On Masking In Schools, Tennessee’s Governor Says ‘Parents Should Be Deciders’

Tennessee’s top officials have landed on a public stance for masking in schools: parents should decide.

As local school boards are faced with the surging COVID delta variant and being slammed by parents on both sides of mandating masks, Gov. Bill Lee — like his health commissioner last week — is sidestepping the issue.

“Parents should encourage their elected officials to do what they believe is best for their children,” Lee told reporters Monday. “The government is not the best decider of what’s good for kids. Government deciding what children should or should not do is government overreach. Parents should be deciders of what happens with schools.”

The governor is giving little credence to a clear directive issued last week by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. With the highly contagious delta variant and the concentration of unvaccinated young people in schools, universal masking should be required.

But right now, masks are purely optional in most Tennessee schools. Even the state’s health department has opted not to weigh in and undercut the governor’s parental-control position.

“I don’t think anybody debates the effectiveness of masks,” Dr. Lisa Piercey, Tennessee’s health commissioner, said Friday. “I think the key here is that parents need to weigh in to this decision.”

Piercey and the governor both note that parents are fiercely divided, but they both say local school boards should do what parents want.

The governor has said he believes masking should be a local decision. Yet his only public criticism recently is of local governments taking their authority further than he feels is appropriate. Shelby County, for instance, required masks for all school districts within the county and included private schools.

Lee says he would at least entertain calling a special session, as threatened by the House speaker, to overturn mask mandates that he considers “government overreach.” But he says his hope is to bring people together, determine what’s agreed upon — putting emphasis on parental input — and finding a way forward.

“No one cares more for the children of this state than the parents of those children,” Lee said. “No one knows better what’s best for a child than that child’s parents.”