Public schools would not be allowed to require students, staff or members of the public to wear face masks under a bill that has passed the House and was debated in a Senate committee on Tuesday.
N.H. Rep. Kristin Noble, R-Bedford, is the prime sponsor of House Bill 361, which passed the House on March 27, 203-164, with most Republicans in favor and most Democrats against.
She told the N.H. Senate Education Committee that the governor would still be able to declare a state of emergency and require masks and that the bill wouldn’t prevent anyone from wearing a mask if they wanted to do so.
During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, local school districts drew up their own masking policies, often relying on guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and from state health officials.
Doctors and public health experts consistently promoted masking as a strategy for limiting the spread of the deadly disease, and many parents felt masks in schools were a proper precaution to protect children and families.
Opponents said masking hurt children’s ability to learn, and noted young people tended to have lower infection rates and fewer severe cases of the disease. Many also argued that face coverings should be a matter of personal choice.
Schools have always been germ factories,” Noble told the committee Tuesday. “Each year we have cold and flu season. Some years are worse than others.”
She said she is concerned that a “new normal” has emerged that could lead to unnecessary local school mask requirements.
“A virus that is dangerous enough to warrant masking is not likely to be localized to one school district,” Noble said.
She said the bill would take “a significant burden off school boards who really aren’t qualified to be making these types of decisions.”
Rep. Timothy Horrigan, D-Durham, argued against the bill, noting that more than 1.2 million people died in the U.S. due to COVID-19.
“So the masks, even though they weren’t perfect, were probably a reasonable reaction given the situation we were in five years ago. They prevented a very bad situation from becoming even worse.
“So I think school boards should be allowed to mandate them,” he said. “They shouldn’t have to wait for the governor to declare a state of emergency.”
Pamela DiNapoli, a member of the N.H. Nurses Association’s Commission on Public Affairs, said in online testimony that historically, local schools have had the right to enact policies to protect the health of students and employees.
“As NH continues to experience severe outbreaks of influenza, RSV and other respiratory illnesses, mitigation strategies such as masks put our state’s school children and school staff in a better place to prevent spread and serious complications from these droplet-borne illnesses especially in our most vulnerable,” she said.
A National Institutes of Health study found that schools that required masking during a surge of COVID-19 in the fall of 2021 saw lower spread of the disease, DiNapoli noted.
Paula Johnson, a former member of the Nashua School Board, spoke in favor of the bill.
“We had parents coming in begging us not to keep the masks on the kids,” she said. “It was a tragic thing. Kids lost the ability to socialize; they were traumatized.
“Don’t let any school board or any bureaucratic agency demand that these masks should ever be put on these kids again. It is up to the parents.”
Rick Green can be reached at 603-352-1234, extension 1435, or rgreen@keenesentinel.com.
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