The Pharr-San Juan-Alamo school board voted to lift its mask mandate Monday, as face covering requirements at local schools become increasingly scarce.
Edinburg and Santa Rosa school districts lifted their mandates earlier this year, and The Monitor reported on three districts in the county last semester that either dropped their mandate or didn’t enforce it.
A county order mandating masks for schools expired in December, and late in January, Hidalgo County Health Authority Ivan Melendez and districts that had dropped their mandates signaled those requirements weren’t likely to be renewed.
PSJA Health Services Director Sulema Solis recommended the board lift the mandate, noting the hospitalization rate in the region is 2.66%— significantly lower than the 15% rate that prompted mandates and capacity limits earlier in the pandemic.
“Also the recommendation is for the PSJA ISD superintendent to have the authority to reinstate a mask mandate according to an increase in cases at PSJA ISD, CDC recommendations and local health authority recommendations,” she said.
The district will continue to recommend masks, administration said, and will continue to follow other pandemic preventative measures.
“The safety protocols of social distance and making sure that we’re still reporting, so all that will continue to be monitored,” Superintendent Jorge Arredondo said. “The vaccine, the testing, all those preventative measures will still be followed.”
Trustees all supported the measure, and several took the opportunity to voice their opinion on it.
“Hopefully one of the effects that this has is we will encourage more students to come back to school,” Trustee Jesse Zambrano said, noting a pandemic-caused learning gap and saying he hopes lifting the mandate restores some normalcy. “I believe that through the leadership of Dr. Arredondo when we started this pandemic we’ve been able to make a lot of difficult decisions for the community, for students, but those decisions have always been with the thought process that we want to first protect our community, but then also understanding that we have the very heavy responsibility of educating our students here at PSJA.”
Trustee Jesus “Jesse” Vela expressed the most concern over the decision, mostly worrying over potential confusion and stressing the need to communicate the change clearly.
“My concern was, and is, that we need to notify … staff members across the district,” he said. “And the community needs to be informed.”
Arredondo voiced his confidence in communicating the mandate lift.
“Something we talked about was once the board made the decision that we would let everybody know, this week we would take time to communicate with families, we would answer questions,” he said.
