Richland School Board’s defiance of WA state mask mandate is a short-sighted disgrace

What a mess.

With little warning and with no authority, three Richland School Board members voted Tuesday night to make masks optional.

There are so many concerns with this improper and misguided decision that it’s hard to know where to begin.

For starters, the action goes against the Washington Open Public Meetings Act.

While the issue of “Local Control” was listed on Tuesday’s agenda, there was nothing to indicate a decision on masks would be made — and public comment was not allowed at this particular meeting.

That “local control” discussion on Resolution 940 was expected to be about vaccines, not masks.

Like it or not, members of school boards, city councils and other governing bodies must provide proper public notice before they take action.

In this particular case, “proper” is the key word.

A potential decision of this magnitude deserved more publicity than it received, and it certainly shouldn’t have been made at a meeting where the public was not allowed to speak. In addition, the vote may be found to be illegal.

The way this was set up, it appears three school board members used what is supposed to be a low-key special meeting to their advantage.

As it happens, the school board has quickly scheduled an executive session Wednesday to discuss the open meeting law with their attorney, so clearly there are legal questions.

After the board failed to take action on the mask mandate last week, the sudden turn-around comes as a surprise.

And the abrupt about-face by Richland School Board members Semi Bird and Kari Williams is troubling.

At last week’s meeting, Richland School Board member Audra Byrd made a motion to immediately make masks optional and was met with silence.

We praised the board for not caving in to pressure from the crowd. After all, plans are underway to soon lift the mask mandate statewide.

So what happened in the week between these two board meetings? On Tuesday, Semi Bird made a motion out of nowhere to make masks optional and Audra Byrd and Williams supported him.

Do they truly understand what they’ve now set in motion? Do they realize the terrible situation they have put the district in?

A few hours after the three-majority school board decision was made, Richland school district officials were forced to scramble and ended up deciding to close schools Wednesday.

If Bird, Williams and Byrd thought their vote meant kids would be able to wake up Wednesday morning and go to school without wearing masks, then they were sorely mistaken.

This is a delicate situation, and district officials are wise to take the time they need to figure out how to proceed.

While the district has declared that masks are optional, the state law still requires the schools and administrators to enforce the requirement.

That puts administrators at odds with the state Department of Labor and Industries if it requires teachers to be in the same classrooms as students without masks.

In addition, officials with the state Superintendent of Public Instruction’s office were already preparing to put the district on notice as soon as they heard the district would be defying state orders.

Throughout the pandemic OSPI has made it clear that state funding could be withheld if school districts didn’t comply with the mask mandate.

“School boards are not empowered to supersede state law. It is null and void,” said Mike Faulk, Gov. Jay Inslee’s deputy communications director.

“The idea that they would cancel a day of school and disrupt students’ and families’ lives for the sake of politics speaks even more poorly of the majority’s actions,” Faulk said.

At least with a snow day, parents usually have time to make arrangements for their children’s care if schools are closed.

But shutting down schools so district officials can make a plan to defy a state mandate is a first, and the suddenness of it no doubt caused turmoil in many homes.

We know that many people and kids are struggling with the masks.

But Inslee is scheduled to discuss plans to lift the contentious mandate on Thursday. The Richland School Board majority should have at least waited a couple days to hear what he had to say.

Instead, they defied state open meeting law, made a decision that caught the public off-guard, closed schools, forced parents to find last-minute care for their children, and made school district officials deal with the fallout.

Again — what a mess.

This story was originally published February 16, 2022 at 12:44 PM.