By DAVID BOYLE
Recently, Anchorage School Board President Margo Bellamy led the board in overriding Superintendent Deena Bishop’s effort to allow students to be able to breathe freely again, unmasked.
“I am confident that ASD is able to transition to parent-informed masking when we return to school on January 3rd,” Bishop said on Dec. 15. Except for member Dave Donley, the school board did not believe it was time to do so. Instead of allowing parents to decide whether their children needed to wear masks, and instead of allowing Bishop to lead the district, Bellamy and her fellow board members believed they knew better than parents. The masks stayed on.
Students were to be masked until Jan. 15. It is now February 18, and the children still cannot go to school without masks. The board cites the broad belief they are following the science, yet no scientific data has been presented to validate this assertion.
Now, Bishop has sent a letter to the parents saying she intends to make a mask-optional policy starting Feb. 28.
“Absent unforeseen conditions, I propose to transition the Anchorage School District (ASD) to parent-informed, optional mask wearing for students and optional mask wear for adults in our schools and facilities. This districtwide change will be implemented on Monday, February 28th. It’s time to do this for our students,” Bishop wrote to parents.
“As a career educator, I understand how critical it is to focus the District’s energy on student learning. I believe that continued mandatory mask wearing is counter-productive and negatively impacts our students’ education, intellectual development, and emotional well-being. COVID-19 cases across the State of Alaska (SOA), Municipality of Anchorage (MOA), and ASD are dropping rapidly. Overall knowledge of COVID-19 and the availability of effective vaccines and treatments largely enable a return to normalcy in the classroom,” she wrote.
Bishop said the last two years have been challenging for everyone and the District strives to be responsive to staff and student needs. “I plan to sustain all other mitigation measures and procedures that allowed us to re-open schools and keep them open during the Omicron outbreak. The District is prepared to offer PCR tests to symptomatic staff and students through the end of the school year. Our COVID-19 page includes this year’s timeline and outlines our step-down approach,” she said in her note.
The district reports that as of Feb. 18 there were 71 positive PCR tests among all students and staff. This means that of the 48,377 students and staff, 0.14% tested positive for Covid. There is no information about how affected any of these students or staff had been by testing positive. Were any hospitalized or severely ill?
Board President Bellamy has been more interested in the board’s ability to exert power and to force unneeded mandates on children. But with elections on the horizon and Bellamy running for re-election, it’s possible the board will go along with Superintendent Bishop and allow the mask mandate to expire.
The matter will be a topic of Tuesday’s Anchorage School Board meeting.
At the Feb. 9 board meeting, Board member Donley asked about the masking of students and cited several studies, including a reference to an article in The Atlantic magazine that supported the unmasking of children. Bellamy brushed off his discussion.
The U.K., Ireland, all of Scandinavia, France, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Italy have exempted kids, with varying age cutoffs, from wearing masks in classrooms. There are no more outbreaks in those schools than in American schools.
Even the World Health Organization does not recommend masks for children ages 6 to 11 because of the “potential impact of wearing a mask on learning and psychosocial development.”
Many argue that student masking has done more harm than good to students, especially the youngest. Board President Bellamy and her policy of masking students has led to emotional stress, anxiety, fear, aggression, and depression among students. Masks have severely impacted the language, emotional, and social development of many children, effects that will be long lasting It will be very difficult to remediate these harmful effects.
The stunted learning that been the result of masking is especially harmful to minority and low-income students, a legacy of Bellamy and the majority of the school board, which have widened the achievement gap in an already failing district.
.
