Here’s what questions have emerged with St. Clair County’s K-12 mask order

When the ongoing K-12 school mask order was issued in St. Clair County, both county and school officials said they learned of the rules within just hours or a day of the announcement.

Now, roughly halfway through the temporary mandate’s term ending Jan. 28, questions are still emerging about the reasoning behind the decision and how the order’s efficacy will be weighed moving forward.

“There were many discussions about the benefits of masking requirements, but the actual decision was made independently by the health department,” Dr. Annette Mercatante, the county’s public health officer, said in an email this week. “Overall, superintendents are strong advocates for the wellbeing of their students and the community they serve but are also primarily educators as opposed to health experts.”

When the mandate was announced on Dec. 29, the health department cited its intent to act pre-emptively and get ahead of a rise of COVID cases in school-aged children once they were back in classrooms after the holidays.

But since school returned this month, local districts have reported daily and weekly varying COVID-19 case counts compared to numbers before the break in December.

And that means, despite the pushback from families irked by a countywide mandate, it may still be too soon to rule on the effectiveness of the mandate.

In December, Port Huron Area Schools had reported 105 student and staff cases over a 17-day period with one case logged over break, while 180 had been reported between Jan. 4 and Thursday.

East China Schools reported 85 cases in its weekly totals between Nov. 29 and Dec. 17 and 50 since Jan. 3 as of Thursday, while Algonac reported 61 and 46 total cases over the same periods.

Both Memphis’ and Marysville’s school districts reported regular totals that included confirmed and probable cases. Marysville’s case count was 46 and 55 for December and January, respectively, while it was seven and 38 in Memphis.

Yale Public Schools reported more than 20 cases in December but had reached 19 for this month as of Thursday. For Capac schools, the totals reported were six and 13 cases between the two months.

How will the health department evaluate masking rules?

Mercatante said health officials planned to use two sets of metrics to measure the order’s success as part of an evaluation process that began with this month’s return to the classroom. One is the percent change in case counts since the break, she said, as well as “the proportion of cases among school-age individuals compared to other age groups.”

In talking about the latest health order, officials still recall past data — including from a period when the last controversial mandate, which was about quarantines, was in effect at the start of the school year.

“When this school year started in late August/early September, we saw a surge in cases among our school-age residents,” Mercatante said. “Cases in that age group surged 490% from August to September and the proportion of school-age cases increased from under 10% of all cases in August to 25% of all cases in September.”

“… It is our hope that masking can blunt the surge in disease among kids and help keep schools operational so kids can continue to have in-person learning.”

Why did officials considered past masking requirements a success?

Mercatante also recalled conclusions that the masking requirements separately installed in Port Huron and Algonac schools in late November and early December ultimately reduced the number of school-age COVID-19 cases.

It was a yardstick first referenced in the few days after the countywide order.

According to the health officials, there was a 32% decrease in coronavirus cases among St. Clair County residents ages 5 to 18 from November to December last year, while there was a 33% increase in all age groups overall. Algonac and Port Huron schools make up about 47% of the county’s total student population.

Like the health department, Port Huron Area School Superintendent Theo Kerhoulas said they considered the district’s late 2021 mask requirements successful.

“I can’t speak to spread, but the number of staff and students asked to quarantine dropped significantly at Port Huron Schools due to universal masking and thus our schools remained open,” he said in a statement. “That’s the goal … safe in-person instruction.”

District spokeswoman Keely Baribeau said continuing mask requirements this month was also already on the minds of Port Huron school officials when the county’s order was issued.

“Our district is constantly re-evaluating and would have at least considered mitigations like universal masking after the holiday if the health department did not require them,” she said.

It wasn’t their call, but were other districts prepared to require masks?

Although the mask order was not born directly out of talks with school officials, the health department has joined regular discussions among superintendents since the pandemic began.

At the start, however, decisions about mitigation requirements were coming from the state level.

It’s a distinction that Kevin Miller, superintendent of the St. Clair County Regional Educational Service Agency, said offers a peek at administrators’ mindset on shifts in who the decision-makers are.

A participant in regular talks with Mercatante and district superintendents, the RESA official was among the few to publicly back this month’s mandate, citing it as the county’s best chance to keep face-to-face learning in place for an industry already affected by teacher and worker shortages and absences due to quarantines.

“It’s weird how the conversation has morphed,” Miller said. “Just based on what’s going to be a national or state order, an MDHHS health order alone, it’s just really changed. (And it is) fascinating to watch.”

Despite the shift in pressure to local leaders, some superintendents join county commissioners in the preference it stays that way.

On Jan. 4, East China Schools Superintendent Suzanne Cybulla said they "would like to see the control for these decisions left to the individual school districts.”

On Thursday, Yale Superintendent Kurt Sutton said something similar.

“We have had questions about why the mandate was done at this time, and I think those are fair questions to ask,” he said. “We have to be very cognizant of not only the spread of COVID but also the feelings around that. There’s been a lot of strong feelings on both sides of it.

“What we have asked for is the opportunity for the district to look at our own data and make decisions based on the data we are seeing within our community. Now, what might be occurring in another district 30 miles away might be very different than what we’re experiencing in this district.”

For Port Huron schools, having made that kind of decision already may have helped brace for continued mask rules from the county.

“When our district required masking back in November, we asked our families that wanted to discuss it further to bring their concerns to my office and not directly to the schools,” Kerhoulas said. “Although those were sometimes difficult conversations, we had already had them with our families by the time of the health department’s requirement.”

Contact Jackie Smith at (810) 989-6270 or jssmith@gannett.com. Follow her on Twitter @Jackie20Smith.

This article originally appeared on Port Huron Times Herald: Here’s what questions have emerged with St. Clair County’s K-12 mask order