The Leon school superintendent, Rocky Hanna, said in a letter to the governor that the district was asking for “the flexibility and the autonomy to make the decisions for our schools that best fit our local data and information in Leon County.” Ms. “That would be a huge mistake.”īut four Florida school systems - in Broward, Leon, Duval and Alachua Counties - have said they would retain or seek to impose mask mandates. and others to make every single person, kids and staff, have to wear masks all day,” Mr. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, said in an executive order last Friday that the state would take away funding from any district that infringed on “the fundamental right of parents to make health and educational decisions for their children” by requiring students to wear masks. “And I would honestly really hope a governor wouldn’t pull funding from a school.” “I think school administrators realize that the benefit outweighs the risk,” said Rachel Graham, an epidemiologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. New laws or executive orders in a number of states across the United States ban school officials from imposing mask mandates, leaving it up to parents to decide whether their children will wear masks in class.īut with coronavirus cases rising sharply across the country, and new federal guidance that everyone, vaccinated or not, should wear masks in schools, some school districts in those states are imposing mask mandates anyway, despite the risk of financial penalties for defying the state orders. Bob Self/The Florida Times-Union, via Associated Press A similar battle is playing out in Arizona.Ĭhristine O'Riley, a teacher who has a child under 12, held a protest umbrella on Tuesday outside the building in Jacksonville, Fla., where the Duval County School Board was scheduled to meet to discuss the district’s mask policy. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, who is often mentioned as a possible presidential candidate, issued an executive order threatening to cut off aid to any district that imposed a mask rule on students, though four large districts say they will defy him. Murphy, who is seeking re-election this year, comes as some Republicans have fought against mask requirements, raising questions about the effect of face coverings on the physical and mental health of children.
The rise is being driven by the highly contagious Delta variant. Hospitalizations are up 54 percent over the same period. C oronavirus cases are rising sharply across the country, and health officials recently issued new federal guidance that even vaccinated people should wear masks indoors in areas where cases are surging, and that everyone, vaccinated or not, should wear masks in schools.Īs in most of the country, new cases of the virus have surged in the state, with the daily average doubling over the last two weeks, to 1,104, according to The New York Times’s database. Whether to require students to wear masks in schools has become a contentious debate across the country, often dividing people along partisan lines.
Murphy, a Democrat, who had previously said that mask-wearing policies would be left up to each district. Murphy of New Jersey plans to announce on Friday that public school students, from kindergartners to seniors in high school, will have to wear masks when school resumes, because of a recent surge of new cases of the coronavirus, said the governor’s spokesman, Mahen Gunaratna. Students wore masks and sat behind barriers at a Jersey City elementary school in April.
0 kommentar(er)
