Indiana school districts re-impose mask mandates; governor says he won’t stop them

(The Center Square) – It started with Indianapolis and Bloomington, but now has spread to the north suburbs of Indianapolis and to other school corporations around the state. More and more schoolchildren in Indiana will be attending school wearing masks, as of this week.

Indianapolis Public Schools was the first to announce it was requiring masks for the fall, saying July 20 all unvaccinated students and school employees would have to wear masks while vaccinated students could submit proof of vaccination to be exempted from the mandate.

The Monroe County Community School Corporation in Bloomington was the first to announce that all students in grades K-12 would be required to wear masks when inside school buildings. Students in the corporation’s 21 schools all started the new school year Aug. 4 in masks.

On Aug. 12, Brown County schools passed a mask mandate after one elementary school closed for a few days because more than 50 students had been exposed to the COVID-19 virus or had had a positive test result.

The next day, the Carmel Clay school corporation in Hamilton County announced it was requiring all students to wear masks. It was only the second day of the new school year.

“They had two days of optional,” says a Carmel parent named Alvin Lui. “Then they said, oh, we have an increase. How do you know you’ve had an increase? You’ve only been in school two days. It was very disingenuous.”

Hamilton Southeastern schools in Fishers were next to announce a mask mandate, and then Noblesville. Lawrence Township, Pike Township and Washington Township in Marion County are also now requiring masks.

But it’s not just the Indianapolis area.

On Monday night, the Brownsburg school board voted to require masks, despite the pleadings of parents who said they didn’t think masks were effective in stopping transmission of the virus.

Schools in Lafayette and West Lafayette, the home of Purdue University, are also requiring masks.

On Monday, Gov. Eric Holcomb told reporters he supports school corporations making their own decisions on mask mandates and seemed to dismiss the arguments of many parents, who say masks don’t work and may even be harmful.

“I think the schools that are putting mask mandates into place are making a wise decision when the facts warrant it,” he said. “I’m not surprised by the pushback having lived through the last year and a half.”

On Tuesday, his spokesperson, Erin Murphy, said the governor is not looking at what other governors are doing in places like Florida, where Gov. Ron DeSantis has prohibited businesses and schools in the state from requiring that students wear masks.

Instead, she said, he’s left it to counties and states to decide whether to require masks.

“That’s been his whole stance is just leaving it up to local authorities, empowering local authorities to make that decision,” Murphy said.

The Indiana State Department of Health dashboard shows that 0.1% of the deaths from COVID-19 in Indiana were in people ages 0-19.

In its announcement to parents that it would require masks, Carmel Clay Schools said they were requiring masks for students and staff as they were “witnessing neighboring districts experience a substantial surge in cases and hundreds of students quarantined.”

It was a reference to the news the day before that 118 middle schools in Noblesville had been quarantined in what was called an outbreak that affected students who were vaccinated and also those who were unvaccinated.

But many school districts in the state are taking a different course.

One of them is Spencer-Owen Community Schools in Owen County, southwest of Indianapolis, which had a temporary mask mandate in place that had been imposed not by the school board but by the local health officer. After community outcry, she agreed to lift the mask requirement for schools, saying in a letter that was copied to parents that “the benefits of the mandate seem to be outweighed by negative consequences.”

“School has been opened for 2 weeks and the period of contagion for those returning from summer travel is past,” Diane Wells, a physician, wrote in the letter, saying she thinks the “greater good” is served by returning to a policy of making masks optional.

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