OCSD school forum turns into mask debate

100 show up at back-to-school meeting, question superintendent over mask requirements

By DAVID NAHAN/Sentinel staff

OCEAN CITY — At a more-than-two-hour meeting Tuesday night, as Interim Superintendent Thomas Baruffi talked about what the district is doing to reopen the Ocean City School District with full-time, in-person instruction, parents pressed him to do more to oppose the statewide mask mandates for students, teachers and staff.

About 100 people attended the meeting at the library at Ocean City High School.

Baruffi focused on the “game-changing” nature of new quarantine rules that should limit the number of students who miss school because of close contact with COVID-positive students. The majority of parents who spoke at the open forum, which was meant to give them the opportunity to ask questions about school reopening in September, complained about the requirement for students to have to wear masks, asserting it will hurt their learning and could have other detrimental effects. They also asked Baruffi and the school board to do more to fight Gov. Phil Murphy’s order.

Although Baruffi and school board members present at the meeting agreed to a request to survey parents about whether they support masking students, the interim superintendent, who has been on the job only about a month following the retirement of longtime superintendent Kathleen Taylor, was firm that he believes with the unknowns about the more contagious Delta variant of the coronavirus, that caution is the best approach and that he and the board are required to follow state laws on the matter.

The meeting was at times contentious, with parents arguing with the superintendent and occasionally with each other masks. Most of the critical comments were directed at the mandate and not at the district for following it.

Game-changing quarantine rules

Baruffi started the meeting with a PowerPoint presentation on COVID-19 safety precautions, showing how there is a rise in cases statewide and locally and that the new Delta variant is responsible for almost all new cases, that it is highly transmissible and as contagious as chicken pox and that it is responsible for a growing number of cases in children. (Those under 12 cannot be vaccinated for it.) Children typically suffer more mild symptoms than adults, unless they have underlying health conditions, and the long-term effect on them is being studied.

Baruffi said it is easy to agree that going to full-time, in-person education is best for students – compared to the remote learning and hybrid schedules from spring 2020 with the onset of the pandemic through the 2020-21 school year. He said the guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and American Academy of Pediatrics recommend masking to prevent students from transmitting or catching the virus.

There are two big changes for the upcoming school year — masks must be worn only inside buildings (instead of on all school grounds like last school year) and contact tracing has been greatly reduced.

Baruffi said he was glad to see a more common-sense approach to contact-tracing.

Last school year, a student or staff member was considered a close contact to someone with the virus if they spent more than 15 minutes within 6 feet of them. That prompted a considerable number of students sent home to quarantine.

On May 24, the district posted on its website the final running total of students and staff who tested positive for the coronavirus and those forced to quarantine for being close contacts.  

Since winter break in the 2020-21 school year, there were 126 positive cases of COVID-19 in the district and 747 close-contact cases requiring quarantine. In the fall, there were 79 positive cases and 488 close-contact cases requiring quarantine.

That put the actual number of coronavirus cases at just over 200 during the school year, forcing more than 1,200 students and staff on quarantine at home.

The new rules state that regardless of vaccination status, students who are within 3 feet of one another will not be required to quarantine if both have been wearing well-fitting masks the whole time. That, Baruffi said, will prevent large-scale quarantines this school year, causing less disruption to learning for the students. 

Because students can take off their masks outside the buildings, it will give the district the opportunity to give all the students breaks on mask-wearing during the school day.

Remote education is not an option for students unless they have been diagnosed with COVID-19. If the schools have to close for any reason other than an emergency order related to COVID — such as a snow day — they still must have 180 days of in-person instruction to meet state requirements.

Because wearing masks should minimize the likelihood of disruption to the in-person education, Baruffi emphasized the importance of doing so.

Parent questions range from basic to challenging

— Some parents questioned why all of the high school students would be eating lunch at the same time since they would be without masks. 

Baruffi said the district is looking at the possibility of staggered lunches but that every available space would be used to keep students socially distanced when their masks were off.

— Last year Taylor said the district would try to use the environment around the high school — the beach and boardwalk and other areas to get students outside. When a parent asked if the district was doing that, Baruffi said a committee was studying that but it was complicated.

— When a parent asked why the plexiglass barriers were still in place in the primary school, but not in other grades, it was explained that is a choice by each school and that because the grade school classes remain separate from each other, the barriers were kept in place because it was highly effective last school year.  

— Asked to clarify rules on close contacts, because they can occur outdoors when students are not in the building, district nurse Jill Berenato used the example of students being close together outdoors during a break or in physical education. (Older) students who are not vaccinated in that contact with a student who tests positive would have to quarantine. If they are vaccinated and asymptomatic, they would not have to quarantine.

That prompted concerns among parents about the stigma of vaccinated versus unvaccinated, allowing others to find out their status, which has become a source of division both locally and nationally. Berenato said HIPAA requirements prevent anyone from knowing a person’s vaccination status, aside from the nurse, and that just being asked to quarantine is not a telling sign because there are other reasons students could be asked to stay home from school, including regular illness.

A parent said teachers should not discuss vaccination status as a topic in classrooms.

There also is a different time limit on being quarantined — or excluded from school. Depending on the threat level in the county, a close contact quarantine lasts five to seven days (if the threat is low to moderate) or as long as 14 days if the threat is high.

Students who are vaccinated and have no COVID-like systems will not have to be excluded from school or tested for an exposure to a COVID-positive student.

— When a parent said the policy penalizes unvaccinated students, who would be required to quarantine after a close contact, Berenato said that those concern needs to go to the Department of Health because the district is following state policy.

