Masks are no longer required to be worn inside Gov. Mifflin School District buildings.
At a special school board meeting Tuesday night, the board voted to end the district’s mask mandate. The change went into effect immediately, meaning as of Wednesday students and staff had the option to show up to school wearing a mask or not.
District officials said the move was made due to decreasing COVID case numbers over the last month within the district’s borders and across Berks County.
Berks has seen a major downturn in reported COVID cases in recent weeks, with daily case counts dropping to a fraction of the record-setting numbers of early and mid-January. The county’s 14-day average of daily COVID cases is in the double digits after reaching as high as 1,036 on Jan. 16.
Gov. Mifflin has gone back and forth with it’s mask mandate over the past few months.
The district made masks optional after a statewide mandate requiring them in all school buildings was struck down by the state Supreme Court on Dec. 10. But a worsening local COVID situation at the start of the new year that led the district to temporarily shift three schools to virtual learning in one week prompted the school board to reinstate a mandate on Jan. 13.
At the time of the vote to reinstate the mask requirement — which passed 7-2, with board members Andrew Pannafino and Christina Worley voting no — the district’s COVID dashboard showed that there had been 399 COVID cases reported in the district in the first two weeks of 2022. That was well more than half of the 702 total cases for the school year that the district had seen at that point.
The district’s COVID dashboard showed Wednesday that just 83 COVID cases have been reported in the district over the last 30 days.
Gov. Mifflin joins several other local districts to make masks optional, including Boyertown, Schuylkill Valley and Hamburg. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s current guidelines recommend universal masking for all students, staff and visitors inside school buildings.
Source: Berkshire mont