WESTHAMPTON — Karen Tetrault’s art classroom was fairly quiet Monday afternoon as students sat hunched over their desks, using pencils to practice shading inside of circular shapes on their drawing paper.
It was the picture of a regular Hampshire Regional High School classroom, except for one major difference from the rest of the school year: Most of the students and Tetrault weren’t wearing masks.
“I forgot what everyone looked like,” senior Jack Seney said with a smile. He was at a table with three others who had decided to remove their masks after the state’s masking mandate expired at the end of last week. “I was actually excited for it,” his classmate, Owen Hunter, added.
At another table sat fellow senior Nora Mulvehill, a high-quality KN95 mask fitted snugly over her nose and mouth. She said that with the COVID-19 pandemic still ongoing, and with a substantial number of people unvaccinated in the school, she chose to wear a mask. Missing a week of school if she got sick would be a big inconvenience, she added.
“A little nervous,” she said of her mood on Monday. “But I’m telling myself not to judge people. It’s their choice.”
Those diverging takes on masking are shared by students, staff and administrators across the region, where some districts like Hampshire Regional have decided to lift all requirements. Others have decided to keep mandates in place, while some are set to make those difficult decisions in the coming days.
“Whatever I say, 50% of people are going to agree with me and the other 50% are not,” South Hadley schools Superintendent Jahmal Mosley said at a Feb. 17 meeting of the School Committee, reflecting the tough choices school leaders now face after Gov. Charlie Baker’s education department decided to end the state’s mandate, pushing choices on masking back down to cities and towns. “We have been trying to do our best to move forward with that the best way that we can.”
In South Hadley, the town’s Board of Health will meet Tuesday to discuss an ongoing townwide mask mandate and whether to extend it. If the health board doesn’t continue the mandate, then the town’s School Committee will have to decide later in the week whether to keep a mandate in place for schools — something that seemed to have support during the Feb. 17 meeting.
Committee chairwoman Allison Schlachter said the state’s Department of Elementary and Secondary Education “has put us in a tough situation yet again” by deciding to end the mask mandate right after students return from February break.
“It’s almost like they’re trying to create conflict within towns,” she said. “It’s terrible timing.”
Other communities like Northampton and Amherst are also waiting for their local boards of health to make a decision on municipal mandates in the coming weeks. Amherst’s health board is next meeting on March 10, and Superintendent Michael Morris has said the schools intend to wait for local guidance from them before making any decisions themselves. Even if the mandate is dropped, he said it would require “lead time” for the district to implement.
“We need to make sure it doesn’t feel rushed to anyone,” Morris told the School Committee last week.
In Holyoke, the city’s health board has a meeting scheduled for Tuesday to review its mask mandate.
In towns like Hadley, however, officials have already made the decision to lift mandates townwide. Hadley’s health board voted last week to rescind a mask order that had been in place since Aug. 22. As part of the vote, the board extended a mask requirement in schools until March 7, after which masks will be optional in the town’s schools.
Based on the state’s COVID-19 dashboard, which is updated every Thursday, Amherst and Hampshire County have the highest number of COVID cases per capita in the state, despite cases having declined substantially from the heights of the recent omicron-variant wave.
For some, the continued dangers of COVID-19 mean that policy interventions like masks still make sense. Some 150 Hampshire County parents recently signed a letter to the editor published in the Gazette, in which they note that masks work and that there are long-term effects for many infected by the coronavirus.
“Wearing a mask is not just about protecting oneself, it is also for the protection of the community, including its most vulnerable members,” the letter reads. “For example, universal masking allows children who are immune-compromised or otherwise at high risk for severe disease and children who have family members who are immune-compromised to attend school when it would otherwise be unsafe to do so.”
With COVID-19 cases on the decline, though, others have said that they’re ready to take off the masks. Lauren Hotz, the principal at Hampshire Regional High School, said that with a vaccination rate near 81% for staff and students, the case data support being able to remove the masks. If that picture changes, she added, the School Committee can always decide to reverse course.
“Getting to see people smiling has been so lovely,” Hotz said Monday, adding that inevitably some portion of the district would have been unhappy with whatever decision officials made about masking.
Hotz said several times that the decision was “respecting people’s personal choices” to wear a mask or not to wear one. When asked about immunocompromised staff and students, she said the school has made high-quality KN95 masks available to whoever wants them, and continues to have air purifiers in some classes and other mitigation measures.
It’s unclear what decisions other districts will make. But at Hampshire Regional High School, many — though not all — masks were off on Monday. For eighth graders eating lunch in the cafeteria, it was the topic of the day.
“I want to show my natural beauty,” 14-year-old Trenton Bush joked when asked why he chose not to wear a mask.
Mariska Felty, 14, a surgical mask over her mouth, said the topic was controversial and she could see both sides.
“A lot of people get mad if you wear a mask or not because of politics, and it’s stupid,” Ben Cooper, 14, said.
Felty agreed: “It’s just a little piece of cloth over your face.”
Dusty Christensen can be reached at dchristensen@gazettenet.com.