Parents across the suburbs have appearing before school boards in recent weeks urging districts to either require students wear masks or make them optional. (John Starks | Staff Photographer)
Masks will be strongly encouraged but not required for unvaccinated students and staff when school starts next month in Libertyville Elementary District 70.
The stance is a turnaround for Superintendent Matt Barbini, who two weeks ago said students in the district’s four elementary schools, as well as unvaccinated students and staff at Highland Middle School, would be required to wear masks indoors.
Barbini said that over the past few weeks he has read and heard “some very strong opinions” on masking in schools and, after “a considerable amount of reflection and soul searching,” he changed course. He said it would be difficult to enforce a mask requirement and keeping it could lead to “open conflict” in a divided community.
District officials said they don’t want principals or teachers having to enforce a masking rule.
“It’s a polarizing issue, and I understand that,” Barbini said Monday. “We’re not going to make either side happy.”
The district will be require masks for all students and adults on school buses, per directives from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
District 70 joins Oak Grove Elementary District 68, Grayslake High School District 127 and Arlington Heights Elementary District 25, among others, in not mandating masks.
Read more here.
Barrington D220, please spend more energy teaching our kids and less time mandating power over them, like a D70 that won’t require masks in the Fall.
This is a big mistake!
Care to elaborate, Jan? I didn’t realize kids were at risk. What has changed?
This is a reprinted article from the Daily Herald. If you click on the link, not only will you get the full article (which does not appear here), but also a whole bunch of another articles talking about how the virus is now spreading in vaccinated individuals, in children, and that children can have lasting long-term effects. Your sarcastic statement that you didn’t realize kids were at risk is at least 4 months out of date.
This isn’t a bold move by Arlington Heights, Libertyville, or any of the other districts. They 100% expect a county mandate on masks indoors to override them before the school year starts. They just want to redirect the vitriol from anti-maskers to institutions above them in the meantime.
All of these districts can be mask optional if testing is mandatory for all that don’t show proof of vaccine. But the “choice” movement has no chance of progressing because it demands the choice to wear masks regardless of vaccination status, the choice to even provide vaccination status, the choice to participate in testing, and – perhaps most ludicrously – it opposes contact tracing. All of the statements can be heard on repeat in district board meeting public comments.
But yeah, what changed Jan? Care to elaborate?
337. From 2019 through July 2021 that is how many people 17 and under have died with covid. No telling of their previous conditions, many could have been sick already.
Just Google covid deaths by age, you dope. Stay in your basement if you’d like to.
Where was it intimated that the article wasn’t a link to the Herald? The Observer routinely posts and shares local news and news articles that pertain to local issues for its readership. If you don’t like it, renew your Herald subscription and unsubscribe from the Observer. Those of us long time readers appreciate the Observer providing this information.
How could you let people go maskless to in person learning? Oh the horror. We will once again have teachers and students dropping like flies and stacked like cordwood in refrigerated morgue trucks outside our overrun hospitals like we did last year when all the private schools in our area had open schools ALL YEAR through the public school lockdowns. Oops that body count never happened….. did it? We didn’t have dead private school teachers and dead catholic school students all over the place did we?Never mind.
Emily Litella
What ever happened to “My Body my Choice” or does that only apply to infanticide or as Jan once stated termination of a zygote. Jan would rather suspend all sense of logic and proportion taking orders from Dr. Fauci who once opined you can contract Aids from a toilet seat.
Jan is a walking contradiction like most liberals. Intellectually lazy, illogical and not worth expending the time or energy to educate. Vaccines and masking are a personal choice, a Constitutionally protected activity, or at least it once was.