Greg Abbott Hit From All Sides With Lawsuits For Failing Texas

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Two school districts in Texas are suing Texas Republican Governor Greg Abbott over his recent executive order seeking to block the implementation by local education officials of mandates to wear face masks, even as COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations surge in the state. As of this Friday, The New York Times reported that Texas was second in the country for average daily COVID-19 hospitalizations, with over 10,000 average daily hospitalizations around the state, but these circumstances haven’t prompted a change in Abbott’s opposition to basic safety precautions. Now, the school districts suing Abbott include the Edinburg Consolidated Independent School District and the Brownsville Independent School District, both of which have opted to also go ahead and put mask mandates in place in defiance of Abbott’s executive order.

Generally, mask mandates in schools include the opportunity for a medical exemption from the rules, but certain counties have made clear that parents will not be able to opt their children out of the policies of their own accord. Although COVID-19 has frequently been considered as something that primarily affects older populations, no age group is somehow immune from the potentially deadly effects of the virus, and children have been among those hospitalized amid this latest surge. Now, in Edinburg, “School resource officers will have the ability to deny entrance or remove people who are not in compliance” with the mask mandate, a Texas ABC affiliate explains.

The Thursday meeting of the Edinburg school board to consider these issues featured unanimous support for the mask mandate. Edinburg School Board President Mike Farias commented as follows:

‘In these uncertain times I want to take every precaution available to us… And I’d rather err on the side of caution than on the side of negligence. I am for mandating masks temporarily until the numbers go down.’

Meanwhile, similar confrontations between local and state officials over mask mandates for the upcoming school year have been unfolding in Florida, where Republican Governor Ron DeSantis has, like Abbott, sought to block local school leaders from imposing such mandates. Nevertheless, counties including Broward, Alachua, and Leon have all opted to put mask mandates for the impending school year in place, while DeSantis has been sued over his order by a group of concerned parents. Florida remains the state with the highest daily average of COVID-19 hospitalizations.