Based on an appeal by parents of students with disabilities, a Federal Appeals Court supported mask mandates in school.
Federal Appeals Court Decision Ensures Iowa Schools Can Require Masking to Protect Students with Disabilities
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Eva Lopez, ACLU, elopez@aclu.org
Veronica Fowler, ACLU of Iowa, veronica.fowler@aclu-ia.org, cell: 515-451-1777
DES MOINES, Iowa — The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit today ruled that the Americans with Disabilities Act requires schools to impose universal masking rules where necessary to ensure students with disabilities have access to public school education.
The decision comes in a case brought by the American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU of Iowa, Disability Rights Iowa, The Arc of the United States, Arnold & Porter, and Duff Law Firm, P.L.C. on behalf of The Arc of Iowa and 11 parents of children with disabilities. The Eighth Circuit held that the clients are entitled to a preliminary injunction to ensure that the defendant school districts in Iowa are providing for universal masking as a reasonable accommodation so that students with disabilities can go to school safely.
“The Eighth Circuit affirmed what we’ve known to be true from the start: School mask mandate bans are discriminatory and illegal,” said Susan Mizner, director of the ACLU’s Disability Rights Program. “To be able to attend schools safely, many students with disabilities need their schools to require masks. At a time when COVID-19 is ravaging our communities once again, this decision ensures that schools can continue to take basic public health precautions like requiring universal masking to protect their students.”
A federal district court in September enjoined the state from barring mask mandates, recognizing that “forcing children to bear the brunt of societal discord is ‘illogical and unjust.’” The state then appealed that decision, resulting in today’s ruling.
“Today’s decision is an important victory for the civil rights of children with disabilities in Iowa, who have a right to go to school with their peers,” said Rita Bettis Austen, legal director of the ACLU of Iowa. “No parent should have to choose between their child’s health and safety and their education, but that is the terrible position that the state put our clients in. It’s important to note that the court’s reasoning also means that even schools that are not named in the lawsuit should be requiring masks when needed to accommodate students with disabilities so they can go to school with their peers. This decision is a huge relief to families across our state.”
The groups are arguing in the lawsuit that federal civil rights laws require schools to be able to require universal masking to give students with disabilities an equal opportunity to benefit from their public education.
The following are additional comments from:
Shira Wakschlag, senior director, legal advocacy and general counsel at The Arc of the United States:
“In the midst of yet another COVID-19 surge, the court is making it clear that students with disabilities have the right to go to school safely during this pandemic. The Arc will continue fighting to ensure that students with disabilities in Iowa and nationwide are able to attend their neighborhood schools alongside their peers without putting their health and their lives at risk.”
Catherine E. Johnson, executive director of Disability Rights Iowa:
“I welcome today’s ruling that universal masking as an accommodation is both reasonable and necessary for students with disabilities to attend school in-person safely during the ongoing pandemic. This ruling comes during a time when Iowa is experiencing a surge of COVID-19 cases throughout the state. We are hopeful this opinion provides relief, confidence and clarity for parents, students, and schools to work collaboratively to restore our students’ long established civil rights under federal law and safely return our students with disabilities to their schools.”
This release is available online here:https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/federal-appeals-court-decision-ensures-iowa-schools-can-require-masking-protect
Diane Ravitch's blog 
In my experience, the ACLU is focused upon justice, not on attracting ‘donations’ like so very many ‘charitable organizations’. Most of their lobbyists work for far less pay than the typical corporate hireling. At least in my State (TN), the ACLU tirelessly continues to swim upstream against a raging current.
ACLU, not to be confused with the ACLJ.
This was more than a victory for children with disabilities.
It was a victory for all rational people of all ages that value safety first over some mask-less, AR-15 totting, antivaccine, idiot that thinks he/she should be free to do whatever they want even if it means other people die because of them.
Don’t read any further if you are a total passivist that believes that when some hits you so hard that they shatter your right cheek bone, you turn your face so they can break the left one, too.
I think (that mean’s it is my opinion and I reserve the right to be wrong) it’s time to start selling hunting licenses to legally hunt anti-vaccine, anti-mask MAGA fascists in public settings that still support the traitor.
If “they” isolate and stay home, then they’d be safe and protected by the law from those hunters.
I just hope, if that comes to pass, that the license isn’t too expensive when I get in line to buy one.
