Multiple sources have indicated that in the midnight hour of Thursday, both the Kentucky House and Senate overrode Andy Beshear’s vetoes of Senate Bills No. 1 and No. 2 — swiftly ending mask mandates on school districts and day care centers lobbied by the governor’s office and the Kentucky Board of Education almost a month ago.
The decisions from the Kentucky General Assembly came less than six hours after Trigg County’s Board of Education convened in Cadiz, which in the moment only possessed knowledge of the House and Senate’s decisions of first passage.
Trigg County Superintendent Bill Thorpe discussed these ongoings at the capitol, noting the district would have to call a special session in order to address and review the potential of either keeping, or dropping, the school’s current mask mandate — all within five working days of any action taken by the general assembly.
Now, there’s chain reaction, and the board will have to reconvene.
The Trigg County Public Schools and its officials were one of 40-plus districts to implement its own mask mandates for students, faculty and staff prior to both Beshear and the KBE’s decisions, in what Thorpe said was a two-fold decision to maintain the health and safety of students, teachers and staff, while remaining in compliance with insurance carriers for the district.
While no opinions in favor of keeping or ending mask mandates within the Trigg County Public School system were explicitly shared during Thursday’s session, Thorpe noted current COVID-19 numbers on campus don’t paint a pristine picture.
And the district’s lawyer, Jack Lackey Jr., also noted that according to the current definition from the Department for Public Health, masking within three feet of a positive case warrants a quarantine, but not masking within six feet of a positive case also warrants a quarantine — meaning the removal of masks could lead to more students missing in-person instruction.
At the time of Thursday’s meeting and according to Thorpe, only two staff members district-wide currently had positive cases, with zero in quarantine.
As it stands, Trigg County school officials will have to make their own decision to either keep or drop masking inside its campus buildings, because of adopting its own legal language prior to the governor and the Kentucky Board of Education ordering mandates.
Thorpe and Lackey also said while current language in Senate Bill No. 1 and No. 2 seemed convoluted and complicated, they did perceive that the new laws — which immediately go into effect, because of their emergency status — did provide 20 more NTI instructional days on top of the 10 already granted, in case a district has to shutdown.
Furthermore, Thorpe and Lackey said that those 20 additional NTI days were understood to be non-concurrent, and would likely have to be divided up between the primary, intermediate, middle and high schools as needed, in the event a COVID-19 outbreak occurs within a specific building.
