NORTHAMPTON — Parents and public school students protested on the steps of City Hall on Wednesday morning to demand an immediate end to the mask mandate in city schools, citing a continuous downward trend in COVID-19 transmission rates and concerns about the impact of masks on children’s development.
About two dozen people affiliated with the new organization MaskChoice Pioneer Valley gathered to promote optional masking, holding signs urging city officials to follow the lead of the state education department, which lifted the statewide public school mandate on Feb. 28.
The Department of Elementary and Secondary Education policy allows local districts to keep their mandates if they choose.
Organizer Emily Boddy delivered a statement summarizing the group’s opposition to mandatory masking, decrying the School Committee’s vote last week to accept the recommendation of Public Health Director Merridith O’Leary and retain the districtwide mandate.
“The Northampton Board of Health has lifted the town mask mandate. Children deserve that same choice in school,” Boddy said. “For the majority of the past 18 months, they’ve only had breaks during snack and lunch, and more recently they have been given the choice to take off masks outdoors. For children who ride the bus and use after-care, the hours only increase.”
She said masks affect young children in myriad ways, potentially impacting their education.
“The struggle is especially profound for children who are hard of hearing or learning to read, who have speech issues, English language learners and those children who struggle with social, emotional and mental health challenges,” Boddy said. “Children are at the lowest risk, and yet they are experiencing disproportionate restrictions, and at a cost.”
The agenda for Thursday’s virtual School Committee meeting, scheduled for 6:30 p.m., features a discussion and possible vote on amending or repealing the mask policy, as well as a possible vote on a waiver for those attending the NHS junior prom on April 8.
O’Leary, in a letter to the School Committee outlining why the Health Department and Board of Health recommended keeping the school mask mandate, cited a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report released March 11. She wrote that the data “indicated that K-12 programs with partial or full mask requirements” had lower rates of COVID-19 infection among students and staff.
“Mask wearing continues to be a valuable piece of a multicomponent approach to COVID-19 prevention in schools,” O’Leary wrote.
Ellen McGrath, the parent of an NHS freshman, said at Wednesday’s rally that the wide availability of vaccines, and the low quality of many people’s cloth masks, are among the factors that make a mask mandate unnecessary. She also questioned the conclusions of the CDC report, which was based on a study of 233 school districts in Arkansas.
“They leave school, they don’t wear it. They hang out with friends in other towns that don’t wear it,” McGrath said. “I just don’t understand what them wearing it in schools is really doing for anyone. If you want to wear it, I’m all for it.”
According to a March 17 article in the Boston Globe, schools in at least 123 Massachusetts municipalities have dropped their mask mandates. The newspaper identified five school districts that still had mandates — Northampton, Springfield, Chelsea, Boston and the Amherst-Pelham regional district — and Amherst-Pelham lifted theirs last week.
Holyoke’s school mask mandate remains in effect at least through the end of March. The mandate at Leverett Elementary School is also still in place, along with the Pioneer Valley Chinese Immersion Charter School in Hadley and the Pioneer Valley Performing Arts Charter Public School in South Hadley.
Smith Vocational & Agricultural High School in Northampton lifted its mask mandate weeks ago. Smith Vocational is its own separate school district, governed by a board of trustees.
MaskChoice’s initial goal is to recruit 500 volunteer students and parents from across the Pioneer Valley, then to recruit 5,000 more. The group has set up social media pages and a dedicated Gmail account.
President Joe Biden last week named Dr. Ashish Jha, dean of Brown University’s School of Public Health, the new White House COVID-19 response coordinator. Jha told “The Today Show” on Feb. 17 that it was “a pretty reasonable time to pull off mask mandates,” including in schools, but people should be ready for new mandates if there is another surge or concerning variant.
From Feb. 26 to March 11, the most recent two-week period for which data are available, the Northampton Health Department recorded 53 cases of COVID-19 and the CDC considers community transmission to be “low.” When transmission is low, the CDC recommends everyone “wear a mask based on your personal preference, informed by your personal level of risk.”
City health officials, however, still recommend wearing masks “when indoors for long periods of time with people who live outside your household,” O’Leary wrote to the School Committee.
Jackson Orabec, a freshman at Northampton High School, attended the rally with several classmates. Students not taking the MCAS test did not have to arrive at school on Wednesday until 12:30 p.m.
Wearing a mask for the entire school day, with only brief breaks, is “exhausting,” Orabec said.
“Not only does it restrict breathing, but it’s uncomfortable to wear. On the face, ears, that kind of stuff,” he said. “It’s hard to understand the teacher sometimes when they’re at the front of the room with their mask on … and obviously, we can’t see our fellow students’ faces,” which he said is damaging the social development of elementary school students and impacting the mental health of his peers.
A community survey conducted by the school district at the request of the School Committee found widespread comfort with the idea of making masks optional.
Superintendent John Provost detailed the results of the survey, which he said had 1,764 responses, at the committee’s March 17 special meeting on masking. The committee voted that night to follow the health officials’ recommendation and keep the mandate.
Nearly 63% of the 940 caregivers surveyed said they were either very comfortable or somewhat comfortable with optional masking. Sixty percent of the 463 student respondents said the same, along with 65.1% of 293 staff members.
Among 54 staff members who are also caregivers in the district, 65.4% said they were very comfortable or somewhat comfortable. Under the category “other members of NPS learning community,” there were 18 respondents, and 63.2% said they were very or somewhat uncomfortable with lifting the mandate.
Randy Baker, the parent of a second-grader at Bridge Street School, said during Wednesday’s City Hall rally that he found the vote “insulting” in light of the survey results.
“Why would they send that out to the parents?” Baker said. “That’s the second time they did (a survey). It came back two-to-one, overwhelmingly, that everyone feels comfortable making masks optional.”
Kids at his son’s school, he said, are not allowed to speak to each other during lunch unless their masks are on, a rule he finds “disgusting.”
“They don’t utter a word. They know better. They want to eat,” Baker said. “How sad is that?”
Brian Steele can be reached at bsteele@gazettenet.com.