Unionville-Chadds Ford School District leaders are refusing to explain where they derived the authority to shutter classrooms and require masks.
Leaders of a southeast Pennsylvania school district who shuttered some of their schools for the better part of the year after the Covid-19 outbreak and then mandated masks for most of the following year are being accused of dodging questions from parents and a prominent Republican lawmaker about their legal authority to implement the pandemic-era policies.
Instead, Unionville-Chadds Ford School District leaders have chided state senator Scott Martin for asking questions and requesting information on behalf of a parent, and suggested he is wasting time on an issue that is not critical for Pennsylvanians.
But Martin, a leader in the effort to limit Democratic governor Tom Wolf’s Covid-era emergency powers, has argued that it is important to reassess local responses to the pandemic. And, he said, concerned parents should not be left in the dark about the legal basis for school-district decisions or the consequences of those decisions for students. “A citizen asking where a government has rooted powers, they deserve answers,” Martin told National Review.
The dispute comes as education leaders nationwide are coming to grips with the impact that pandemic-related school closures and mask mandates had on students. In its first post-pandemic report this week, the National Assessment of Education Progress found math and reading scores plummeted across the country, including in Pennsylvania, where eighth-grade math scores dropped 11 points since 2019, and reading scores are at their lowest level in nearly 20 years.
Martin, the chairman of the Pennsylvania Senate Education Committee and a former candidate for governor, sent a letter to Unionville-Chadds Ford district leaders in mid June asking for, among other things, documentation regarding their legal authority to close schools and then to mandate masks, as well as information about the number of child-abuse claims the district received related to masking and what it did with those reports. The school district includes portions of Chester and Delaware counties, west of Philadelphia.
“I believe that it is incumbent upon our educational institutions at all levels to operate with transparency, responsiveness and trust,” Martin wrote in his June 16 letter to district superintendent John Sanville and school board president Jeff Hellrung. “All pandemic-related decisions are worthy of close examination, if only to ensure that any mistakes that were made are never again repeated, especially mistakes involving the physical, mental and educational well-being of our students.”
Martin’s letter was based on concerns raised by Unionville-Chadds Ford parent and local attorney Chad Williams, who has publicly expressed doubts that the district had legal authority to shutter schools, mandate masks, and decline to report abuse allegations to the state if they were based on mask-wearing. In his letter, Martin wrote that Williams had “repeatedly raised the issues below with the UCFSD, in some cases for more than a year, but to date has not received a detailed written response to any of these issues from any UCFSD representative.”
The district didn’t respond to Martin until August, claiming his letter never arrived through the mail, and that they only received an emailed copy from a community member in mid July.
In their response, Sanville and Hellrung did not answer any of Martin’s questions. Instead, they wrote that it was “disappointing” that Martin – “holding yourself out there as the chairman of the [Senate Education Committee] – would not complete some minimal due diligence like contacting the District to discuss these issues first. Instead it appears you simply copied and pasted information from a non-constituent of your district and placed it on the official letterhead of your office.”
“Instead of writing such a letter to the District,” they continued, “we would have hoped the Chairman of the Committee would be spending more time addressing critical issues that face Pennsylvanians like a pending shortage in highly qualified teachers, the persistent underfunding of our K-12 schools, and the vital need for important and substantive charter school reform.”
Rather than answer Martin’s questions, Sanville and Hellrung offered to schedule a meeting with him to “discuss the needs and concerns of our public schools.”
In an August interview with National Review, Martin said he was simply trying to act as a conduit for Williams to get some of his legal questions answered.
“You can see the tack that they’re taking. They don’t answer any questions. They’re very arrogant in their response,” he said of Sanville and Hellrung, adding that kind of attitude is part of the reason why parents around the country have grown angry with school leaders.
In late August, Martin sent a follow-up letter, assuring Sanville and Hellrung that his committee has “managed to tackle many pressing issues,” and noted he that he has “publicly expressed concern as to how governments and school districts reacted during the COVID-19 pandemic.” He rephrased Williams’ concerns as his own, listing seven different questions and requests for documents, including documents from residents questioning the district’s legal authority to impose pandemic restrictions, the district’s response to those questions, transcripts from public meetings where the legal issues were discussed, reports detailing the number of child-abuse cases reported to the district from March 2020 to March 2022, and any communication from the state outlining circumstances when mandatory reporters were not required to forward reports of alleged child abuse to Pennsylvania’s child-protective-services agency.
