Sharifah Simms-Williams, director of communications for the Normandy School District, just doesn’t get it.
According to recentdata released by the county, the number of students with COVID-19 in St. Louis County schools has doubled, with the number of infected staff almost tripling. As of Dec. 11, Normandy had 82 confirmed cases of COVID among students and 22 among staff members.
“It really floors me how people have made a public health crisis political.”- Sharifah Simms-Williams, director of communications / Normandy School District
Yet, with signs the Delta variant is surging through North County and the region, Simms-Williams is perplexed with the pushback from parents and politicians opposed to mask mandates.
St. Louis County parents have staged protests demanding their mask-less students be allowed in public schools. In late November,a Missouri judge ruled local health orders imposed to curb the spread of COVID-19 in the state are illegal and should be lifted. Since that ruling, multiple county school districts are considering ways to scale back COVID-19 mitigation policies.Lindbergh, Rockwood, Francis Howell, Parkway, and the Mehlville schoolhave all adopted resolutions to make masks mandates optional.
Simms-Williams, a mother with twins in the Hazelwood School District, said she finds the resistance to mask mandates “unnerving.”
“It really floors me how people have made a public health crisis political,” she said. “Children are subject to what their parents want, and there are parents who don’t want to vaccinate their children. I understand that, somewhat, but the numbers of those infected are children, and we don’t know the long-term effects of COVID. There are a lot of questions and a lot of controversy over things that should not be controversial.”
Yet, controversy abounds over mask mandates, even as rates of infection soar in the county. Christopher Ave,health department spokesman for the St. Louis County Health Department, told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch the county’s overall, weekly diagnosed pediatric COVID-19 cases hit 551 during the week ending Dec. 4, the highest number since November 2020.
State Attorney General Eric Schmitt, a Republican running for U.S. Senate in 2022, has warned school districts they are in violation of the Cole County circuit court judge’s ruling if they enforce mask mandates. Schmitt even took to Twitter to solicit parents to turn in school districts that enforce mask mandates and quarantines.
“This is incredibly dangerous and occurs while numbers are rising dramatically,” Dr. Sam Page, St. Louis County executive director, wrote in his weekly newsletter. “We have more info about the rise (of COVID) in schools in particular – and as the new Omicron variant gains a foothold.”
The county executive called parents who are not taking COVID-19 “seriously a menace to society,” and their beliefs “carnival quackery” as a pandemic continues.
Thankfully, Simms-Williams said, Normandy can still employ mask mandates and other safety measures despite the Cole County judges ruling.
“Now that we’ve had time to review the ruling, we see it applies mostly to public health, not schools. So, we still have the right to implement rules to keep us safe,” she said.
Unlike other county schools, Simms-Williams said Normandy has never had contentious school board meetings or widespread pushback against COVID safety measures. Demographics, she said, is a major factor.
“Like most low-income communities, many of our children have health issues, or they live with families with health issues,” she said. “We have a lot of families who have older people in the home or are grandparents raising kids.”
To illustrate her point, Simms-Williams shared a story about a mother who came to a school board meeting who was undergoing chemotherapy treatments for cancer. The mother told the board, ‘I can’t afford to have my child come home and give me COVID.’”
Normandy instituted a hybrid educational system last year with at-home and in-person classes. Simms-Williams said only about 30% of the district’s students participated in in-person instructions. Parents who were still concerned about the contagious virus weren’t exactly thrilled about sending their kids to school this year.
COVID-19, Simms-Williams stressed, hit North County hard, especially majority-Black communities like Normandy. So, for many families in her district, she added, the pandemic is personal.
“We’re in a small community,” she said. “People infected with COVID weren’t just something you read about in the paper. Our families know people who have died from COVID. They have first-hand experience and aren’t willing to turn their backs on what they knew.”
As the Omicron variant spreads, hospitals here and around the country are sounding the alarm, the county executive told the St. Louis American last week. Normandy students and staff are on holiday break. Simms-Williams, who fears what students may bring back to schools in January, said she has trouble reconciling efforts to beat back mitigation policies in these desperate times.
“We’ve had more than 800,000 people die from COVID. That’s a lot of people,” she said. “As adults, as parents, we have to do the right thing. We have to look out for kids.”
Sylvester Brown Jr. is The St. Louis American’s inaugural Deaconess Fellow.