I’m not a pacifist but I am against violence unless someone is directly attacking me, a loved one or some innocent bystander. I don’t own a gun and I’m not interested in owning one ever. Pax vobiscum.
And also with you, Joe!
I consider myself a pacifist and I own/use firearms.
One can be a pacifist and still believe in using force for self defense for myself and others.
Mr. Lofthouse,
I’m a mental health nurse with many years of experience working with men who have severe anger issues and tendencies toward violence. I’ve read your postings for a few months and you show all the signs of a psychopathic personality. You have recently posted several comments advocating violence against people you disagree with; your style of writing is not sarcastic – you mean it, something I’ve seen many times over the years. I suspect you are a lonely man who has alienated most people who once meant something to you. Get help before you actually hurt someone. I write this with the best of intentions.
Maybe you need to call up Lloyd’s postings over a period of years rather than months. And read the context too– the other posts here. Yes, we vent. So do commenters on MSM articles: do you read them? You would be clapping a large %age of them into psych wards too, judging by your post here. Get some perspective, and some humor.
Lloyd, do you intend to kill people?
From outside the left-wing bubble…..
I have to assume that the response here to that advertisement is that any parent for whom the ad resonates is either a right-winger or the victim of right-wing propaganda.
No, my response is that the organization that conjured up this BS video is a right wing GOP anti-teachers’ union propaganda outfit. When you slander the teacher’s union, you slander the teachers carte blanche. Blaming the teachers’ unions for the problems in schools is typical of the GOP and Chris Chrsitie was a master at this sort of baloney.
I think this advertisement exactly reflects how some folks believe discourse should be.
Scapegoat some convenient folks for the problems and ignore the complexities.
It’s the dienne77/flerp mode of discourse — it isn’t surprising that the two of them have a mutual admiration pact.
If this ad “resonates” with a parent, I would say that parent would have to be pretty similar to the folks I know who are rabid Trump voters. I know parents who used to vote Republican all their lives who would never feel that this ad understands them, the way flerp does.
“Democrats are putting kids last” (if you don’t count providing them with food, shelter, healthcare, of course, and trying to disenfranchise their parents)
“Teachers’ unions are putting kids last” (if you agree with Eva Moskowitz that only non-union teachers who are specially trained by miracle workers like Eva Moskowitz can properly identify those students who are worthy and those who are not worthy and deserve to be last.)
Mask mandates are a way to keep schools in-person. Most parents understand the complexities. I wish flerp would explain why he is so certain that “union teachers” get some benefit from forcing students to wear masks and being forced to wear masks themselves.
I just rode the subway and 98% of the folks were wearing masks. And there were a very few – 1 or 2 per car – who felt entitled to break the law because their needs were more important.
I am sure that flerp is outraged that airlines and subways haven’t stopped mask mandates already.
The US has one of the highest COVID death rates because of folks who do not understand anything but their own needs.
I don’t love wearing a mask and neither does my kid. But I have never seen such a ridiculously obnoxious group of adults than those who believe the only people who matter are them. And I see them on the subway and screaming on Jan 6 and yelling at school board meetings to ban books that white parents don’t like. And they post here, too.
The following is the kind of information that folks like flerp dismiss because an ad by republicans “resonated” with them and who better to trust than the folks who repeatedly lie and never apologize. Kind of like flerp posting the lie about Gov. Hochul and never apologizing.
From the Yale School of Med – the doctors who actually have to treat the patients with COVID.
“There is still a lot we don’t know, especially as the new variants continue to emerge,” says Carlos Oliveira, MD, PhD, a Yale Medicine pediatric infectious diseases specialist who recommended people hold on to their masks regardless of their vaccination status even in late Spring 2021, when the CDC eased its recommendations as the virus seemed to be waning, before Delta—and then Omicron—became the dominant variants. “There could be spikes in [coronavirus] transmission for a variety of reasons,” he said.
Sheela Shenoi, MD, MPH, a Yale Medicine infectious diseases specialist, adds that while the U.S. as a whole has made progress in vaccinations, rates of infections and deaths are still high in other parts of the world where overall vaccination rates are significantly lower. “I hesitate to say that we are approaching a post-COVID world when so many are still being ravaged by this virus,” she says. “If there is anything we should have learned, it is that we are all interconnected; what happens in one part of the world affects everybody.”
