Letter to the editor: Health secretary, not school boards, should be making mask rulings

State law provides school boards authority to make reasonable and necessary rules governing students in school. Using this authority, many schools choose to keep masks optional. Gov. Tom Wolf disagreed with the rules made by most school boards and had his health secretary issue an order requiring masks. This order requires school districts to enforce the state’s rule by, presumably, using authority they don’t have but that they would have had if they had adopted such a rule in the first place. No wonder the school boards seem short on answers and long on confusion.

We also have given school boards authority to exclude students from school, after being afforded due process, for violating an established and published code of conduct. You’ll find that state law and school boards’ policies describing this due process as including hearings, calling of witness(es), etc. before they exclude a student from school for 10 days. In Wolf and cohort’s world, due process is replaced with seating charts, telephone calls and words like “close contact” to exclude healthy children from education for those same 10 days.

The secretary of the Department of Health has the authority to issue isolation and quarantine orders alone. Shouldn’t we expect that person to use that authority instead of demanding school boards act outside of their own authority? If Alison Beam wants healthy children isolated, then that order should be issued under her hand, and she should suffer the political consequences, along with the governor.

Matt Pergar

Unity