Wauwatosa School District May Require Masks For Students

WAUWATOSA, WI — The Wauwatosa School District may require students to wear masks while indoors if enough become infected with the coronavirus while enrolled in classes, according to plans presented by the district Wednesday.

School district and health officials reviewed a multilevel COVID-19 mitigation plan for the 2021-'22 school year, under which different mitigation efforts would be implemented depending on positive cases in a seven-day period, the plan said.

Masks will be required for everyone indoors at school buildings if cases reach "substantial" or "high" levels, the plan said.

The Wauwatosa School Board will meet Monday to vote on whether or not to approve the plan. The district meeting stream can be viewed online.

"We felt we needed to have information that would allow us to provide an informed metric that was close to [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] recommendations as possible that could guide our operations," Wauwatosa School District Superintendent Demond Means said.

"Our strongest mitigation strategy is vaccination. That's the best way we're going to end this pandemic," Laura Stephens, the health officer of the Wauwatosa Health Department, said at the meeting. "We recognize kids under 12 are not yet eligible and still remain at risk for COVID-19 infection."

The delta variant is highly transmissible, and Wauwatosa has seen more cases recently, Stephens said. Mitigation practices last year, such as masking for students and staff regardless of vaccination status, as well as contract tracing and physical distancing, were important to continue for this school year, she said.