Iowa City school leaders discuss how to pinpoint an end date for mask requirement

Iowa City school district leaders are pondering a key question: When's the right time to do away with the mask requirement?

In early November, administrators released a draft of a rubric that could be used to determine mask usage based on county-level COVID-19 transmission and school building-specific absences. District leaders then pivoted from that idea at a follow-up discussion with the school board on Nov. 23, saying that approach could be difficult to execute and suggesting the district follow broader guidance from a public health agency.

However, neither the guidance used to make a masking determination or when it will be implemented has been finalized. Community members can expect another discussion about how and when masks would no longer be required in December.

The school board enacted a mask requirement on Sept. 14, one day after it could legally do so. The district had been without a mask requirement since mid-May, when the state government passed a law prohibiting them in schools. A federal judge then paused that law in response to a suit brought by parents of students with disabilities, paving the way for districts like Iowa City to again require masks.

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That case is still making its way through the courts, however — leaving mask requirements implemented by districts like Iowa City hanging in the balance. Attorneys made their arguments before a three-member panel of the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals on Nov. 18.

As of Monday, 109 Iowa City students have active positive cases and 245, or 1.69% of the student body, are in quarantine, according to the district data dashboard.

The discussions about an end to masking in Iowa City schools began in response to vaccines becoming available for people ages 5 to 11 earlier this month.

Chace Ramey, deputy superintendent, told the school board Nov. 23 that nearly 1,300 students in that age range have gotten the vaccine via district-run clinics. Second-dose vaccine clinics hosted by the Iowa City Community School District opened up Monday.

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At a meeting Nov. 9, district leadership presented the school board with potential guidance that could be used to determine when to do away with the mask requirement. It used two factors to make that determination: building-level absence rates of students and staff due to coronavirus, and Johnson County transmission levels as defined by the CDC.

Masks would be required if a "high" percentage of students and staff were absent due to the coronavirus, the draft rubric showed, but that percentage had yet to be determined. Masks would also be required if there was a "moderate" or "high" county-level transmission and a "moderate" building absence rate.

The difficult question for the school district turned out to be how to determine those building absence rates.

At the meeting two weeks later, Superintendent Matt Degner said it "doesn't seem like there's really any basis to root that decision in for where we would put those percentages."

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Instead, the school administration suggested it align guidance on masking with public health agencies like the CDC, Johnson County Public Health Department or the Iowa Department of Public Health.

"Linking to a piece of guidance seems pretty consistent to how we’ve handled this," Degner said, and it's "something that would keep us rooted in how we’ve made decisions prior, rather than starting to create our own protocols."

The pending litigation complicates the situation, Ramey said.

“Nobody has a crystal ball, and so the ‘when do we do this’ part of that conversation is still out there as well. Is it when we come back from winter break? Is it before spring break?’ I think that’s a large piece of the conversation that we need to have, too,” Ramey said.

Shawn Eyestone, president of the school board, said he wants the district to be prepared with a plan related to masking that is not solely tied to the outcome of a lawsuit.

"I think we need to still have something crafted, assuming that we have the authority to enact it," he said.

That would be some sort of rubric with numbers that the district holds itself to, he said.

Degner cautioned that, even with the caseloads in some buildings right now, the percentage of students out sick is still low, which would complicate the question of using numbers on a rubric. Eyestone suggested the rubric could be based on a number of students out sick from a particular building or 1%, whichever is higher, or another similar solution.

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Eyestone said the goal is to get to a place where masks would not be needed. Looking at the data, that's not immediate, he said — but it will happen. And he wants to know what the "trigger" would be to decide when that day is.

“I think we can probably work some sort of metric in there that’s going to ... make sense to all of us, but also protect our kids and our staff that are in those buildings. That’s the intent," Eyestone said.

Cleo Krejci covers education for the Iowa City Press-Citizen. You can reach her at ckrejci@press-citizen.com or on Twitter via @_CleoKrejci.

This article originally appeared on Iowa City Press-Citizen: End to COVID mask mandate in Iowa City schools is under discussion