As Matt reported Thursday night, Los Angeles County is going back to requiring people to wear masks indoors, regardless of their vaccination status. This is all thanks to the Delta variant, which is spreading among the unvaccinated. People have been assured that those who are vaccinated are protected against the variant, with no need for a booster at this time. And yet, as of Saturday night at 11:59 pm, even the vaccinated will have to mask up while indoors. But there's another mask mandate issue at hand in the entire state of California, and it has to do with mask mandates for school children.
For POLITICO, Mackenzie Mays reports that "Newsom faces backlash over masks in California schools."
The piece calls such mandates "the latest sign that the recall-threatened leader must tread lightly as schools prepare to open next month."
As Matt also reported, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recently announced that vaccinated children do not need to wear masks in schools.
The mask mandate was announced Monday, which even The Los Angeles Times acknowledged was "one of the nation's most stringent," and requires all students, regardless of vaccination status, to wear masks. Otherwise, they would be forbidden from campus.
Mays also wrote:
The Democratic governor said his mask rules were intended to ensure school officials could open full-time for the first time since the pandemic began. But for critics, the new rules were distilled into one authoritarian takeaway: all students must mask up or else.
Understandably, the backlash was particularly swift. In fact, the enforcement rule was deleted just hours later, with Newsom being forced to clarify that it will be up to the local schools to deal with enforcement. Not a good luck for a governor facing recall. Mays writes this is "putting Newsom and his policies under a daily microscope" and "For now, every move will be viewed through the recall prism."
The backlash came from all sides, especially with the confusion it created with some thinking the governor's clarification meant the mask mandate was rescinded entirely:
The Newsom administration responded to frustration this week by tweeting that local school districts would decide how to enforce the mask policy. It was an attempt to soften the language that bluntly barred students from classrooms, signaling how sensitive the governor's office is to criticism over schools at the moment.
But the tweet was seen as a backtrack, even though Newsom health officials say they were only explaining the policy in place.
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Sacramento-based education lobbyist Kevin Gordon said he was fielding calls this week from superintendents who thought the state had reversed the mask mandate entirely.
“There were probably easier paths that avoided a mandate. He didn’t have to go down this road,” Gordon said of Newsom. “This has actually been very welcomed by some districts because it solves the bigger problem of social distancing, which schools knew they did not have the space for.”
Still, Newsom's latest rules drew criticism from parents who don't want any students in masks, including a "Let Them Breathe" movement out of San Diego, and from those who feared the rules would complicate things for schools that they thought should have opened months ago.
Open Schools CA, a parent group that has pushed Newsom to mandate in-person instruction, said the universal mask mandate ignores evidence that Covid-19 transmission in schools is unlikely and disregards California's low virus rates.
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Republicans pounced on the mask miscommunication as a sign of Newsom’s mishandling of the pandemic and alleged that the governor had backtracked on the rules to save face.
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Monica Gandhi, an infectious disease expert at the University of California, San Francisco who has become a leading voice during the pandemic, said it would have been better to require masks in schools only when local Covid-19 cases reach a certain number because that approach relies on science and provides more transparency behind the rationale.
Under the current plan, there’s no “off ramp” in place for how the mask mandate should change if case rates hit significantly low numbers, she said.
“It really backfired,” Gandhi said of the plan. “I just feel like they are creating a lot of confusion with this, and people are really angry and upset and concerned.”
Adding more infuriation with Newsom, as Mays also points out, California public schools have endured some of the nation's longest closures.
The recall election will take place on September 14. Because the governor's office missed a deadline, Newsom will not be able to list his party affiliation.