Debates raging across the nation over mask mandates for children in schools arrived in Ocean City Tuesday, Aug. 24, during a two-hour community forum on getting the students back to school in September.
At the heart of the debate is a simple but complicated question: Whose rights get precedence?
Are the rights of parents who don’t want their children to wear masks more important than the rights of parents who want masks for everyone so their children have more protection from COVID-19?
The issue is moot for the time being in schools, but it reflects the entire mask debate throughout the nation: does one person’s right to be free from a mask supercede another’s right to be protected from a deadly virus?
It is moot in New Jersey schools because there is a state mandate requiring everyone – students, teachers, administrators, staff and visitors – to wear masks whenever they are inside school buildings. An additional state mandate requires all teachers and staff to be vaccinated for COVID-19 by mid-October or be forced to undergo regular testing.
The forum last week, led by Interim Superintendent of Schools Thomas Baruffi, was focused on getting the students back to school for full-time, in-person learning, but the audience was one Baruffi said he expected – mostly people who don’t believe their children should be wearing masks. As such, that is where the majority of questions and statements focused, with parents asserting there is no evidence masks protect children, that masks actually are detrimental physically and emotionally, and that statistics show young children mostly suffer only mild symptoms even if they do contract the virus. (Baruffi’s presentation included that last fact as well with the facts that more children are contracting the virus, the Delta variant is as transmissible as chicken pox, and children with underlying conditions are vulnerable.)
While neither the audience nor school officials have a choice in this matter under the law, what if they could? What if it came down to a vote?
A new Monmouth University poll showed a strong majority of New Jersey parents – 69 percent – support the mask mandate in schools. Although the majority of parents at the meeting were against masking, school officials said they have received correspondence from parents on the other side of the issue, supporting the mask mandate and calling for even stricter measures, such as a demand all teachers and staff are vaccinated.
The audience succeeded in getting the district to survey parents on their feelings of masks. (A survey has been available online at the school’s web site, oceancityschools.org, where parents can raise any concern.)
If the survey results are akin to the Monmouth survey and nearly 70 percent want masks, will that stop the anti-mask parents from fighting to take the masks off of their children? Hardly. Many take the mandate as a violation of their civil rights. The issue, and getting the COVID-19 vaccine, have become a lightning rod among friends, family and neighbors, causing just as many problems as the proverbial Thanksgiving dinners where it makes sense to avoid talk of national politics.
Some want to wear their mask-wearing beliefs and vaccination status on their sleeves; others believe it is no one’s business but their own.
And what if the results in Ocean City – or statewide for that matter – are reversed, that a majority is against masks?
It still boils down to the same question: Whose rights get priority?
Either way, the district will follow the law, but who gets to decide the greater issue? What serves the greater good?
People talk about their individual freedoms – that the government shouldn’t force mandates on them over masks or vaccines – but what collective responsibility do we owe to each other? Many of the local, state and federal laws that we all have to follow are rules agreed upon as a shared responsibility. The preamble to the Declaration of Independence laid down our inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, but how does that fare when that individual liberty conflicts?
Our founding fathers wrote the declaration to escape the tyranny of the British Crown, but a dozen years later wrote our own Constitution with the supreme set of laws of governing our own country. The preamble to the Constitution, in part, reads to “promote the general welfare.”
Interpreting the Constitution has been an ongoing topic of debate in the 230-some years since it was written; we don’t expect a simple resolution to the question of mask priority.
The majority of parents on both sides of the mask issue are sincere and have their children’s interests at heart. We believe the district is doing the right thing right now, not only because it is required to follow the law.
We believe the school district – and the others around New Jersey – are correctly putting the priority on the community as a whole for the protection of the youngest among us who are in the classrooms and the faculty and staff who are there to care for them.
The death toll from COVID-19 has exceeded 637,000 across the United States since the pandemic began and the new Delta variant is creating new surges of infections close to home. It is true most of the continuing deaths and serious hospitalizations for COVID-19 remain with older people – almost all unvaccinated – but erring on the side of caution at this point in time is the best way to promote the general welfare.