Johnson County pediatric expert: School closings ‘inevitable’ without mask mandates

The Johnson County Commission will decide on Thursday whether to require masks in grades K-6 — and will be asked to go further and include all of K-12. It absolutely should.

Both locally and nationally, more children are being hospitalized with COVId-19. The delta variant is filling up emergency rooms in Kansas City and in the two-state area, and is likely to prompt quarantines and perhaps even close whole schools — unless masks are required.

“I don’t think it’s likely, I think it’s inevitable,” local pediatric pathologist Dr. Melissa A. Gener says of closings due to COVID outbreaks in schools without mask mandates.

Gener has spearheaded letters to the Johnson County Commission and Blue Valley Board of Education, now signed by nearly 200 area doctors, urging mask requirements in K-12 schools. “We’re absolutely, 100% for in-person learning,” she says, adding that a mask requirement “is the only way that we’re going to keep our kids — especially in high school — in school full-time.”

Ominously, in grades K-6, kids aren’t yet eligible for a COVID-19 vaccine. “So really, masking is their only option for protection,” Gener notes. Yet, she says, it’s vital for masks to be required through grade 12: “If they do not institute universal masking, there will be quarantines and there will be schools that will have to shut down, or at least classes that will have to shut down.”

Moreover, since the Kansas Legislature, in its infinite wisdom, practically outlawed remote learning going forward, interrupted academic time will have to be made up after the end of the school year. And that would mean extending school into next summer, adding more economic disruption to the quarantines and closures during the regular school year.

“Should we start school and kids aren’t masked, how quickly are we looking at the potential of (of COVID) spreading and schools needing to be closed?” asks state Sen. Cindy Holscher, Democrat of Overland Park, who has joined her powerful, principled voice to that of the doctors.

Shawnee Mission schools, follow the lead of De Soto

Anti-maskers have been heard from loud and clear throughout the pandemic. Not so much the silent majority favoring masks. That may change Thursday when supporters show up to the Johnson County Commission’s 9:30 meeting to press for universal masks.

“They just haven’t been vocal until now,” says Holscher, who has also been encouraged by petitions circulating in the Blue Valley and Olathe school districts urging universal masks.

Commission Chairman Ed Eilert says he’ll vote for the K-6 mask requirement — and perhaps with the commission majority if it’s persuaded to extend the mask requirement to grade 12.

The De Soto school district has already done that. While the Shawnee Mission district has approved a mask requirement in K-6 schools, it should consider expanding it to K-12 — and has called a special meeting on the topic for 5 p.m. Thursday. Olathe and Blue Valley districts, which have yet to mandate masks at any level, should follow suit.

“We expect to have more details about our steps for moving forward in the coming days,” says Blue Valley director of communications Kaci Brutto. And since she adds that “our primary goal remains to provide in-person learning in the safest manner possible,” the choice seems clear.

In conservative-leaning Blue Valley, especially, leaders will have to be willing to stand up to a very vocal minority opposing masks.

Yet with so many parents and health professionals all for masks in schools, standing up and being counted isn’t just the right thing to do. It’s the only thing. Your leaders have never needed to hear that more than now.