Optional masking has many worried
Oak Creek-Franklin most relaxed in county
Tracy Wraniosky knew her sixth grader’s school wasn’t requiring masks this fall, but when none of her child’s teachers wore masks at a recent open house, she was “horrified.”
“This was the first time the teachers were meeting these kids, and they’re the ones who should be setting the example,” Wraniosky said. “I naively expected to see the adults supporting the kids.”
Wraniosky’s child goes to school in the Oak Creek-Franklin Joint School District, which has made mask use optional this school year.
Although nearly all districts required students to wear face masks last school year, many rescinded their mandates last spring when COVID-19 cases dropped and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advised that vaccinated people did not need to wear masks in public.
That was before the emergence of the delta variant — which is more transmissible and can spread even among vaccinated people, and which led the CDC to recommend that everybody in K-12 schools, regardless of vaccination status, wear masks.
Since then, local health departments have recommended mask mandates, and many districts have reinstated them.
In those districts that don’t require masks, families are left with a difficult choice for their children. Either make them wear masks, with the risk that they’ll be in the minority and face social pressure, or ignore nearly universal health recommendations.
In Milwaukee County, the Oak Creek-Franklin district appears to be the only one that doesn’t mandate masks or have a metric in which maskwearing is tied to rising or falling numbers of cases in their community.
More than 700 parents have signed a petition asking the district to implement a mask requirement for 4K through eighth grade since most of them are unable to be vaccinated. Several of those parents have expressed frustration that they haven’t gotten responses to their petition or their emails to school board members.
Oak Creek-Franklin’s official guidance is that people are “strongly encouraged, but not required” to wear face masks.
In practice, according to several Oak Creek-Franklin parents, most people in the district’s schools — both adults and children — are not wearing masks. According to Emily DeBaker,
the district’s director of communications, Oak Creek-Franklin doesn’t require schools to report face mask usage and doesn’t have estimates of how many people wear them.
Julie Halverson, who has a 9-yearold child in the district, suspects the politicization of mask-wearing is at play and that school board members fear there would be backlash if they instituted a mask requirement.
Such backlash has become common as school boards have met to discuss mask mandates, with unruly protests causing some in-person meetings to be shut down, school board members to resign and even police to be called.
Bridget Coghlan, who has a sixth grader and third grader, said there would likely be pushback, but there would be widespread compliance with a mask mandate, and many parents would feel relieved if the district took responsibility for requiring kids to wear masks.
“We’ve heard from our friends that they would prefer if there was a mask requirement,” Coghlan said. “But because they want their kids to look like everyone else, they’re telling their kids they don’t have to wear masks.”
Although parents who spoke to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel had not heard of bullying incidents from their children, the pressure to fit in weighs heavily on their minds — especially in families who have decided it’s important to continue masking. One mother said her high school son starts out his days wearing a mask but takes it off throughout the day because so many of his classmates are maskless.
Coghlan said her kids understand the importance of face masks, but she’s especially sensitive to her middle schooler feeling different from everybody else.
“I work with medically fragile children, so my kids do understand why they should wear masks,” said Coghlan, who is a pediatric physical therapist. “But even my third grader will say, ‘My friends don’t wear masks. Do I really have to?’ “
Parents have also pointed out that last year’s message from schools was that kids should wear masks to protect others.
Halverson said when her son went back to in-person class halfway through the school year last year, he was told by his teachers to wear a mask so everyone could be protected.
“He’s happy to do that, he doesn’t complain,” Halverson said. “Last year, the school told him this is what we do to protect each other. I’m wondering where that message is now.”
Although the district says staff is reminded to encourage everyone to wear masks indoors and that they communicate that message to families, parents say that message isn’t enforced, especially when adults don’t wear masks. In practice, it’s up to the kids to decide what to do.
Critical care nurse Monica Koch has told her son Braden, who is in fifth grade at Oak Creek-Franklin, that mask-wearing helps stop the spread of COVID-19 and eases the burden on health care workers.
“Just that one kid wearing a mask can possibly prevent someone from coming to our hospitals that are bursting at the seams,” Koch said.
“Sure, they say we don’t have to wear masks at school, but I’m going to keep wearing a mask because COVID is still going on,” Braden Koch said. “Wearing a mask literally does not bother me. It’s a little thing. There’s no reason to complain about it.”
Contact Amy Schwabe at (262) 8759488 or amy.schwabe@jrn.com. Follow her on Twitter at @WisFamilyJS, Instagram at @wisfamilyjs or Facebook at WisconsinFamily.