The Interlude

A professor from the University of Georgia resigned mid-class late last month when a student refused to properly wear a mask. The incident, first reported by UGA’s student newspaper The Red & Black, made national headlines and served as one of the first in a breakout of COVID-related back to school stories.

Irwin Bernstein, an 88-year-old retiree-rehire professor, was teaching his second class of the school year when a student who had been absent the day prior showed up without a mask on. Though UGA follows the University System of Georgia’s policies, which encourage mask-wearing indoors but does not allow the institutions to enact a mask or vaccine mandate, Bernstein had made his class aware of his personal “No Mask, No Class” policy.

“At that point I said that whereas I had risked my life to defend my country while in the Air Force, I was not willing to risk my life to teach a class with an unmasked student during this Pandemic,” Bernstein said in an email to The Red & Black. He had explained to the student that COVID-19 was a huge risk for him to contract because of underlying health conditions like age-related illness, Type 2 diabetes, and hypertension.

After the student repeatedly said she couldn’t breathe with the mask on and wouldn’t pull it up over her nose, Bernstein announced his resignation on the spot and left the class.

Bernstein’s resignation is one of many examples of how COVID-19 is affecting this back to school season. Even though many people are itching to return to a normal school experience, parents worry about their children’s safety as they return to in-person schooling. Polls conducted by USA Today suggested 41 percent of parents’ top concern is that their child will become severely ill if exposed to the coronavirus at school.

Their fears seem justified.

This week alone, pediatric cases of COVID-19 are hitting records. According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, weekly cases in children have soared past 250,000 for the first time since the beginning of the pandemic.

More children than ever before have been hospitalized for COVID-19, and on college campuses without mask or vaccine mandates, students and staff worried for their safety are speaking up.

On September 2, hundreds of Resident Assistants (RAs) from Stanford University went on an indefinite strike. The student staff organizers demanded that the university allow them to host virtual options for their events and raise their pay to meet peer institution’s rates. The strike came days after more than 100 students voiced their concerns about the in-person meetings and one RA tested positive after an in-person training event.

In Florida, after Republican governor Ron DeSantis issued an executive order that effectively banned schools from enforcing a mask mandate, 13 employees from Miami-Dade County Public Schools died after contracting COVID-19, including four teachers. Some Florida schools are openly defying this ban, and a state judge ruled that Florida had to stop enforcing the ban on mask mandates this week. Gov. DeSantis filed an emergency appeal. On Sept. 10, the court sided in his favor, which means schools can once again be penalized for requiring masks.  

The hunger to return to in-person learning is understandable. More than half of parents told USA Today that distanced or online learning caused their child to fall behind, and studies show it’s also led to a decline in children’s mental health. Our craving for normalcy isn’t unwarranted after this year. Even so, the delta variant is proving we aren’t as prepared to go back to school as we had hoped — and it will take stricter measures to return safely.