This Texas school district didn’t mandate masks during COVID. Here’s how that went
When Lance Johnson, the superintendent of the Peaster school district in Parker County, northwest of Weatherford, looked at the available COVID-19 data in the months leading up to the fall 2020 school year, he didn’t see what most people saw: Instead of mask mandates, he saw choice. Instead of months of virtual learning, he saw school rooms filled with laughter and education.
After surveys, school board resolutions and a town hall meeting, Johnson decided Peaster would hold school in a traditional manner.
Peaster was mocked and scorned.
“A North Texas superintendent is openly defying the state mask mandate in schools. No one is stopping him,” a Texas Tribune headline read. The Star-Telegram reported that at least one parent filed a complaint against the school district for not following mask mandates. Johnson said people told him they were hurting, even killing, children.
So what really happened at Peaster when COVID worked its way through Texas at its height? Did hundreds of Peaster kids fill hospital beds to capacity? Worse, did they die?
“We were looking at data, at no given time during the height of COVID, did Texas have less than 99.4% of its population COVID-free,” Johnson told me recently.
As soon as data was available, Johnson said he could see that children under 18 were hardly ever infected with COVID and when they were, they rarely even required hospitalization. Based on this, Johnson, who leads a district of approximately 1,630 students (800 in elementary, 400 in junior high and 430 in high school), sent a survey to parents in July 2020 asking them if they would send their child back to schools in August if they were to start as normal, without mask mandates, just common sense and choice. Of the responses, nearly 90% said they would send their kids back to school that way.
The school board adopted a resolution that would make masks an option. Johnson also held a town hall meeting announcing school would start in August 2020 in person and masks would be parent choice. “We’re not going to let fear propaganda drive our lives,” Johnson said over and over. He alone did not make the decision, nor did he do so lightly. Faith over fear was a common refrain.
Most parents, administrators, and teachers agreed with the school board’s decision. A handful of teachers had concerns and Johnson did whatever he could to alleviate those, letting them wear masks and providing Plexiglas for their desks to mitigate contact.
One set of parents filed a complaint and was repeatedly in touch with the school about their “concerns with [Johnson’s] lack of health and safety standards.” The mother sent a letter to the editor to the Star-Telegram, saying the school had more protocol for lice than COVID. Johnson offered that family virtual learning.
Johnson simply looked at COVID differently than most. “Prior to covid, if a teacher had said, I’m going to make my kids wear a mask, I’m going to isolate them, I’m going to make them separate from each other in the name of preventing the flu, which we know is more deadly to kids than COVID, we would have said it was abuse,” Johnson says matter of factly.
So did COVID spread like wildfire even through a small district of 1,630 kids?
“We learned that the asymptomatic spread of COVID among children is extremely rare — it doesn’t happen,” Johnson said, which is why he didn’t require teachers and administrators to do any contact tracing or reporting of COVID. Parents could let the school know if they wanted if their child had a positive COVID test. If kids were sick, the school required a student to be fever and medication-free for 48 hours, rather than the usual 24, before their return.
“Every district has baseline data, our average daily attendance,” Johnson recalls. “We thought, if we see a sharp drop we will know we have an illness going around.”
For the first 10 weeks, that didn’t happen. There were no reports of COVID cases. Finally on the 11th week the school was told about a student testing positive for COVID.
Still, the school had a fall festival, prom — student life went on per normal and they thrived.
Johnson says in all, the school was notified of approximately four cases of COVID though he says there was likely more that weren’t reported.
According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, among the states that reported COVID cases, 0.1%-1.5% of all child COVID-19 cases resulted in hospitalization and less than 0.01% of all child COVID-19 cases resulted in death. Still, shuttering schools and requiring masks wreaked havoc among our children. Research shows the pandemic has caused depression, anxiety, and suicide among teens to skyrocket and children have fallen behind academically.
Two years later, Johnson’s only regret is that he closed schools at all. Peaster was briefly closed in the spring of 2020, when Gov. Greg Abbott initially closed schools and enforced mask mandates.
“Hindsight is 20/20,” he says. Something everyone observing the pandemic and children can relate to.
Maybe Peaster was just too small to have a massive COVID outbreak. Or maybe, masks and social distancing did little to mitigate the spread of COVID. Either way, Johnson is glad the students of Peaster have led healthy, full lives the last two years when many other were being forced to wear masks or worse, falling behind or into depression.
“The adults in the building let kids down,”Johnson says of other districts in Texas. “I hope more adults will take a stand with kids. I was completely disappointed in our state associations, and that more did not take a stand for kids.”
