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First, it was sports fields and locker rooms that took precedence over education in Ohio County Schools when the board of education voted to partially defund the Ohio County Public Library.
Now, it's masks and quarantine rules that some board members are allowing to divert their attention from where it needs to be -- and that's educating, as best possible, all students in the district.
This past week, for the second consecutive meeting, the board held a vote on whether students should wear masks to class.
And for the second consecutive meeting, the vote to make masking optional failed.
We're not here to weigh in on the debate of whether students should be masked or if it should be optional. The important thing this year, as we've stated previously, is that the district does whatever is necessary to ensure students remain in the classroom.
Our children cannot afford another year -- not another week -- of lost learning opportunities.
Instead of debating masks, here are some issues we believe board members should be publicly debating at each meeting moving forward:
– Strategies to elevate student achievement;
– The best ways to tackle a lost-learning year in 2020;
– How district administrators are addressing what has become a troubling trend of unacceptably low standardized test scores throughout the district;
– A plan to streamline the bloated bureaucracy that governs the school system, and taking those resources and focusing them where they belong -- on education.
Instead, it appears moving forward as if masks will be the hill this board will battle over, with 3-2 votes in favor of keeping masks becoming the norm at each meeting. That will continue to distract the board from its mission and in the end, only hurt students.
We call on board members to stop playing politics with this issue, and instead ensure, by whatever means possible, that students remain in the classroom for the remainder of this year.