Health boards in both South Hadley and Holyoke rescinded their municipal-wide mask mandates on Tuesday evening.
The decisions were the latest in a flurry of action as municipalities decide whether to lift or modify their mask mandates. Holyoke’s citywide mask requirement was lifted effective immediately, though the city’s schools will keep a mask mandate through March and revisit that decision in April. In South Hadley, the town’s mask mandate expires March 5, with the School Committee set to make a decision for town schools at its meeting Thursday.
In Holyoke, the Board of Health on Tuesday lifted the city’s mask mandate effective immediately, replacing it with a mask advisory for “those with a weakened immune system, at risk for severe disease and the unvaccinated.” In a statement, the board stressed that its vote doesn’t prevent local businesses from enforcing their own mask requirements and does not apply to a mask mandate in Holyoke Public Schools.
Those in Holyoke’s schools, however, will still have to wear masks for at least another month.
On Monday evening, the Holyoke School Committee voted to agree with Receiver-Superintendent Anthony Soto’s recommendation to keep a mask mandate in place. Holyoke’s public schools are under state control, known as receivership. Under receivership, the state-appointed receiver-superintendent is granted the decision-making powers that are normally split between a superintendent and an elected school committee.
Soto said his choice was made based on a survey that 1,772 families and staffers at the district’s schools filled out. Of those, 55% said they wanted to keep masks for the entire school year. Another 30.7% said they wanted to end the mandate on March 7, and the rest said they wanted the mandate lifted in later months this semester.
“This is a tough decision,” Soto said after some councilors questioned why masks were needed in the schools when many other municipalities like Holyoke and institutions are dropping their own mandates.
Ward 3 School Committee member Rebecca Birks pointed out that Holyoke is hosting the first St. Patrick’s Parade since the pandemic began.
“We’re going to have our kids masked in school while we have thousands of people lining the roads unmasked,” Birks said. “How are we protecting our kids?”
In South Hadley, meanwhile, the Board of Health voted unanimously Tuesday to end the town’s mask mandate on March 5, which will ensure that students and staff continue to wear masks this week — the week after a school break, when many may have traveled.
The South Hadley School Committee will now meet on Thursday to decide whether the town’s schools will continue to require masks inside beyond March 5.
At Tuesday’s Board of Health meeting, town Public Health Director Sharon Hart said that there were 17 new confirmed COVID cases for the week as well as four other active cases that had carried over from the previous week. Case counts, hospitalizations and the amount of virus detected in local wastewater have all dropped significantly, she said.
Johanna Ravenhurst, who chairs the health board, said that 72% of high schoolers and 53% of middle schoolers in the town were vaccinated as of Feb. 10. At Mosier Elementary School, 53% of eligible students are vaccinated, and at Plains Elementary School 51% are immunized.
Though the School Committee will ultimately decide Thursday what comes next for the schools, several town residents at Tuesday’s health board meeting voiced support for lifting the mask mandate in South Hadley’s schools. One of them was Jonathan Wilhelm, a town middle school teacher.
“I think there’s been just a huge, devastating effect on the social, emotional, mental health of all people — not just students,” Wilhelm said. He said he wanted his students to be able to “breath unhindered without a cloth mask mandated over their face.”
Health board member Karen Walsh Pio said that it’s important to remember that the masks were mandated because of a health crisis. A mental health clinician herself, Walsh Pio said that anxiety and depression “comes more from the pandemic, and the risk factors and the difficulty of witnessing people become ill.”
“All of those things play into the mental health of the students,” she said. “So I don’t want to load all of that onto the masks.”
Dusty Christensen can be reached at dchristensen@gazettenet.com.