NR analyzed data on the spread of COVID in schools in 60 Florida counties.
In late summer, as the Delta variant of the coronavirus surged through the American South, Victoria Defenthaler kept a close eye on the data in her Florida community. Cases of COVID-19 had spiked about 600 percent since June. Defenthaler was worried.
A member of the Martin County school board on the state’s Treasure Coast, Defenthaler warned that the district’s mitigation efforts might not be enough. She tried and failed to convince other board members to bring in health-department officials to provide counsel.
And she urged her colleagues to defy Governor Ron DeSantis and reinstitute a school mask mandate. Neighboring school districts were mandating masks. They should too, she argued.
“I don’t really care what the governor is saying,” Defenthaler said. “I want to do what is right.”
Lisa Miller, the mother of a 16-year-old high-school student, was one of the Martin County parents who spoke against a mandate. To Miller, a radiation therapist working with cancer patients at a local hospital, masking kids should be a parent’s decision.
The vast majority of kids who contract the virus have mild or no symptoms. And most kids aren’t wearing masks when they’re around friends outside of school, said Miller, who is skeptical that the flimsy masks many kids wear are effective at slowing the virus’s spread.
“People are wearing all types of different masks,” she said. “I don’t think they do that much.”
The Martin County school board ultimately did not institute a mask mandate, and abided by DeSantis’s order, which empowered parents to make the masking decision for their kids.
But the other two Treasure Coast county school boards made different decisions.
In St. Lucie County, the county directly north of Martin, the school board instituted a mask mandate but allowed parents to opt their kids out. In late August, with coronavirus cases spiking, the school board in Indian River County — directly north of St. Lucie — instituted a full-fledged mandate, with only medical exemptions allowed. Indian River was one of 13 Florida counties that have instituted mask mandates without parental opt-outs for at least a portion of this school year.
Three neighboring counties. Three different masking strategies. But did they work?
To get a better sense of what happened in Florida during the state’s Delta surge, National Review filed public-records requests with the school districts in all the state’s 67 counties, asking for the number of COVID-19 cases among both students and staff from the first day of school through September 21, and for the total number of students and staff in each district. Sixty of the school districts provided a response to the request.
The data show that many of the school districts that instituted the strictest mask mandates — mandates that required a doctor’s approval for an exemption — had among the lowest percentages of students and staff who’ve tested positive for COVID-19 this year. But there also is evidence that those lower percentages were driven not by district mask policies but by larger community trends, including vaccination rates and natural immunity. Some regions of the state were just hit harder by Delta than others, regardless of any one county’s masking policy, the data show.
And there are several examples — including on the Treasure Coast — where districts without mask requirements had similar, and sometimes lower, percentages of students who tested positive for the virus than did neighboring districts with stricter mask requirements.
For example, between the first day of school and September 21 — a roughly six-week period — St. Lucie County, where kids are required to mask unless their parents opt out, documented 1,326 positive COVID-19 cases among students, or about 3 percent of its student body. In Martin County, which had no mask mandate, the district documented 699 positive cases during that period, or 3.4 percent of its smaller student body.
By contrast, in Indian River County, which had the strictest mask mandate in the Treasure Coast, the school district documented 1,039 COVID cases, or 6.8 percent of its student body.
Miller, the anti-mandate mom, was not surprised. Last year, she said, county-run schools that mandated masks often didn’t have better results than charter schools that didn’t require them.
“It’s a virus. It cycles. It gets higher, it gets lower,” Miller said. “I don’t think there’s a whole lot you can do to prevent it.”
Defenthaler, on the other hand, remains convinced that mandating masks in school is an effective strategy for slowing the spread of the virus, particularly in the case of elementary-aged students who are not yet eligible to be vaccinated and for immunocompromised children. She is confident that last year’s mask mandate helped the district keep the virus under control. Even if the masks don’t do much, they likely do something, and that something is worth it, she believes.
“I’m looking at the science,” Defenthaler said. “We had great success last year when we were wearing masks. That’s why the numbers went down.”
