Samo students adjust to end of mask mandate
Sydney Roker, Staff Writer
Samo students and staff members have been adjusting to the new masking rules over the past few weeks since the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District has changed masking from required to ‘highly recommended.’ In an SMMUSD School Board meeting on March 9, the decision was made that schools would follow the Los Angeles County Department of Health guidelines and would no longer mandate indoor masking starting on Monday, March 14.
In the deciding board meeting, multiple school board members expressed their thoughts about the recommendation from SMMUSD Superintendent Ben Drati to make masking optional starting on March 14. At the end of the meeting, a unanimous vote was made by the six present SMMUSD board members and student member of the board, Nathan Castanaza (’23), amending two resolutions; making masking optional for both SMMUSD employees and students.
“I felt the need to ensure the board members knew the results of the survey given out to the student body, and ensure that they knew the student body was split on moving the mask mandate to the “strongly recommended” category. I made it clear that once cases were on the rise again after break we should enforce the mask mandate once again,” Castanaza said.
Although there was a unanimous vote for ending the mask requirement starting on March 14, many students and parents expressed concern about a potential rise in COVID-19 cases after students return from spring break. Currently, the plan is for each student to return home on the last day before spring break with a take home antigen test which they must take and show a negative result to enter back into schools. However, some board members feel that this method is not a reliable way of preventing COVID-19 cases. One board member, John Keane, who agreed with the decision to remove the mask mandate, believed that each SMMUSD school should require masks again until PCR tests come back after students return from spring break on April 18,.
“I don’t think two to five days [of masking] is too much to ask for when we know after spring break we see spikes,” Keane said.
Keane, along with other board members and student speakers, also noted that there should be a more lenient absence policy for the first week of optional masking, and that the district should give parents and students more time to decide whether or not they want to do independent study in response to the change in masking rules.
Another school board member, Jennifer Smith, emphasized that the district is not “unmasking students”, as was said by previous speakers, and is still highly recommending masks.
“We are not stripping off people’s masks, and we are not taping them on. We are just highly recommending,” Smith said.
Many expected that more students would begin to remove their masks as the initial week of the policy change progressed, including Shannon Cox, a history and Freshman Seminar teacher.
“In terms of my classes I actually anticipated the first day I would have a couple [of students not wearing masks] and by the end of the week a lot more, and that has happened I would say. It’s still only a handful of students, and I think they were just reading the room to see how comfortable they were,” Cox said.
Principal Antonio Shelton also has noted the varied responses from students to the new mask mandates.
“A lot of people still have the mask on, which is not a horrible thing. It really is a good thing. But you have a choice now to do that. And I think that contributes to students, and our numbers (of positive Covid tests) not being high as well,” Shelton said.
The school board’s March 9 decision allows students to be in class without masks. From left: Clarice Shimahara (’24), Alex Wray (’24), David Ervin (’24).