EDITORIAL: Don’t punish schools that end masking

Published 2:00 pm Friday, February 25, 2022

The decision by Oregon state health and education officials to end the statewide mask mandate for schools on March 19 — moved up from the original March 31 — is reasonable.

But only partly.

Officials apparently aren’t content to simply make the decision that almost every other state has made and that data clearly support — to end the mask requirement without reservation because masks are no longer necessary to control the virus among students and staff.

School districts can make masks optional on March 19.

But those that do so — and Baker 5J Superintendent Mark Witty said he expects the district will be among them — might be treated as though their decision isn’t wholly sound.

State officials, in announcing the pending cancellation of the mask requirement, didn’t exactly emphasize a detail — districts that drop the mandate will no longer be able to allow students’ negative results with a rapid test to shorten or avoid the quarantine period, what’s known as the “test-to-stay” policy that’s been in place this school year and is designed to keep students in school as much as possible. Instead, students in districts where masks are optional would have to stay home for five days if they’re determined to be a close contact of someone who tested positive for COVID-19.

Marc Siegel, a spokesman for the Oregon Department of Education, told The Oregonian that the agency plans to issue new guidance soon related to quarantine periods. That guidance should drop the differential treatment for districts that end required masking next month.

Schools in Baker City and elsewhere have navigated the pandemic with aplomb. And now that the omicron variant — which poses an infinitesimal risk of serious illness to students — is waning rapidly, neither mask requirements nor punitive rules for districts that make masks optional is justified.

The end of masking in schools should be a celebratory event, a recognition of the sacrifices that students and staff have made. State officials need to embrace this progress rather than overreacting to a virus that we are learning to live with.

It’s not 2020.

— Jayson Jacoby, Baker City Herald editor