In Spring 2021, Dr. Shenoi also held onto her masks, and continued to wear them inside in stores, partly because she was interacting with people and had no way of knowing whether they were vaccinated. “There’s nothing that’s ‘safe’—it’s always ‘safer.’ If you are fully vaccinated, it is safer than it was two years ago to be around people without a mask,” she said.
Dr. Oliveira says his greatest concern is for children exposed to adults who could be infected, especially children younger than 5 who are not eligible for the vaccines, and the majority of whom he says have gotten COVID-19 got it after exposure to an infected parent or other adult. He suggests parents do whatever they can to limit a child’s exposure to unvaccinated people. “My advice—if your children can’t get the vaccine—is to make sure they are with immunized people outside of school,” he says. “Try to get everyone in the family who can get the vaccine to get it.”
Karen Jubanyik, MD, a Yale Medicine emergency medicine specialist, stressed the importance of wearing a mask among people who have compromised immune systems, whether they are elderly or taking immuno-suppression medications, or if they are an organ transplant recipient or have a condition such as cancer that affects the immune system.
Dr. Jubanyik also said the decision to wear a mask is important when considering the potential for breakthrough infections and geographic location. The vaccines are effective at preventing severe disease and hospitalization, which is good news for any given person, but across 350 million people in the U.S., that’s still a lot of potential infections, she says, especially with the highly transmissible Omicron variant. ”
Yale doctors are concerned about children younger than 5, and Republicans and flerp profess to be MORE concerned than anyone else about them.
Boil and bubble, toil and trouble!
Our motto.
From the above biased video: Democrats and teachers’ unions are putting kids last???!!!! end quote. What a total smear job which amounts to slander and misinformation on steroids when it comes to teacher unions. From the web site of this propaganda outfit: SGLF is a 501(c)(4) social welfare organization and a strategic partner of the Republican State Leadership Committee (RSLC), the nation’s largest organization focused solely on electing state Republicans. end quote And there you have it, the truth be damned, just attack, attack and attack some more. Although, many prominent Democrats have been for so-called “school choice” and charter schools. Actually the SGLF and Arnie Duncan are pretty much on the same page when it comes to education.
Such cute kids! So glad that some people are rational enough to want to protect them with mask mandates!
In other news, after the Loser Former Guy was booted from office by voters, I fully expected Propaganda Minister Stephen “Goebbels” Miller or KayLie McNinny or Sarah Huckster-bee Sanders or some such mouthpiece to write a Mein Kampf for Glorious Leader Who Shines More Orange Than Does the Sun. A follow-up to his January 6th Beer Hall Putsch. But, ofc, we are talking “He who does not read” here. So, instead, he issued a picture book.
Yup. A picture book.
A book published by a press co-founded by The SemiLiterate One himself. A self-published book. Nobody knows books like Donald Trump.
With Tweetlike captions that won’t tax even a Trumpanzee brain.
Sorry, readers of this blog, but the $229.99 copies with the Trump’s signature malignant narcissistic Sharpie-produced angry scrawl are sold out.
Perhaps they should issue one with just pictures appropriate for, say, Don Jr.
But who knows, maybe they will reissue it soon!!! Don’t give up hope.
How about this: a Special Deluxe Edition for $10,000 with a slipcover made of Presidential Records that Trump took out of the White House!
Oops. A correction. The press was co-founded by Donald Trump, Jr. Isn’t that sweet! Like kids the world over, he made a book for Daddy!
This is coming at a time when states seem to be lining up to end state mask mandates. NJ has just said they’ll end theirs in March. Connecticut just announced it’s ending school mask mandates in February. I’m sure more states are going to follow, as this seems to be a semi-coordinated effort by blue state governors.
https://centerfordignity.com/state-by-state-school-mask-mandates/
Oregon and California have followed suit since my last comment.
And Delaware.
FLERP, if there is a new and dangerous variant, the masks will be back.
Flerp, it makes sense to me that states will be ending mask mandates in March– that dovetails nicely with the trajectory of the Omicron variant which easily escapes vaccinations, whose transmission is best tamped down by wearing high-grade masks in public gatherings. By the same token, it will make sense to me if universal masking is again imposed in the event of some future variant surge. I do not know why you have stumped for no-masks during Omicron spread: schools with universal masking have fared much better; regions with low-to-no-masking have seen healthcare delivery stretched to the breaking point, and schools with so few teachers/ bus drivers etc to cover that they’ve had to close periodically.
