Fort Worth school district can once again require masks, Court of Appeals rules
An appeals court on Thursday overturned an injunction that blocked the Fort Worth school district from enforcing mask mandates, allowing the district to require masks on campuses again if it sees fit.
The opinion, which was filed Thursday evening, comes from the Court of Appeals for the Second District of Texas and is the latest in a months-long legal battle over mask requirements in schools amid the COVID-19 pandemic. The case began after the Fort Worth ISD superintendent issued a mask mandate for schools in August, and four parents of Fort Worth students sued the school district to try to prevent enforcement of the requirement.
A Tarrant County district judge granted a temporary injunction to the parents in September, but the injunction has since been paused and re-instated several times by the Court of Appeals. At one point in September, the district was able to reinstate the mask requirements for only one day before the Court of Appeals reversed its decision again.
The Fort Worth school district does not currently have a mask requirement in schools. District spokeswoman Barbara Griffith said the district will decide what action it will take at a March 22 board meeting. The district is on spring break next week.
Thursday’s opinion likely does not mark an end to the legal battle. The opinion, signed by Justice Dabney Bassel, granted a legal win to both sides of the case while skirting some of the other legal arguments over mask mandates.
On one side, the court opinion gave the Fort Worth school district the power to once again create and enforce a mask requirement. However, the opinion also gave the parents suing over the mask requirement the option to re-file their plea with additional arguments, which attorney Warren Norred, who represents the parents, said he plans to do.
Norred said he was “pretty pleased” with the opinion because he is confident the court will eventually rule in the parents’ favor.
“I cannot imagine that ... people who are being damaged by an illegal rule cannot eventually get some remedy from the courts,” he said.
Jason Smith, a Fort Worth-based attorney, became a party in the injunction case in August when he filed a court petition in support of the Fort Worth school officials and in opposition to the four parents suing them.
Smith said while those opposed to masks have the opportunity to push forward, the “big picture is that the mask requirement is enforceable.”
“The court’s opinion restores FWISD’s ability to take reasonable steps to protect students and the community from this deadly virus,” he said.
While COVID-19 cases have been declining, Smith said, “FWISD needs to have the flexibility to take reasonable steps if another deadly variant emerges.”
The latest COVID-19 variant that experts are worried about is deltacron, which has been identified in at least 17 patients in the U.S. and Europe, the World Health Organization said this week.
The court’s opinion
The 54-page opinion from the appeals court tackled three main issues in the case: whether the school district violated the open meetings act when it created the initial mask requirement, whether the mask requirement is constitutional and whether parents exhausted their administrative remedies before bringing a suit against the district. If the parents had not exhausted those remedies, their lawsuit would not be valid.
The court ruled that the school district did not violate the open meetings act, but also said the parents did exhaust administrative remedies before suing the district.
The opinion said the parents did not prove that the mask requirement violates any constitutional rights.
“At present, because the Parents have failed to articulate what constitutional violation that they claim has occurred,” the opinion said, “we are unable to determine whether their claim is viable or not.”
Norred said in their next filing, he will lay out those claims more specifically.
“We cannot be unhappy; the court of appeals clearly said trial court had jurisdiction, so that fight is over,” he said.
The appeals court send the case back to the trial court for further proceedings.
The appeals court did not rule on or discuss any of the claims that Smith brought in his petition.
Smith wrote in his petition that Fort Worth school officials have the power to require students and staff to wear face coverings to stop spread of the delta variant of COVID-19. The petition calls Gov. Greg Abbott’s order that tried to prevent local government mask requirements across Texas irrational. Smith has 12-year-old twins and a 8-year-old stepson in the school district.
This story was originally published March 11, 2022 at 1:20 PM.
