The following is an All Things Appleton editorial.
It’s been over a week since since the Appleton Area School District sent out the family letter announcing that they were reversing course and were going to require masking after previously telling parents masking would be optional, and it has been almost a week since the Board of Education voted to formalize that announcement.
Since that letter and that vote, I myself have reached out to Superintendent Baseman with questions, as have multiple parents. I have received no response either from the Superintendent or her assistant, and as far as I have been able to determine, the administrative team has not responded in any substantive way to emails from the parents and public who have questions about how this decision was made and how it will be worked out practically.
From my perspective, the issue is not masking in schools per se but the major communication issues surrounding the implementation and rescission of the masks optional policy as well as the overall appearance of little to no planning being put into either of those decisions.
The Appleton Area School District serves thousands of area students and families and is funded by taxpayer dollars, and at this point I think the public deserves to have a clear explanation of what went wrong in this process and what specific metrics have been and will go in to the administrative team’s decision-making.
Quite frankly, I was surprised when Superintendent Baseman asked the Board to start the year out with masks optional and spoke so confidently about their mitigation tools sans masking. Last year, in 2020, cases started rising markedly prior to the start of the school year. This year in the 7 days leading up to the 07/26/2021 Board meeting where they voted to go masks-optional, Appleton had a total of 42 new cases, almost 4 times as many as the 11 cases the week before that. Appleton’s two week burden jumped from 27 to 71. Beyond that, it was well known at that point that the Delta variant was in Wisconsin and had caused cases to rise precipitously in other parts of the country and world. Given all that information, it seemed to me that AASD’s administrative team, and the Board of Education were making a conscious decision to return to in-person school with masking optional with the knowledge that cases were increasing. Why then did they reverse course 4 weeks later when nothing substantially had changed beyond the fact that Covid had continued the course that had already been established when the Board of Education, at the request of the administrative team, initially voted to start the year with masking optional?
Their decision was made after 16 months of watching Covid and after an entire summer of being able to plan. I do think that the parents and taxpayers deserve to have an explanation as to why the district administration was caught so off guard by an utterly predictable increase in Covid cases and why for the second year in a row they were unable to provide accurate information in a timely manner to the parents and students regarding how the school year was going to work.This need for clear communication is even more important now given that September 1st, the first day of school, is a mere three days away and parents still have no answers to some fairly important questions such as how long will this masking mandate be in effect? What metrics are they using to influence decisions? What will happen if a child doesn’t wear a mask? What if a family has religious or personal beliefs that do not allow the wearing of masks?
When Governor Evers implemented his mask mandate, not only did the emergency order itself clearly lay out the details of the mandate, but, along with it, he also provided a guidance document answering frequently asked questions. When Mayor Woodford reinstituted Appleton’s policy mandating masking inside city owned facilities, the city attorney was able to clearly point to and explain the state statute that gave the mayor the authority to do that. Last year, when the lockdowns were rescinded and Mayor Woodford initially implemented a Safer At Home order specific to Appleton, he lifted that within 24 hours when the city attorney determined it was legally dubious and, since then, the city of Appleton seems to have been scrupulous in making sure they are acting within the bounds of Wisconsin law.
In the case of the Appleton Area School District, the administrative team and the Board of Education do not seem to have publicly provided an explanation as to what legal authority they have to implement a mask mandate or what their legal responsibilities are regarding providing education to students with religious or personal beliefs that prevent them from wearing masks. They do not seem to have been able to answer basic practical questions regarding mask wearing in schools such as how the district will be tracking the effectiveness of masking, how they will be making sure that students are wearing masks correctly, and how they will effectively serve students who need to see their teacher’s entire face to learn properly. They also haven’t been able to answer larger questions such as, given that Covid does not seem to be disappearing, and for the second year in a row cases have spiked around the time school has been starting, will students be required to mask every year going forward?
Finally, what is the Appleton Area School District’s leadership team going to do to make sure that in 2022 they don’t, for the third year in a row, publicly assure parents that the school year will start out a specific way only to completely upend those plans and change course 2 weeks before school starts?
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