There was a similar response when a parent questioned why the close-contact policy occurs when students are outside, when they aren’t required to wear masks.  

— Concerned that students would be asked to report on other students in suspected close-contact cases, Berenato and Baruffi explained it is a complicated process to determine the need to quarantine.

Berenato said when a student tests positive, the first thing the district does is interview the parent. They get that notice from either the parents or the county Department of Health. They also will interview students if they are of age of consent.

“If they say, ‘I think I was around this student,’ then we talk to that student as well,” she said. “We do as much investigation as we can.” 

All of the information goes to the Health Department, which decides who is a close contact.

“That’s truly the only way it can be done,” Baruffi said. “We do have to ask the students sometimes and we want them to be honest with us. Why would they not when the idea is to make sure they weren’t a close contact so they don’t have this disease? We don’t want them to get it. You don’t want them to get it. Encourage your children to be honest. It’s an honor system.”

“It’s not an exact science, it can’t be,” Baruffi added.  

He said the new rules make more sense because they should greatly reduce the number of close-contact cases required to quarantine.

— On a question about gym class, Baruffi said if the students are involved in an aerobic activity, they can remove their masks.  

— The school will have masks available to students who do not have them.

— Baruffi agreed with a suggestion that students be taught to properly wear masks.

Politics enters the discussion

— The political nature of the mask debate came out on more than one occasion during the audience questioning, with one asking if the mask mandate may go away around Election Day coming up in November. The governor’s race is on the ballot.

“I’m going to make a comment about that because everybody laughed about it,” Baruffi said. He said he heard there was no way masks were going to be mandated before Election Day because it is a politically divisive topic, “but guess what, the governor mandated masks. I don’t know that it’s fair to say this is political. I don’t care.”

“I actually think it was something that needed to be done because we don’t know” about the impact on children, he said, noting he shared the information with the audience about the nature of the virus in the PowerPoint presentation. “We all know this variant is out there, whether we want to acknowledge it or not. It doesn’t matter. It’s out there.”

“We don’t know what it’s going to be like to bring 1,300 kids into the school and what kind of impact that is going to have,” Baruffi said, adding he hopes that if the levels of the virus go down at some point the district will get the “green light” to end the mask mandate. “I hate wearing them as much as anybody. But until then, I don’t know how we can possibly do that.”

— A number of parents claimed they haven’t seen any studies showing the efficacy of masks and that there are negative effects on students from wearing them. (One audience member cited a study that showed the value of the masks, but others in the audience disputed that study’s findings and some scattered bickering ensued.)

Baruffi said he has not seen any studies showing bad effects from mask-wearing among students or an instance of a particular student suffering from wearing a mask, but that he does know the new Delta variant is contagious.

Another parent said it is “unethical” to require young children and special-needs children to wear masks. “More kids are bitten by sharks than die of COVID,” he said.

In a comment he used repeatedly, Baruffi said the priority of the district has been to get back to full-time, in-person instruction and that following the rules allows them to do just that.

Lobby the governor, do a mask survey

A number of parents who were getting increasingly upset at the meeting said Baruffi should be lobbying the governor to change the rules and asked that he and the school board members take a survey to learn the sentiments of the majority of parents.

When one parent asked if Murphy changed the rules to allow each individual district to decide on masking, Baruffi said he would make it optional.

Although he later agreed to a survey, he made it clear he was not sure what the majority of the community wants. Academic Services Director Curt Nath said a survey had been active and remains available on the school’s website (oceancityschools.org). Nath said the district reads all of the responses to the survey.

After the meeting, Ocean City Board of Education President Joe Clark said although most parents at the meeting were against requiring students to be masked, the district has also received a lot of calls from parents not just supportive of masks, but wanting to ensure all the staff and teachers are vaccinated. The governor has required all teachers and staff to be vaccinated by mid-October or they will be subject to COVID testing once or twice a week.

A Monmouth University Poll released Aug. 23 revealed two-thirds of New Jersey voters, including parents of school-age children, support the state’s mask mandate in schools. The survey shows 67 percent of voters and 69 percent of parents are in favor of the mandate.

The survey also found just more than half supported a vaccine mandate for students ages 12 and older.

According to Patrick Murray, director of the independent Monmouth University Polling Institute, “The vocal opposition to the state’s school mask mandate is a decidedly minority view. However, there may be greater pushback from parents if a vaccine mandate was instituted for school children.” (This is reported on the university’s website, Monmouth.edu.)

School board member Cecilia Gallelli-Keyes, who was at the meeting, said the board will listen to parents because they are the public’s representatives but all action must be a collective decision of the board.

As members of the audience pushed back against the mandate as the meeting went on — and there were some rumblings of having students show up without masks to see what the district would do — Baruffi said he had expected most of the people in the audience would be against masks but he held fast to the position the district must follow the rules.

The point of the forum, he said, was what the district needed to do to get back to school. 

“That’s our goal,” Baruffi said.

“We are a school district. We understand what we have to do. We have to teach these children,” he said. “Whether you want to hear it or not — I’ve said this 20 times — we have to play by the rules. It’s a law. I hear people say, ‘We don’t have to listen just because the governor said this.’ Well, you know what? You do. They mandate that you wear seatbelts. You stop at red lights. How many times have you stopped at a red light and are wondering, ‘Why am I stopped?’ … You stop because it’s the law. Right now, this is our red light as a school district.

 “We have to do what we can, within the rules. That’s our goal. That’s our focus,” Baruffi said. “It’s not to have debates about this. We don’t have the time. You have just as much power as I do or anybody else … to gather people together and take a strong stance. …. Let your voices be heard.”