Photo by Erin Nelson.
School systems in the Birmingham area, including Homewood, Hoover and Vestavia Hills, have made their own decisions regarding health and safety procedures in their school facilities.
UPDATE: This story has been changed to reflect that Bo Glenn is not an employee of UAB. The Voice apologizes for the error.
Parents are split down the middle after the decision made by Vestavia Hills City Schools to keep masks strongly recommended, but optional, to begin the 2021-22 school year.
In Superintendent Todd Freeman’s plan, sent to parents shortly before school began Aug. 10, parents were informed that students are strongly encouraged to wear masks but are not required to. On Aug. 9, parents were outraged at a school board meeting after board members adjourned the meeting, called for personnel reasons, without publicly discussing masks.
“Please respond to our emails; please require masks,” said one parent at the meeting. “If safety measures aren’t needed, why do you have chairs distanced in this room?” said another parent.
Members of the board, along with Freeman and Assistant Superintendents Patrick Martin and Aimee Rainey, met with parents for about an hour after the meeting, said the school system’s public relations director, Whit McGhee.
For Katie Roach Dudley – a Vestavia parent and organizer of the petition “Masks Up to Keep Students Safe in Vestavia Hills: Listen to the Experts,” which has garnered 2,058 signatures so far – it has been scary for her to watch her children go back to school.
“It’s a little disappointing and disheartening because the people in this town that are highly educated and are experts in infectious disease or pediatricians or are doctors that work in the ICU, they’re unanimously saying that we need to wear masks,” Dudley said. “If our board of education really values education, why are they not listening to the people that are educated experts?”
Karen Templeton said she is concerned about her children who are not old enough to get the COVID-19 vaccine and other children that are ineligible.
“I think we need to temporarily inconvenience ourselves to protect the community,” Templeton said. “I think it’s important to remember that a year ago we wore masks and the children wore masks to primarily protect older adults in their lives and in our community and now we have to do that for them. I think we’re really failing them if we don’t follow the very strong, very clear public recommendations to protect their health.”
I think we need to temporarily inconvenience ourselves to protect the community.
Karen Templeton
Karl Julian, a Vestavia parent, said he recognizes that masking isn’t the perfect solution but it is the best way to keep transmission rates low in schools. Julian said he finds it strange that the school board seems “adamant” on not following health guidelines set by the CDC and ADPH as well as other health officials that have recommended the same thing.
Steve Bendall, president of the Board of Education, reached out to Julian via Facebook after Julian sent Bendall an email about his concerns.
“I asked him ‘why aren’t you following the guidance’ and he said ‘well we are; they recommend masks and we strongly recommend masks,” Julian said. “He knows they should. They know … Dr. Mark Wilson is not going to mandate anything because last time he did that, he almost lost his job.”
Bendall had not responded to the Vestavia Voice for a request for comment about the board’s decision by press time.
Wilson, Health Officer for Jefferson County and CEO of the Jefferson County Department of Health, faced backlash after flirting with the idea of mask mandates in schools.
On the other side of the issue are many parents who don’t believe students should be forced to wear masks.
Jenny Blumberg, a Vestavia parent, believes parents should be able to make health decisions for their children and not the Vestavia school board. “I think that how we choose to handle our personal health is actually a personal choice.”
Blumberg said despite the recommendations that the CDC gives in their guidelines, there is no one-size-fits-all solution to the problem.
Bo Glenn – a Vestavia parent, organizer of the ‘Keep Masks Optional in Vestavia Hills City Schools' petition and a primary care worker in Montgomery – said there is little to no evidence that supports the effectiveness of masks against COVID-19.
“We’re asking these masks, that are not respirators or PPEs, to do things that they can’t do,” said Glenn. “It’s like asking my Toyota Corolla to go 200 miles per hour but it’s not made to do that; It can’t, as much as I want it to.”
Glenn said masks are not made to stop a droplet/aerosol viral contagion like COVID-19, which is why they’ve never been recommended before in any influenza-like illness outbreak. Glenn said during the swine flu epidemic, even in areas with serious outbreaks, masks were not recommended either indoors or outdoors.
“As a healthcare provider, I’ve never worn [a mask], I’ve never recommended people to wear one and I’ve never gone to a physician that’s ever recommended me to wear one,” Glenn said. “I think we’ve had a lot of revisionist history on masks in the last 18 months.”
Glenn does think the Delta variant should be taken seriously. He’s seen firsthand the effects of the virus in hospitals, has taken care of patients with COVID-19 and has had it himself. He says the virus is hyper-transmissible among children but the good news is that children are less likely to die from the virus.
He understands the passion of parents that want a mask mandate in Vestavia schools but believes that it's a matter of personal choice and that parents should have the right to decide if their children should wear a mask.
“I’m not anti-masks, I’m just anti-masks mandate,” Glenn said.
In a Q&A hosted by UAB Medicine, Dr. David Kimberlin – co-director of pediatric infectious diseases at Children’s Hospital of Alabama and UAB – wanted to make it clear the science behind masks is not invalid and health experts are not mistaken about the dangers of the Delta variant.
“If the CDC, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Infectious Diseases Society of America and the Pediatric Infectious Diseases Society … all of them, with all of their scope of expertise, have looked at the totality of the data and say ‘masking works,' do you think you’re going to find the one article that they missed that’s going to disprove all that?” Kimberlin said.
Several other school systems in the greater Birmingham area, including Homewood and Mountain Brook, have announced they will require masks while students are indoors, while Hoover require masks for the first 30 days of school. Trussville will require masks for “some activities,” but not for others.
