Raucous crowd, angry about masks, forces school board to adjourn
The Albany County school board approved a one-week mask mandate for K-12 schools. The board will meet next week to consider a longer mandate and give public commenters more opportunity to speak.
All Laramie students from kindergarten through high school will be required to mask up next week. That’s a brief extension of the mandate passed last week for grades K-8, as well as a new requirement for high schoolers, but the short timeframe was not the original intention of the board.
Instead, the decision came after a lengthy and heated meeting Wednesday, during which the board shut down in-person public comments before everyone signed up to speak had gotten the chance — and adjourned the meeting shortly after that, when the angry crowd grew too disruptive.
Board members reconvened virtually.
The original proposal under discussion would have instituted a mask mandate lasting to mid-October. But citing his discomfort with the way the evening had proceeded, Trustee Lawrence Parea amended the mandate to end next Friday. Before that new sunset date, the board will meet again, giving previously cut-off speakers a chance to comment, and giving the board a chance to vote on a longer-term mandate.
Many on the board expressed similar regrets about how the evening had gone and most supported Parea’s amendment.
The temporary mandate passed on a 6-3 vote — with Chair Janice Marshall, and Trustees Jason Tangeman and Jamin Johnson voting against it.
‘Each of us, as pediatric providers, are likely to lose one patient this winter.’
At the outset of the meeting, Chair Marshall announced they would host one hour of in-person comments, then one hour of virtual comments from those tuning in through Zoom, before finally discussing the mask mandate proposal as a board.
But it didn’t happen that neatly.
In-person comments lasted for some 80 minutes. Throughout that time, the crowd grew more agitated, more confident and louder with their interruptions, and more frequent with booing and applause. The atmosphere of the Laramie High School auditorium generally grew more tense.
There were public commenters both for and against the mask mandate.
The first three speakers were pediatricians, who each made an impassioned plea for the school board to mandate masks.
Dr. Kent Kleppinger was the first to speak.
“Right now in this county, one person in 14 are COVID-positive,” Kleppinger said. “You look out around this room, you can do the math yourself. The rate has doubled in the past two weeks. It’s tripled in the last five. Our numbers are going up and accelerating. The problem we have is a third of the new cases are children.”
He added the delta variant is much more transmissible, and more likely to lead to hospitalization. The community is confronted with this new strain as hospitals both in- and out-of-state are pushed to their limits, he said.
“Our hospitals are full,” Kleppinger said. “Ten days ago, (Ivinson Memorial Hospital) had to transfer a patient — not down to Colorado, not to Cheyenne, not to Casper — but to North Dakota due to hospitals being full.”
But he concluded with his most dire statement.
“We have the same vaccine rate as Alabama and, as you know, that state is burning to the ground,” he said. “Each of us, as pediatric providers, are likely to lose one patient this winter.”
Others in favor of the mandate spoke to the circumstances faced by other schools across the state.
Next door, in Laramie County, Cheyenne schools decided against a mask mandate and saw a massive outbreak in the first week of school. There were more than 170 active cases and exposures and 458 children had to quarantine.
Teton and Sheridan County schools are also requiring face masks, while Hot Springs County schools have been forced to go completely virtual following outbreaks in its first week of the semester.
Still others made the argument that a mask mandate would help keep schools open.
The argument is this: if one student tests positive for COVID, those unmasked and exposed to the student will also have to quarantine. So wearing masks not only reduces transmission, but reduces the number of people who need to quarantine when there is a positive case. The alternative, the argument goes, is to leave masks optional and quarantine a greater number of people with every exposure — something that could quickly shut down the entire school.
But those opposed to the mandate were unswayed.
Several made false claims, alleging that masks had not been studied, were ineffective, or were actively harmful. Those claims are false, according to the most recent and best available research, and according to the experts who parse that research.
But other complaints about the mandate focused on the issue of parental decision-making — with some parents even threatening to pull their kids out of Albany County schools if masks were mandated.
Some went so far as to call mask mandates “tyranny.”
Carolina Colling said both the Centers for Disease Control and the school board should “stay in their lane.”
“You are forgetting that we are the parents and we should be the ones to choose what is best for our children,” she said. “I don’t care if you're a doctor or a scientist, the parent is first.”
Joel Senior, formerly a detective with the Laramie Police Department, said the decision to wear or not wear a mask was not in the school board’s purview.
“Nobody is saying you can’t put a mask on your child,” he said. “For me, this is not a mask/no-mask issue. Rather, it’s a parental-rights and government overreach issue.”
Senior questioned the constitutionality of such a mandate.
“None of us want our children to get sick,” he said. “That’s why every parent in here — I assure you — has done their research, spoken with their doctors and made the decision on what is best for their specific child.”
