the legislature to consider a mandate will make any impact. Senate President Jake Corman and Speaker of the House Bryan Cutler have not issued any public statement yet on the matter, though both have supported putting the decision in the hands of local districts in the past.

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