NJ School Mask Mandate In 2022: Will Gov. Murphy Extend It?

NEW JERSEY — Gov. Phil Murphy's K-12 mask mandate officially expires Jan. 11 and in November, the Democratic governor was giving hints he was going to gradually drop the mask requirement in schools.

However on Jan. 1, Murphy officially asked the state Legislature to grant him a 90-day extension of emergency powers, amid the highest case numbers in the history of the pandemic.

"On January 1st, I formally notified leadership in the Senate and Assembly to extend for an additional 90 days our administration’s emergency powers related to vaccine distribution and administration, testing, and ensuring adherence to CDC guidance in vulnerable settings," said Gov. Murphy Monday on his official Twitter account.

That same day, Jan. 1, New Jersey reported 29,740 new cases, the highest since the pandemic began. Also, these latest totals are very likely an undercount, because they don't include the results of home tests. New Jersey logged more people with COVID in the hospital on Monday than at any point in the past year, and the most since early May 2020.

In June, Murphy formally ended the COVID-19 public state of emergency. But while he discontinued the state of emergency this past summer, he allowed several of his executive pandemic orders to last until Jan. 11, 2022, under the Emergency Health Powers Act. Specifically, the governor said he could unilaterally implement any recommendations from the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention, and the CDC recommends mask wearing in indoor public spaces.

In order to extend the K-12 mask mandate:

"He would have to either come to the Legislature, or declare another state of emergency, which he could do by using the spike in cases as an excuse," said state Sen. Declan O'Scanlon, a Republican from Monmouth County.

O'Scanlon said he personally would not vote to renew the K-12 mask mandate.

"I think all Republicans and a significant numbers of Democrats would not vote to extend the K-12 mask mandate," he said, referring to the Democrat-majority Legislature.

"I think it should be up to local school districts to decide what's best," O'Scanlon continued. "And if they keep it, more power to them. I don't think masks make much difference in preventing the spread of COVID. Certainly, masks in school have not stopped our case rates from going up."

The only U.S. states that had mandatory school mask mandates in the fall of 2021 were New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, California and Washington.

Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf already said he will let that state's K-12 mask mandate expire on Jan. 17. Incoming New York City Mayor Eric Adams, also a Democrat, said when he won election he hopes to end NYC's school mask mandate when he takes office Jan. 1. And New York state Gov. Kathy Hochul said she will lift the statewide mask mandate if coronavirus cases drop after the holidays.

Before the arrival of the omicron variant and holiday season case surge, cases were trending down in New Jersey.

This led Gov. Murphy to publicly muse at a November press conference that he would drop the school mask mandate in January, if enough New Jersey children get vaccinated.

"The executive order for mask mandating in schools, just to put a date out there — and I'm not suggesting this is the date folks should focus on, but another data point — is January 11 that expires," said Murphy. "So we would have to volitionally re-up that ...

"In terms of lifting the mask mandate in schools, I could see it as we do it in a phased approach if that number of 12- to 17-year-olds gets into an acceptable zone, which it almost by definition will before the younger kids," said the governor in November. "You could see making a move, phasing it in, based on the age of the kids, high school versus middle school versus grammar school. That seems to me to be a sensible way to think about this."

Prior: Murphy: K-12 Mask Mandate May Not Need To Be Extended (Nov. 10)

Get great local news. Sign up for Patch emails: https://patch.com/subscribe Contact this Patch reporter: Carly.baldwin@patch.com.

This article originally appeared on the Middletown Patch