The Tippecanoe School Corporation on Wednesday decided to make masks optional within the district starting on Monday - after months of debate over the policy.
School board president Brian DeFreese voted in favor of lifting the mask mandate. He said there are still some concerns that there could be a repeat of earlier this school year - when making masks optional led to a spike in quarantines among students.
“The hope is that we can make it through optional,” he said. “The fear is that some other variant comes flying in and all things go crazy again.”
Earlier in the fall semester, TSC moved from optional mask-wearing to a mask requirement after seeing a disproportionately high number of quarantines.
DeFreese said Gov. Eric Holcomb could lift the COVID-19 emergency in March, and the school board didn’t want to have to wait until its next meeting to change its masking guidelines.
“People on both sides don’t understand how much we care about our students being in school,” he said. “All of our decisions have been based off that. Also within that context, we do not want to send the message that we should break laws or ignore executive orders.”
“Within the law that we have, we have tried to do the best we could to keep children in school and healthy,” DeFreese concluded.
Tippecanoe County Health Officer Dr. Jeremy Adler said he advised TSC officials to keep a mask requirement in place.
“Because of our high community transmission and to be consistent with the current CDC recommendation, which continues to be that masks should be universally required in K-12 schools,” he said.
Adler said that COVID numbers have been declining - but the virus is still very much in the community.
“Tippecanoe County is still designated as a county of high community transmission by the Indiana Department of Health and the CDC,” he said. “When you combine that with our less than optimal vaccination rate, and think about the prolonged close contact that occurs in the school environment, there is of course a potential of increased spread in the schools without a mask requirement.”
Both Lafayette School Corporation and West Lafayette Community School Corporation plan to keep mask requirements in place.
When reached for comment, LSC Superintendent Les Huddle said the district will wait to see what happens with the statewide health emergency, as well as what the state and Tippecanoe County health departments recommend.
“We are seeing our positive numbers drop and as important with the mask mandate still in place, we are seeing our quarantine numbers drop,” Huddle said. “This has helped to keep a lot of students at school.”
WLSC Superintendent Shawn Greiner said there is no discussion about changing mask requirements at this time.
“We are working closely with the medical experts and continue to follow the directions of our consult doctors,” he said.