The Masking Debate Erupts
The debate over reinstituting mask mandates in schools was contentious as Delta surged, particularly in Florida after DeSantis’s executive order in July making masks optional.
President Joe Biden accused DeSantis and Texas governor Greg Abbott of enacting “bad health policy,” and the Biden administration offered to reimburse Florida school districts that were penalized for defying DeSantis’s anti-mandate order.
There was no shortage of hyperbole over DeSantis’s order in the mainstream media.
South Florida newspapers called DeSantis’s COVID policies “reckless” and suggested that the governor refused to “follow science.” The Daily Beast declared DeSantis’s school-opening plans a “Delta disaster.” MSNBC’s Joy Reid accused DeSantis of “killing children.”
Fights broke out in at least one Florida community over the school board’s mask mandate.
Meanwhile, the medical community is still deeply divided over just how effective mask mandates are at slowing the spread of COVID-19 in schools. Studies claiming to show that masks are effective at preventing COVID transmission in schools have been criticized for not using control groups to isolate specifically for masks, or for comparing results from schools in different counties with wildly different rates of community spread.
In May, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a groundbreaking study finding no statistically significant benefit from requiring students to wear masks.
The data compiled by National Review show that school districts that instituted mask mandates did, in fact, tend to have lower percentages of students test positive for the coronavirus at the start of the school year. Of the ten counties that reported the lowest percentage of students testing positive, seven instituted a mask mandate without a parental opt-out for at least some portion of the school year, and two others instituted a mandate that parents could opt their children out of.
Combined, the 13 districts with mask mandates reported 42,194 documented cases of students testing positive for the virus, out of about 1.57 million students total, or about 2.6 percent. According to data provided by the Miami-Dade County school district, the largest school district in Florida, only about 0.6 percent of the district’s students tested positive for COVID-19 this school year, the lowest in the state. In August, Miami-Dade County instituted a mask mandate with no parent opt-out.
In the 28 school districts that had no mask mandate and that track COVID-19 infections, there were 27,878 infections among 537,594 students, or about 5.2 percent, according to data provided to National Review.
In rural Lafayette County, northwest of Gainesville, more than 10 percent of the kids attending school in the district tested positive for COVID-19 this year, one of the highest rates in the state, according to the district’s data.
Twelve Florida counties, which are mostly rural, reported that they either weren’t able to provide the data for the dates requested or do not track COVID-19 cases at all.
No Mandate, Better Results
Supporters of mask mandates may look to these results as proof that the mandates are effective. And while it is generally true that schools with the strictest mask mandates tended to have lower rates of students testing positive for COVID this year, that was not always the case.
In Sarasota, for example, about 7.2 percent of the student body tested positive for COVID through September 21, despite a strict mask mandate and a countywide vaccination rate of 67.5 percent, one of the highest in the state. In neighboring Manatee County, where parents could opt their kids out of the district’s mandate, about 4.7 percent of students tested positive.
National Review identified several cases where districts with no mandates had similar or, in some cases, lower percentages of positive cases than did neighboring counties with mandates.
Lee County, in southwest Florida, started the school year with a mandate that parents could opt out of, and briefly transitioned to a mandate that parents couldn’t opt out of, only to transition back after a federal judge allowed DeSantis’s mask order to stand. In the roughly six weeks tracked by National Review, about 6.3 percent of Lee’s students tested positive for the virus, according to district data. Directly to the south, only about 3.6 percent of neighboring Collier County’s students tested positive over that same period.
Gadsden County in North Florida, which considered but did not implement a mask mandate, had about 1.7 percent of its students test positive. That was lower than neighboring Leon County, which includes Tallahassee, where about 3 percent of students tested positive. Leon County is one of the 13 Florida counties that had a mask mandate with no parent opt-out.
In northeast Florida, only about 1.8 percent of the students in Duval County and 2.1 percent of students in Nassau County tested positive for the virus this year, according to district data. Duval, where Jacksonville is located, also is one of the 13 counties that instituted a mask mandate with no parental opt-out. Nassau, to the north, mandated masks but allowed parents to opt their children out.
Meanwhile, in the more rural Clay County to the south of Duval, about 3 percent of students have tested positive for the virus this year, according to school-district data. That’s slightly higher than Duval and Nassau but still among the lowest rates in Florida.
Beth Clark, a Clay County school-board member, was against a mandate. She said she heard from several teachers who said the masks made it difficult to teach young children and children with special needs. She heard “horror stories” about kids sharing masks and wearing dirty masks. She said comparisons between county-run schools that mandated masks last year and charter schools that didn’t showed little significant difference.
“The size of the virus is so small to begin with, the cloth masks these children come to school in just aren’t effective,” said Clark, who believes the board would be setting a bad example if it broke the law by violating DeSantis’s order.
Clark said the district has been “extremely cautious,” utilizing social distancing and encouraging hand-washing to curb the spread of the virus. She believes the virus is being spread predominantly in the community at large, not in schools.
“In Florida, we’re still going out to eat. Thankfully the churches are open. People are still socializing in family gatherings and high-school reunions,” she said.
Luanne Eckert, a grandparent of two elementary-aged children in Clay County, supports a mask mandate because younger kids cannot be vaccinated yet. She said she is confident that masks are effective at reducing the spread of the virus in schools, and she supports a mandate until COVID-19 is gone entirely, or at least until positivity rates drop to 1 percent or less.
“I don’t know why everyone is in an uproar about it this year,” Eckert said. “They were fine last year. All these kids were fine with masks.”
Vaccination Rates and Community Spread
Given the unpredictable county-level trends, it’s far from clear that mask mandates are driving disparate COVID outcomes. Vaccines seem to be doing much of the work. The school districts with the strictest mask mandates are overwhelmingly in counties with relatively high vaccination rates and low new case positivity rates.
In the 15 counties with the highest vaccination rates as of September 21, eight had at some point instituted a mask mandate without parent opt-outs this year, and three had mandates with parent opt-outs.
By contrast, none of the 36 counties with the lowest vaccination rates in Florida have mandated masks in any way this school year.
In the ten counties with the lowest new case positivity rates between September 17 and September 23, eight had mask mandates without parent opt-outs and at least one had a mask mandate that parents could opt their kids out of.
None of the 22 counties with the highest positivity rates during that period have mandated that students wear masks in school.
School districts that reported the highest percentages of students and staff testing positive for the virus tended to also be in counties with relatively low vaccination rates and relatively high positivity rates.
In Lafayette County, where more than 10 percent of students contracted COVID this year, only 37.4 percent of the eligible population was vaccinated as of September 21.
In rural Glades County, where about 8.8 percent of students have tested positive for the virus this year, only 30.6 percent of the eligible population was vaccinated.
In the ten Florida counties with the lowest vaccination rates that also provided school data, about 7.1 percent of the students tested positive for COVID-19 this year. In the ten counties with the highest vaccination rates that also provided school data, only 1.9 percent of the students tested positive.
Science Not Strong on Masking Kids
Dr. Tracy Beth Høeg, a private-practice physician, epidemiologist, and associate researcher at Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation at the University of California–Davis, said it’s likely not a coincidence that school districts with lower rates of students testing positive for the virus tend to also be in counties with higher vaccination rates and lower positivity rates.
Høeg was the senior author of a study in Wisconsin that found there was minimal transmission of the coronavirus in schools. That study and others have found that less than 5 percent of cases that are identified in schools were transmitted in schools, meaning that the students who contracted the virus usually contracted it elsewhere. What’s happening in a community — what percentage of the community is vaccinated, how fast the virus is spreading — is likely far more significant than any school district’s masking policy.
“The science is strong and there for vaccination in terms of preventing cases,” Høeg said. “The science is not strong with the mask mandates in the schools.”
The data collected by National Review are not enough to prove or disprove the effectiveness of masks in Florida, in part because there are so many variables to take into account.
The data were self-reported by individual school districts, not the state, and it’s likely that it was not collected uniformly. The state was not releasing county-level pediatric data during this period.
While most schools in Florida started on or around August 10, others started later, meaning they had fewer days to count students testing positive for the coronavirus. Schools in Miami-Dade County, for example, didn’t start until August 23.
Some counties, particularly the counties in South Florida, were hit harder at the outset of the pandemic, so it’s possible a higher percentage of students and staff in those counties had some level of natural immunity. The data also does not address school-level or district compliance rates, and vaccination rates among students and staff. School districts also instituted mask mandates at different times and for different durations.
Høeg said it is difficult to specifically measure the effects of mask mandates in schools.
“If you want to look at the masks’ actual effect on how much transmission there is in the schools, you need to look only at the cases that are being spread in the schools, and those are very rare,” she said. “You would need a very large study to be able to look at just those cases.”
Schools to Blame for Student Deaths?
In addition to requesting documented COVID-19 cases among students and staff, National Review also inquired about documented COVID-related deaths among students and staff.
Most of the districts that responded said they don’t track COVID-related deaths. However, 24 school districts did provide data for the request. Of those, 23 reported no student deaths. St. Lucie County reported one.
Four school districts — Hernando, Indian River, St. Lucie, and Taylor — reported COVID-related deaths of staff members since the start of the school year. However, media reports indicate that there have been COVID-related deaths among staff in other districts as well.
NPR reported in September that at least 13 Miami-Dade school workers died of COVID since mid August. However, most of the workers who died had contracted the virus before the beginning of the school year, and none of the 13 were vaccinated, NPR reported.
There were several reports of child deaths during the Delta surge in Florida. According to a report by Politico Florida, between July 30 and September 9, ten children died of COVID in the state. Prior to that, only seven children had died of COVID in Florida, according to Politico.
Still, child deaths are only a tiny percentage of the more than 57,000 people who have died from the virus in Florida. And it’s not clear how many, if any, of the ten children who died during the Delta surge had contracted the virus at school. At least a couple of the deaths involved young children — including at least one baby — who were not old enough to attend school, according to media reports. At least one teenager, Jo’Keria Graham from Lake City, died before the start of her senior year, according to a local TV report.
‘It’s All About Feelings’
Back on the Treasure Coast, it was the August surge in cases — and the threat that surge posed to students and staff — that led Indian River County school-board member Mara Schiff to support a reinstituted mask mandate.
Schiff said the board hoped that by approving a mask mandate they could avoid having to temporarily close schools. The district eventually did temporarily shutter two Indian River schools, and was in danger of having to shut down more, she said.
She said that at the time COVID rates in Indian River County were rising faster than in surrounding counties, which might help explain why the school district ended up with a larger percentage of its student body testing positive for the virus than surrounding districts. Schiff said the concern was that rates of positive cases in schools would follow countywide rates.
“Anytime we talk about the effectiveness of masks in schools, it’s never just about schools,” Schiff said. “It’s about what’s happening countywide.”
Schiff voted for the mask mandate. She said the board’s legal counsel told them it was lawful. Local parents’-rights groups have since called on DeSantis to remove from their posts the superintendent and the three board members who supported the mask mandate.
Tiffany Justice, a former Indian River County school-board member and a co-founder of the national nonprofit Moms for Liberty, argues that masks are harmful to students and contribute to anxiety, depression, skin breakouts, dental issues, and regressions in speech patterns and that they are generally a distraction. She said that many of the COVID-mitigation measures in local school districts — including the Indian River County mask mandate, and a prohibition on indoor singing last year by Brevard County to the north — are being implemented arbitrarily.
“There’s no data or science to back any of it,” she said. “It’s all about feelings.”
The virus is not as dangerous for children as it is for other groups, Justice said. If teachers and staff want to protect themselves with masks and face shields, that’s their right.
“But for our students, there really shouldn’t have been a change,” she said. “I think the concern for parents here is, where does it stop if the district can tell you they know better than you about what’s best for your child?”