When Hall County students return to class on Tuesday after the long Labor Day holiday weekend, many of them will be wearing masks.
Eleven of the county’s public schools have temporary mask mandates in place in an attempt to better protect students, faculty and staff against the COVID-19 delta variant.
The temporary mask mandate has reached 13 schools since the end of August due to rising case numbers. The school system, as of Sep. 3, has 385 COVID-19 cases and 609 in quarantine.
“Three is absolutely no doubt with our first four weeks of school that this delta variant is different,” said Hall County Schools Superintendent Will Schofield. “At a statewide level, the testing that has been done on the samples that have been collected suggest that 98 percent of the COVID [cases] in our state is the delta variant, and the delta variant is behaving differently and is continuing to be, as we suspected, much more contagious than the variants we dealt with last year.”
Schofield says that the temporary mandate is a step to keep students in school and out of virtual learning. The mandate is evaluated on a case-by-case basis, and case numbers, quarantine numbers and masking updates will be updated daily on their website.
For North Hall High School, Mount Vernon Elementary School, Cherokee Bluffs Middle School and Cherokee Bluffs High School, mask mandates are scheduled to end after school on Tuesday the 7. However, the schools may reevaluate the current case numbers and risk at their school and choose to extend that mandate.
The mask mandates for Chestnut Mountain Elementary School, Chicopee Woods Elementary School, East Hall Middle School, Flowery Branch High School, Johnson High School, Oakwood Elementary School and Spout Springs Elementary School extend until Friday the 10 and may be re-evaluated afterward.