On October 14, the district responded, denying most of Martin’s request, claiming that it was “overly broad,” that it used “insufficiently specific language,” and that he didn’t identify specific senders or recipients. They claimed that any information about child-abuse reports are exempt from disclosure, though Martin only requested numbers. The district did include a link to school board meeting agendas and dates where the board addressed a specific policy Martin had questions about.
It also provided one email and an attachment – a joint letter from the Pennsylvania Department of Education and the Pennsylvania Department of Human Services from October 2021, in which they discuss “a small but concerning push to report masking requirements for children in schools to the child abuse reporting system.” In the letter, they state that while obstructing a child’s breathing is considered child abuse, “mask wearing for children 2 and older does not obstruct breathing and is not child abuse,” and reporting it as such is “insulting and disrespectful to survivors of child abuse.” The letter does not specifically direct school leaders not to send reports of child abuse related to mask-wearing to child-protective services, and it does not cite any legal authority that would give mandatory reporters discretion in those cases.
Martin intends to appeal the district’s response denying the rest of his records request. In August, he noted that “the General Assembly has the power to remove people who are negligent in their jobs. If people are going to abuse the powers that people have given them, we need to rein that in, whether that’s on the highest level with governors coming up with new powers that they think they have, all the way down to school boards who are enacting policies that nowhere in law are they given that power.”
In an email to National Review, the Unionville-Chadds Ford School District denied it is dodging questions about the legal authority it had to impose various pandemic-era policies. “Our district has answered these questions throughout the pandemic and beyond and has been fully transparent to our citizens,” the email states. It also defended its response to Martin, noting that the district “invited Senator Martin to visit us in person for a conversation and to see firsthand how our students are thriving in our school district,” and adding, “He has not responded to our invitation.”
In the email, the district did not explain where it derived its legal authority to shutter schools and to impose a mask mandate.
After shuttering schools – with the General Assembly’s backing – at the beginning of the pandemic in 2020, the Unionville-Chadds Ford School District brought elementary students back for a hybrid in-person model in early October of that year, according to updates on the district’s website. Middle-school and high-school students came back for a few weeks that fall, but were sent back to a virtual model in mid-November. They returned in a hybrid model at the end of January 2021. The district mandated masks into the spring of 2022, even after the state supreme court shot down a Wolf administration mask mandate. The day of the ruling, Wolf’s education secretary, Noe Ortega, urged school leaders to continue masking kids, and said they had the authority to do so, though he did not cite any legal basis for the claim.
Williams, the father of four who raised his concerns with Martin, told National Review that his family took the Covid-19 pandemic seriously, particularly when the virus first started spreading in the U.S. in the spring of 2020. “We actually pulled our kids out of school before the schools shut down because my one daughter has asthma,” he said.
But as district leaders were preparing for the 2020–21 school year, he became concerned that they were overstepping their legal bounds – the General Assembly hadn’t renewed an exemption that allowed public schools to operate remotely, and in his mind “there was a lack of clarity” surrounding the governor’s emergency declaration (Martin said he believes Wolf’s emergency declaration allowed school districts to go virtual that year).
Williams also grew increasingly concerned that the pandemic’s alleged remedies – shuttering schools, and then mandating masks – was doing more harm to kids than the virus was. As he became more vocal, parents started reaching out to him. “There were a number of psychological issues, like anxiety, depression, self-harm. Physical issues, like kids who had breathing issues from wearing masks,” Williams said.
He believed the district didn’t have the legal authority to mandate masks, or to decline to forward reports of child abuse to the state if they centered on mask-wearing. Without a full accounting of those reports, it will be impossible to fully grasp the pandemic’s impact on kids. When he expressed his concerns during an August 2021 school-board meeting, and when he exceeded his allotted three-minute speaking slot, the board walked out.
“It was lunacy,” Williams said. “To me, this is all about who has the power to make law. The fact that the school district will not respond to me, won’t allow their legal counsel to talk to me, is to me evidence of culpability. They know they were wrong, and now they don’t want to disclose this stuff because they’ve got potential liability. And just, they were wrong.”
“Every parent has a right to demand certain things from a public school,” he added. “If you’re hurting my children, you need to tell me where your legal authority comes from.”
Other school districts in Pennsylvania have also faced accusations that they’ve kept parents in the dark about pandemic-related decisions. In nearby Bucks County, government leaders sued two moms over the summer to block them from receiving emails the women believed would show county leaders based school-reopening guidance on Democratic politics, not science. Parent activists who led the fight last year to reopen Pennsylvania schools believe that, during the pandemic, Wolf’s administration engaged in a statewide pressure campaign to coerce school districts into following their restrictive guidance on quarantining and masking, rolling over legislative roadblocks and local officials with a different view.