A divided Tanque Verde Unified School District governing board ultimately approved a mask mandate for students and staff in preschool through the sixth grade during its special meeting Tuesday.
The mask mandate, approved 3-2, will be in effect Nov. 15 through Dec. 17. Board members Vieri Tenuta, Anne Velosa and Susan Fry voted in favor of the measure, while Jeffrey Neff and Jeremy Schalk voted against it.
“I think in relation to PreK-6 the option to vaccinate is there now, however, there hasn’t been enough time to be able to provide layered mitigation,” Tenuta said, referring to layering several practices to protect from COVID-19.
The board’s special meeting to discuss further COVID-19 mitigation practices came a week after the Pima County Health Department recommended that the district temporarily close down the Agua Caliente Elementary School due to a coronavirus outbreak.
Numbers at the time, according to the district’s coronavirus dashboard, showed that there were more than 40 positive COVID-19 infections at Agua Caliente that were reported to the health department.
On Tuesday, that number was changed to 11 positive cases. The northeast-side district added a note that the previous number had included positive infections that occurred on and off campus, while the updated number reflected only cases on school grounds.
Agua Caliente students, who were all put on distance learning after the temporary school closure, will be returning to in-person classes Monday. But Tenuta insisted that they couldn’t ensure that every kid returning to school was not still sick with COVID, and further contagion was still possible.
“My concern is that quarantine doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re following that quarantine order from the health department,” he said. “We don’t have a guarantee that those students are going to be healthy.”
Schalk said he believed that more students would return to school wearing masks voluntarily after experiencing the Agua Caliente closure, and that the problem would “solve itself to some extent.”
For his part, Neff said he believed the mask mandate would mainly cause more division among the district’s community.
“My opinion is that this will cause great dissension in the district and I don’t think it’s really effective that much,” Neff said. He added that he preferred to further explore Superintendent Scott Hagerman’s proposal to implement masking when necessary under a certain threshold.
Under that measure, Hagerman explained, students would be required to mask up for 10 days as soon as staff saw an increase in cases within a classroom or throughout a school.
The board members voted unanimously to table that item for the next meeting, when Hagerman could present more scientific data on the effectiveness of that measure.
During the meeting, the board also unanimously approved to suspend large district events through the end of January, and discuss further mitigation strategies for smaller school events such as field trips and after-school activities.
