HOULTON, Maine — Students and staff in RSU 29 will no longer be required to wear face coverings in school and on buses beginning Wednesday, March 9.
The RSU 29 school board Thursday unanimously approved switching to an optional mask policy, ending several months of pleas from parents to have the masks removed from their children.
The Houlton school district is just the latest Aroostook County school to ditch mandatory masking for students and staff.
Earlier in the week, SAD 1 in Presque Isle; SAD 42 in Mars Hill; RSU 39 in Caribou; and SAD 20 in Fort Fairfield all switched to an optional mask status. Many other school districts around the state have followed suit.
RSU 29 Superintendent Richard Lyons said it was his recommendation that the district continue to follow the guidelines of the Maine CDC and Department of Education. Those groups said this week that universal masking was no longer recommended starting March 9.
“I have been with you for about 8 and a half months now, and I want to express sincere appreciation and gratitude to our staff and student body for adhering to our policies,” Lyons said. “I have struggled with this decision personally, but I am recommending that optional masking be the mode for RSU 29.”
Maine has not had a statewide mask mandate in schools since Gov. Janet Mills allowed a state of emergency to expire last June. Instead, masks were recommended, but individual school districts were able to decide for themselves on whether coverings would be required.
While the Houlton school board’s decision to go mask-optional was unanimous, the date when the change happened was not. The board spent almost as much time debating when the change should take place as it did on why the change was warranted.
A motion to have the change go into effect Wednesday, March 9, resulted in a split 5-5 vote of the board, which required using the district’s weighted voting method to declare an outcome. In a weighted voting system, each representative is assigned a number, based on the population of the town they represent.
In this system, votes from Houlton representatives carry more weight than votes from Littleton, Hammond and Monticello representatives. Under the weighted voting system, the motion for March 9 was approved by a vote of 437-359.
“To say this is a difficult topic to discuss and make a decision on is a massive understatement,” board chairman Fred Grant said. “The people on the board have a very difficult decision to make. We are here to make a decision on what we feel is best for our students.”
More than 75 people attended the meeting, held in the high school’s auditorium. During the nearly two-hour meeting, the school board heard from its administration as well as members of the public before making its decision.
Director of Health Services Holly Hodgkins said that she felt the time was not right for the district to remove face coverings.
“There are a lot of indications that say to me that it is not quite time,” Hodgkins said. “I don’t enjoy wearing these (masks), but the data we are looking at and what the state is telling us, it doesn’t seem like we are quite there.”
Two of the district’s three building principals — Tim Tweedie at Houlton Middle-High School and Cindy Peterson at Houlton Southside School — said they were in favor of trying optional masking. Houlton Elementary School Principal Candy Crane expressed concerns about dropping the masks.
“Personally, I would like to try it (optional masking), and if the numbers go up we can revisit it,” Tweedie said.
