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Daily Archives: September 2, 2021
As mentioned in the post previous to this one, I just wanted to make sure this important news got highlighted. The South Carolina Supreme Court voted 5-0 that the Columbia mask mandate violates state law. This ruling apparently also put to bed any efforts by schools to issue their own mask mandates…at least for this year.
Columbia’s City Council had voted 5-1 last month to issue another mask mandate. Here’s the article from The State Newspaper explaining the mask mandate ordinance.
As though our times can’t get any stranger but here in South Carolina, if you have kids in elementary, middle or high school, they are more likely to be masked if they attend a private school rather than a public school. Sound crazy? It is!
Last year with all the Covid craziness with education, private schools across the nation saw an increase in students as parents looked for other options outside of the virtual learning and heavy mask mandates that so many public schools were using.
In South Carolina, the legislature wrote in to the budget bill that became law a specific order that public schools could not issue mask mandates for their students for the coming year. (Note: this might change with next year’s budget). There has been plenty of push back against that as well as court challenges. The courts ruled against the law as it pertained to state colleges…they can require mask mandates. But somehow public schools still could not require masks. The City of Columbia went ahead with their own indoor mask mandate including schools and day care centers. Well the South Carolina Supreme Court just struck down Columbia’s mask mandate. The vote was 5-0. If I’m reading this correctly, it strikes down any school official or school board thinking they can institute a mask mandate this year. With this news, I do expect a big move or schools to go to virtual. How long will they go that route? Hard to know.
I’m not going to call out the specific private schools that are requiring masks but if you’re considering a private school and the mask issue is an important one for you, make sure you do your homework.
Here we go again with the virtual schooling. Not sure if the districts have gotten better about delivering education via the computer than they have in the past 18 months but we are about to find out. I suspect this is the first notice of many schools going virtual. The good news is this is supposed to only be for a week. We’ll see.
Here’s the story about the three schools in Laurens County that are going virtual during Labor Day week.