Beginning Monday, Owensboro Public Schools will be moving to a mask-optional, but strongly encouraged policy for all staff and students, district officials have announced. The decision will be left up to the individual or the parent of the student and will no longer be a district-wide or individual classroom decision.
However, the district does reserve the right to reinstate a mandatory masking policy should the need arise, officials said.
“This decision was not made lightly,” an announcement from OPS reads. “We understand that COVID-19 is still prevalent in society, but we have been monitoring the data not only in our community, but across the state and the country and feel it is time for us to accept that we will have to live with COVID being a permanent part of life and move forward.”
The announcement continues: “We understand that this decision won’t be popular with everyone, but we believe that it is time to get our students back to as ‘normal’ of a school environment as possible…something we haven’t had since March of 2020. Those wishing to do so are more than welcome to continue wearing a mask. Masks are still available for students and staff who request one.”
OPS made the announcement at 1 p.m. via social media.
The updated OPS COVID-19 plan can be accessed here by clicking “Updated COVID Policies Effective February 14, 2022.”
Daviess County Public Schools adopted a mask-optional policy for their middle and high schools in late November, while the same policy was extended to elementary schools in December. The latest updates on the DCPS COVID-19 operation plan can be found here.
Jared Revlett, Public Information Officer for OPS, said that they were able to lean on how things have gone at DCPS over the last couple of months.
“From the start, we have said we would monitor all the data, whether it’s local, statewide, national, whatever,” Revlett said. “Having a neighbor right here in town that’s been optional for a while, we were able to see how that worked for them. There wasn’t really much difference between the two in terms of things such as the number of staff that were out, proportionally.”
Revlett said that wasn’t the only data point, though, and that there have been ongoing discussions about when OPS could make the move to a mask-optional policy.
“We looked at schools statewide, we looked to see what other states were doing across the country,” Revlett said. “The decision has been talked about back and forth for several weeks. Now we feel that we have the data that shows the time is right to do this.”
