Belleville school district will require masks for all students this year
Whiteside District 115 in Belleville will require all students to wear masks when they start the new school year, after the school board unanimously approved the district’s COVID safety proposals Tuesday night.
Over the past months, many school board meetings about COVID safety proposals across southwest Illinois have been contentious, with rallies outside and long lists of parents and community members giving public comments. Most of the speakers in the metro-east have advocated for mask-optional policies, regardless of a child’s vaccination status.
At the Whiteside meeting, though, most of the vocal support favored requiring masks. Between one parent who showed up in person and nine others who submitted comments to be read by Superintendent Mark Heuring, eight out of 10 expressed support for requiring masks.
Heuring said that he had two priorities: keeping students and staff safe and making sure students receive a quality education. If masks can help keep students in class for five full days a week, he said that could help after some learning loss last year.
“We know students learn better in-person, period,” Heuring said to the board. “The more minutes I can keep them under my roof, the better the chance I have to provide them a quality education.”
Given the rise of the delta variant and the rising COVID-19 diagnoses within the ZIP codes Whiteside 115 serves, Heuring said the district would have to prepare to adapt whether cases go up or down.
All of St. Clair County — and the rest of southwestern Illinois — is marked as having high COVID-19 transmission by the Illinois Department of Public Health. St. Clair’s positivity rate was 11. 79% as of Tuesday.
The elementary district is among the first in the metro-east to require all students to wear masks, regardless of vaccination status. As the district serves students up through the eighth grade, the majority of students are not eligible for the COVID-19 vaccine because they’re younger than 12 years old.
The Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine is authorized for children as young as 12, but clinical trials for children younger than that are not complete.
In 2020, Whiteside 115 had 1,285 students, according to information from the Illinois State Board of Education. Fewer than one in four are eligible to be vaccinated.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are allowing local school boards far more control over their safety plans for this year, including any mandates for masks or social distancing. The CDC recommends everyone in schools wear masks, regardless of vaccination status.
Gov. J.B. Pritzker is expected to announce school mask requirements Wednesday afternoon.
This story was originally published August 4, 2021 at 10:05 AM.