Masks Required By School Dress Code In Defiance Of Texas Governor

PARIS, TX — With coronavirus cases surging, the board of trustees for a small Texas school district has gone on offense and done an end-run around Gov. Greg Abbott’s ban on mask mandates.

The trustees of the Paris Independent School District, located about 100 miles northeast of Dallas, found their opening to require masks with an amendment to the student dress code.

Moreover, the trustees said in a sharply worded statement Tuesday, the governor “does not have the authority to usurp” the local control on the matter.

The board of trustees, the statement continued, has “exclusive power and duty to govern and oversee the management of the public schools of the district.”

Trustees believe the dress code can be used to mitigate communicable health issues, the statement said, and therefore amended the dress code to “protect our students and employees.”

Abbott banned school districts and other government entities from imposing mask mandates in Executive Order 38, but it doesn’t suspend Chapter 11 of the Texas Education Code, which gives control of the operation of schools to locally elected boards.

Chapter 11 clearly gives the Paris school board the right to include mask guidance in the dress code, according to the district statement.

Mask mandate bans are among the political footballs school districts across America are jostling as students head back to school. Governors in seven states, Texas included, have imposed them; and only one them, Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchison, has looked at the climbing coronavirus numbers with any remorse over those policies.

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Nationally, Texas ranks second only to Florida in the number of new cases. The level of community transmission is high across the state, which has had an average of about 15,500 new cases per day over the last seven days. The seven-day positivity rate is between 15 and 19 percent, according to data reported to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

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The outbreak in Texas and others states across America is fueled by the delta variant of the COVID-19 virus. Breakthrough infections remain uncommon, but they do occur. A fully vaccinated Abbott tested positive for COVID-19, the governor’s staff said Tuesday, a day after he attended a jam-packed indoor GOP fundraiser.

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Abbott’s executive order still stands, after the Texas Supreme Court temporarily blocked mask mandates.

In Paris, trustees debated using the dress code to get around Abbott’s order for more than an hour, the tense debate mirroring a national conversation around masks, vaccine hesitancy and efficacy, and the coronavirus itself.

District employees, parents and health care workers supported the gambit, especially as health care resources become scare and hospitals bulge with COVID-19 patients, The Paris News reported. Others said parents should be able to decide for themselves if their children will wear masks, and still others said trustees are setting a poor example for students by exploiting a loophole.

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Dr. Amanda Green of the Paris-Lamar County Health District, who also is the mother of two Paris High School students, said the delta variant has stretched Paris Regional Medical Center — which ran out of ventilators Monday — and Texas hospitals to their limits.

“People are dying from this,” Dr. Pia Lippincott, an intensive care anesthesiologist at the Paris Regional Medical Center, said at the meeting. “A little mask for a few weeks won’t hurt you.

“I don’t have any nurses to take care of anybody that comes into the hospital right now,” she continued. “We are on our knees at the hospital.”

The Paris Board of Trustees plans to revisit the dress code monthly, according to the report by The Paris Times.