Superintendent of the Mat-Su Borough School District Randy Trani presented his school Covid-19 mitigation plan to the borough school board on Wednesday night.
The plan to be rolled out is school-specific, and is dramatically different from that being implemented by the Anchorage School District, where it’s “one size fits all” and students and staff must be masked when in campus facilities, except in limited situations.
For Mat-Su schools that have no cases of Covid-19, no masks are required of students and staff, while if there is a Covid-19 diagnosis at a school, the administration will review information from the State of Alaska Department of Health and Social Services, and has an option of masks or other measures. If there is a widespread outbreak at a school, the campus may be closed temporarily, with students doing distance learning.
“We are treating each individual school building as a community,” said Thomas Bergey, who is president of the School Board. The only guidance the board has given to the superintendent is that the schools will remain open, he said. The details of how to do that are operational matters in the purview of the superintendent.
“What folks don’t understand is that school boards, under Title 14 of state code, have specific duties, and the superintendent has specific duties. Keeping schools open or closed — that is the superintendent’s job,” he said. “The school board doesn’t have the authority to close the schools but has the authority to end a superintendent’s contract.”
Enrollment numbers for Mat-Su Borough schools were released last night by Trani during his superintendent report, and it appears the district will be on track for about 19,000 students, Bergey said, about the same as last year.
In Anchorage, parents are sharing stories about moving to the Mat-Su so their students can attend school without masks, and play football or other sports and take part in after-school activities. Bergey has heard those stories. Many parents testified at the board meeting on Wednesday, and nearly all of them wanted the board and superintendent know that they oppose masking the children.
In a parent survey responded to by 750 people in the Mat-Su, only 17 percent supported masks for school this fall, while 71 percent of the parents said “no” to masks on students. 55 percent of all parents participating in the survey were in the “hell no” category.
Read: Mask outrage at Anchorage School Board meeting
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Read: Enrollment explodes at no-mask Anchorage Christian Schools