If people hadn’t “stumped for no masks” for the last year and a half, these mandates wouldn’t be being lifted now. They would continue indefinitely because that’s the lowest political risk and it would be giving the people what they want. Note these are only state mandates—the bluest areas within blue states will repeal their school mask rules when they’re pried from their dead hands.
I don’t understand your hostility to masks. Are you also oppposed to vaccines?
Love how the anti-maskers have such a high opinion of themselves: “If people hadn’t “stumped for no masks” for the last year and a half, these mandates wouldn’t be being lifted now.”
Wrong. And they aren’t being lifted “now” — they are being lifted SOON. In response to changing circumstances. In response to science. Just like they will be resumed, in response to changing circumstances and science.
I certainly fear for our country if they responded to anti-maskers who demanded no mask mandates during the worst of the omicron spread when hospitals were turning away people with all sorts of medical emergencies.
I didn’t wear a mask in the summer when COVID seemed to be ending. Then I did in the fall and now.
If anything, the rabid anti-maskers have caused masking to last longer than it would have.
And bethree5 made an excellent point that schools with universal masking have fared much better.
Diane, I’m not opposed to vaccines. I’ve had three shots myself.
If you don’t understand why people don’t like requiring children to wear masks 7 hours a day at school, for years of their childhood, while adults go to packed indoor arenas maskless, then we are ships passing in the night.
FLERP,
I am not sure why you posed a false equivalence. Did I ever write that kids in schools should be masked but adults in sports arenas should not be masked? No, I did not.
I don’t think anyone should be maskless indoors, whether in a classroom, a sports arena, or a church, so long as the pandemic rages. If reputable authorities (not politicians) say it’s fine to go maskless, then take them off. If the danger of infection is high, wear them.
Kids are required to be in school. Adults are not required to be in “packed indoor arenas”.
Even before the pandemic there was never any vaccine mandate for adults to attend events in arenas and yet there were school vaccine mandates.
I don’t seem to recall the anti-vax Orthodox Jews who were spreading measles citing the fact that “adults can be in arenas without being vaccinated for measles”, but I doubt that would have been considered a very convincing argument for all public schools to end vaccine requirements for students.
Are we supposed to believe that the vast majority of doctors who have devoted their lives to caring for sick children are conspiring with evil democrats to keep children in masks for no good reason?
What the heck is wrong with Democrats and schools listening to doctors when apparently they are supposed to listen to economists and some angry parents?
The far right has done a great brainwashing job on some people and now anti-science folks are given the credibility they weren’t when anti-vax Orthodox Jews and a few other rabidly anti-vax communities were not held up as the only folks who cared about children’s health. Now, economists supposedly know more than doctors.
Parents vin 145 (5.9% of the state’s total of 859) IL School Districts had filed a complaint against the school mask mandate, which was overturned by a Sangamon County Judge. Therefore, numerous districts communicated to parents that, today, masking would be optional. (Some of the defendant school districts stuck to their guns & had stated that all students must continue to wear masks).
A few of the Defendant school districts cancelled school today in order to have an emergency school board meeting & a decision.
A movement to overturn this is being filed by the IL S.A.
It is unfortunate that the aforementioned states’ governors (oh, & these are in BLUE states!) seem to have jumped on a bandwagon, ending the mask mandates. Didn’t the CDC & Dr. Fauci JUST announce that even cloth masks weren’t a good deterrent, & that everyone’s best protection is the N-95?!
Soo…the numbers have gone down. Could that be BECAUSE people have been, er, wearing masks, & more of them 95s?
Watch for another spike, people, or perhaps a brand new variant. Just wait…for once…the cases will–DUH!–rise yet again.
Americans are an impatient breed, & all of this is based on…politics.
If the Blues can’t please more of their impatient
constituents (this get themselves reelected) well, then, the + #s are down: we’ll take it!
This is all sickening.
Literally.
Oh, & as for these awful & selfish teachers unions: CPS is one of the Defendants mentioned above. But they’re keeping the mask mandate. Why? Because the Chicago Teachers Union NEGOTIATED Covid Protocols INTO THEIR CONTRACT!!
Way to keep EVERYONE safe, CTU!!!