ST. TAMMANY PARISH, La. — Louisiana's top school board is deciding whether it will challenge or follow Gov. John Bel Edwards' mask mandate for public schools.
The state Board of Elementary and Secondary on Wednesday is wading into a thorny issue that has divided parents and provoked angry protests in some school districts.
The Democratic governor enacted the mask mandate this month for all indoor public spaces including school campuses as Louisiana saw infections of COVID-19 surge. The mask mandate won support from health care leaders around Louisiana.
But Republican Attorney General Jeff Landry, GOP state lawmakers, and others object to the requirement and suggest the education board should decide what happens in schools.
Last month, before the record-setting fourth surge of virus cases and the governor's mask mandate, BESE chose to not enact statewide requirements, instead, allowing each school district to set its own rules.
After hearing from upset parents, the St. Tammany Parish School Board asked BESE to give parents and teachers a choice to wear masks on campuses.
"We're losing our freedoms. What's happened? I've been here for years," one grandparent said at a public meeting. "I don't understand what y'all are doing."
"We've gotten a lot of emails, pro-mask and anti-mask, but we really feel like it's the right of the parent to choose," St. Tammany School Board President Brandon Harrell told WWL-TV.
Not all parents agree.
"It's barely an inconvenience to wear a mask in order to keep everyone safe and healthy, and I also want to keep my kids in school. I don't want there to be quarantines, I don't want their lives interrupted and I think the mask mandate is the best way to move forward with that," parent Coco Darrow said.
The Louisiana chapter for the American Academy for Pediatrics sent a letter to Edwards strongly recommending that all students and school staff should wear masks on campus. The organization says it came to that conclusion because a significant portion of the student population is not eligible to receive a COVID-19 vaccination, and many schools do not have systems to monitor vaccine status for students or staff.
“Masking provides the best protection of unvaccinated students and teachers from COVID-19 and reduces transmission,” the group wrote. “Universal masking is the best and most effective strategy to create consistent messages, expectations, enforcement, and compliance without an added burden upon our teachers.”
Louisiana is struggling with the record-setting fourth surge of COVID-19 driven by the highly contagious delta variant and low vaccination rates. The state has one of the lowest vaccination rates in the nation and is seeing one of the country's worst COVID-19 spikes per capita.
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The Associated Press contributed to this report.