By ABIGAIL YOUMANS and SARA CLIFFORD | The Democrat
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Within the first three days of school, four students at Helmsburg, Brown County Middle and Brown County High schools tested positive for COVID-19, prompting quarantines of up to an entire classroom.
Over the weekend, new Brown County Schools Superintendent Emily Tracy sent out a parent phone call: Masks were coming back.
Everyone in Brown County schools is now required to wear masks indoors when social distancing cannot happen, regardless of vaccination status.
On Monday morning, students and parents gathered outside Brown County High School to protest.
Lisa Patrick, a parent to a Brown County High School senior and junior, organized the protest as a Facebook event, in addition to a petition on Change.org that has more than 600 signatures.
Patrick said that after dealing with required mask-wearing for a third school year, many parents and students are “done.”
“Masks are obviously not doing any good,” she said. “The CDC (Centers for Disease Control) keep flipping, (saying) vaccinated children are now just as likely to get it.”
She said that she struggles to keep a mask on for an extended amount of time, but the children in schools are required to wear them for eight hours.
Tracy clarified in a later phone call to the newspaper that students are not required to wear them for the entire day, just indoors and when social distancing is not possible.
“Kids can’t speak up,” Patrick said. “The masks are not going to do anything. This age group is not the age group to worry about. They’re trying to control it like the common cold. It has to run its course.”
Patrick said her child who is a senior has contemplated getting the vaccine, unsure if they’ll be able to participate in various school sports and functions without one. She is resistant.
After the group stood on the corner of Brown County High School’s campus, they walked to the Brown County Schools administration office, then planned to go to the Brown County Health Department.
“We’re not letting this go,” Patrick said.
A group of high school students also held signs saying “UNMASK ME” and “No More Masks” in front of the school’s steps. The student organizer, sophomore Evie Taylor, said that several students don’t want to wear masks and don’t want to be forced to do so.
“We all hate wearing masks,” she said, “and we want to be heard.”
A third group also held signs of protest in front of the high school, but for a very different reason. The students, smiling under their masks, said they were protesting “Karate Kid III,” which they said was a “terrible movie.”
Trent Austin stood at the top of the steps, welcoming students to school on his first day as Brown County High School’s new principal.
“This is democracy in action,” Austin said. He gave props to the students for doing things the “right way, in a democratic practice.”
Outgoing high school Principal Matt Stark, a former social studies teacher, said he appreciated the students’ respectfulness. “They exercised their constitutional right, in a matter designed for it,” he said. “We can agree and disagree respectfully.”
Tracy also said that the ability for people to be able to “express their opinion and have that right is what our country is founded upon.”
“It’s very well respected,” she said.
She said she has received emails an phone calls on both ends of the spectrum regarding the mask requirement.
Previous COVID-19 plans for the schools were approved prior to her arrival to Brown County’s school system on Aug. 2. Those include plans for what to do when schools report a certain percentage of students or staff out with COVID, COVID symptoms, or due to exposure to a known case. “We wanted to keep those plans,” she said, “and within the first day of school, we had one positive case.”
The school board met with Brown County Health Department staff to hear their perspective and get their guidance and recommendation.
“With their guidance and the CDC, we went with the decision to be proactive,” Tracy said. “Our main goal is to have kids in school. We want them in school.”
Tracy said that even though parents and students may hear that there are few positive cases, each case can cause an entire class to be quarantined. In that case, “tough decisions” have to be made, Tracy said, like moving those students to e-learning.
“At the end of the day it’s our duty to do whatever is possible to keep our kids healthy,” she said.
Parent Kathleen Schwein, who drives her children in to Brown County Schools from another county, emailed the school board Monday to ask for an emergency meeting “to discuss the reinstatement of parent rights and parent ability to choose mask options for our children.”
“The CDC’s recommendation was not in need of the emergency-style reaction that was placed upon our school families,” she wrote. She cited studies that cast doubt on the effectiveness of masks and shared concerns about the effect on students’ mental health.
If schools leadership could not agree, she asked that a poll be sent out to parents “to vote pro parent choice or masks.”
“There are many parents prepared to remove their children over this decision,” she said.
COVID status
As of Aug. 9, Brown County had gained 21 new COVID-19 cases since Aug. 3, including 13 new ones over the weekend.
On Aug. 4, Brown County went to “yellow” on the Indiana State Department of Health’s color-coded map of virus spread, the second of four levels.
By Aug. 9, all of Indiana was listed as “substantial” or “high” transmission on the CDC’s COVID tracker map. Brown County was at “substantial,” the second-highest level. At those levels, the CDC recommends that everyone wear a mask indoors.
In one day last week, Aug. 4, the Indiana State Department of health reported 1,944 new COVID cases across the state — more than on any one day in the past 90 days. The last time the one-day total was near that was April 16.
The delta variant of the virus — a strain that spreads quicker than the original — is showing up in 87 percent of tests that are sampled for variants.
“Currently available vaccines are effective against the variants of concern that have been detected in Indiana,” the ISDH reported. “As more people get vaccinated and become immune, communities will have more protection against variants. Virus cannot multiply or mutate in people who are immune, so variants will not emerge or spread. Vaccination prevents mutation, so get vaccinated as soon as you can.”
Gov. Eric Holcomb told a crowd at a Chamber of Commerce luncheon in Greenfield last week that he did not plan to reintroduce any statewide restrictions, but he encouraged people to continue getting vaccinated for COVID-19. “That’s the true and surest way to get not just through this, but out of it,” he said.
Children under 12 are not yet eligible for COVID-19 vaccines, making their protection dependent on the health and behavior of the people around them.
As of Aug. 6, about 49 percent of Brown County residents had received at least one COVID vaccine. That included an increase of 830 people between Aug. 5 and 6 due to some being placed in the wrong counties on the vaccination map because of their zip codes over the past few months; Brown County did not actually see that many new people come in and get their vaccines in one day.
Free vaccines and testing are being given at the Brown County Health Department, 200 Hawthorne Drive.
The Brown County Board of Health is no longer in charge of setting COVID restrictions per county; the county commissioners now have that power from a bill passed by the Legislature. The commissioners did not discuss COVID at last week’s meeting.
As the anti-mask protest group moved around town Monday morning, county commissioner Diana Biddle said she wanted to clarify that neither the state nor the county has mandated masks everywhere; the health department had just made recommendations for places such restaurants and the school district, and school district leadership decided to take the advice. She believed that the protest group was acting partly on misinformation about a mandate that doesn’t exist except for at the schools.
Biddle said that the commissioners would not be making any mandates because “all things don’t work for everybody.”
“I think everyone has had 18 months to figure this out and they can figure out what’s best for them,” she said.
