The ECISD needs to impose a mask mandate, immediately. I know that many people in Ector County have chosen not to believe in the seriousness of Covid-19; many remain defiantly unvaccinated; many hold that no government has the authority to tell people what to do with their own bodies. Perhaps these views are held by majorities of residents in the county.
There are times when majorities are wrong – dangerously so. A majority of Americans opposed the Civil Rights movement (Martin Luther King was seen by many as an invidious radical; discrimination against African Americans was public policy in states like Texas, regardless of whether teachers are now allowed to make such claims in public school classrooms).
The science of virology is inexact, and public messaging from the Trump and Biden administrations has been convoluted and at times driven by expediency. Still, people who deny that Covid-19 is surging right now, or that the ascendant omicron mutation represents a grave threat to unvaccinated people, the immunocompromised, and other vulnerable populations, are consuming disinformation; one has only to look at the astronomical increase in county cases, in school absenteeism, and in local hospitalizations to see that something is making people sick. There is a real chance that schools will be shuttered in the district, not as a mitigation strategy, but because there will not be enough healthy adults to keep buildings open and classrooms managed.
Since most people who consume fake news about Covid-19 will not listen to appeals based on public health or community welfare, and since most students in local schools eschew masking or wear masks as a neck accessory rather than a nose and mouth cover, the ECISD needs to reject its own version of expediency and prioritize the welfare of vulnerable people at its schools (even if community members are outraged).
ECISD staff members have already died because of Covid-19; given the perfect storm of denialism, virus mutation, and contempt for the safety of others, it is almost inevitable that students will also perish. A vaccine mandate would be an ideal solution (the science is quite clear on this subject: Vaccinated and boosted people may get the omicron strain, but are far less likely to be hospitalized, to need ICU beds, or to die as a result of infection). But it is likely enough that a vaccine mandate would be subjected to years of legal wrangling, and a proper mask mandate (in which all people who enter district facilities would be required to don masks properly) would substantially reduce the risk that vulnerable children and adults face at school.
I am not now speaking to those who have chosen magical thinking over empiricism. I am speaking to ECISD leaders, who know what the data say, who are intimately aware of the surge of Covid-19 cases in our schools, and who hold the responsibility for protecting those of us who are at risk precisely because so many others have chosen not only to accept a risk to themselves, but to impose it on others, in willful defiance of one of the most basic tenets of the social contract.
If a chemical spill threatened the lives of some students and staff at a school, and the only way to keep people safe was to require mask-wearing, then school leaders would require mask-wearing. There would be no other ethical option. There is none here: Our lives are at risk, and protecting them will engender public criticism, even outrage. This test has nonetheless only one right answer: the ECISD needs to impose a mask-mandate, immediately.
David Newman
Odessa