Senior received uproarious applause, as did many of the speakers to follow. But applause was far from the only audience reaction.
Dr. Tess Kilwein, a clinical psychologist and member of the Laramie Board of Health, encouraged school board members to extend the mask mandate.
“You’ve experienced the bullying from those who are against taking mask precautions — so have I,” Kilwein said. “And we absolutely cannot put students in that position. As adults, we have the responsibility of not putting our youth in the position of having to justify why they are wearing a mask when others are not.”
Kilwein stressed that the long-term impacts COVID-19 has on one’s health are still not fully known and that adults have a responsibility to shield children from them.
“We already know that there is evidence for substantial neurological and psychiatric comorbidity following COVID-19 infection,” she said. “Please do not let our youth become part of these statistics.”
As Kilwein finished out her comment, murmurs and backtalk grew louder until — at the conclusion of her comment — there was loud booing and applause for one who booed.
It was a harbinger of things to come.
‘This meeting is adjourned due to public disruption’
As the board closed out in-person comments and took a five-minute break, several anti-mandate audience members objected.
There were 30-40 more names signed up to speak who had not gotten the chance to comment.
A crowd formed around Sandi Rees, who gained attention by shouting over the noise of the auditorium.
“We are parents and we have a lot to say,” she said, her voice filling the room. “You said you would listen to us and you serve at our pleasure. You need to hear what we have to say.”
Rees said the school board ought to keep hearing public comments even “if it takes all night.”
Following this raucous five-minute intermission, the board called the meeting to order again and immediately gave the floor to Albany County Public Health Officer Jean Allais.
Allais addressed the audience via Zoom, discussing the highly contagious delta variant.
“It’s 200 percent more transmissible than previous variants, results in 1000 times higher viral loads and, on average, one person infects six to ten people — which is similar to chicken pox,” Allais said. “Wyoming continues to have one of the lowest vaccination rates for COVID-19 in the United States. States that have the lowest vaccination rates are seeing the highest levels of spread.”
Allais’ comments were consistently interrupted with booing and at least one call of “Bullshit!” When Allais stated that just 39 percent of children who could be vaccinated were, someone loudly responded, “Good!”
When Allais’ comments stretched beyond two minutes — the time allotted for all other public commenters, several in the audience started shouting “Time!”
Chair Marshall explained: “We are allowing our county health officer extra time,” but the audience was not having it.
They started calling out “How much time does she get?” I want more time, too!” and “Why is her voice more important than mine?”
This continued even as Marshall kept gaveling and calling for order.
Eventually the crowd added whistling to the chorus of shouting. Noise in the auditorium reached such a point that Dr. Allais could no longer be heard over Zoom.
“This meeting is adjourned due to public disruption,” Marshall said, gaveling a final time.
The crowd grew even louder at this, and several continued to shout and swear as others stormed out of the auditorium. But the in-person segment of the meeting was officially over.
The board reconvened 30 minutes later, now virtually.
‘They have abdicated their responsibility’
Earlier the same day, Gov. Mark Gordon said he is not entertaining the idea of another statewide mask mandate. A major reason for that is that he doesn’t think the state can actually enforce one.
“Attitudes have hardened significantly,” Gordon told the Casper Star-Tribune. “One of the significant challenges with a mandate that we saw last year is a significant amount of pushback.”
Instead, he said, decisions about masks for communities, and for schools, should be locally controlled.
“We don't believe that mandates from on high work," he said. "We do think that local control, local government is where that nexus lies. They can appreciate the circumstances at a local level in a way we find from on top things can't happen."
Several Albany County School Board members lamented this lack of state direction as they discussed the mask mandate.
Once the board had reconvened, it heard more public comments virtually and then began its discussion. The board members would eventually decide to pass a one-week mask mandate and revisit the issue again next week, allowing even more time for parents and others to comment — especially those who had been cut off by the close of in-person comments.
But several members, both for and against the mandate, expressed frustration that a decision such as this was even left to local elected boards.
Trustee Jason Tangeman, a local attorney, provided an overview of the law dictating the responsibilities and authority of the Wyoming Department of Health and the Wyoming State Health Officer.
“When I read those all together, that says to me, this decision falls squarely with the state health officer and the county health officer,” he said. “You see on a national level, and now on a local level, that national politicians and state-level politicians are foisting this very hard decision upon us as a school board. And that’s a political strategy done by people at that level. It’s unfair, and I find it a little cynical.”
Trustee Jamin Johnson agreed.
“We have been continually lobbed balls that should have been hit by somebody else,” he said. “There are people who do have the statutory authority to make these decisions. They have abdicated their responsibility to do that one way or the other. They have decided to leave it up to volunteer elected officials — who are parents, who are members of this community — to make a decision we should never be asked to make.”
The school board will meet again Sept. 8.
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