Mandatory Masking Likely to Return to Harrison Schools

“I’m hoping people look at it like an analogy, like a Band-Aid." - Dr. Stewart Pratt, Harrison Schools Superintendent.

Superintendent of the Harrison School District, Dr. Stewart Pratt, joined KHOZ’s “Around the Table” program on Thursday and said with the uptick in COVID cases he believes he will soon make the decision to bring back mandatory mask wearing in the district.

Pratt has been following the data from the Arkansas Center for Health Improvement (ACHI) which has pegged Harrison Schools at 49 cases per 10,000 district residents as of this week. Harrison Schools started the school year with a mask mandate that ended when the ACHI numbers dropped below 50 per 10,000. Pratt believes the next report he receives will have Harrison above that threshold once again.

Pratt said, “I’ll just prepare you and any listeners that there’s a pretty good chance that we’ll bring masks back for a short period of time, try to weather the storm, get them back off again, but we need kids to be in school.

In the fall the Harrison School Board gave Pratt the authority to install a mask mandate, based on ACHI data, without their formal consent as along as he communicates with them. That means that Pratt will not need to wait until the January board meeting to mandate face coverings.

Pratt said he has also considered the number of parents in the district that work full-time, which he estimated to be around 80%, and of that group he estimated that 60% of them had children too young to stay home alone. For that reason, he said it’s important to bring back masks to help ensure cases don’t rise to the point that school would have to be completely shut down for any length of time.

“I’m hoping people look at it like an analogy, like a Band-Aid. I fall down, I scratch my knee, I put a Band-Aid on it. I don’t like wearing Band-Aids…but I’m going to put in on there for a little while until it heals then I’m going to move on and take it off,” Pratt said.

He gave no indication of exactly when that mandate will come but he expects it to be soon.

See Dr. Stewart Pratt’s full interview here: