Paris, Texas Eiffel replica (Photo by Adavyd, via Wikipedia)

As the battle rages on across Texas over whether the state’s COVID-19-infected governor can legally stop local authorities — city, county and school district officials — from enacting and enforcing measures intended to try to stem what health officials are predicting will be the worst wave of COVID here yet, the Board of Trustees for Paris Independent School District last night (Tuesday, Aug. 17) simply stepped around the issue to protect students in their district.

Rather than issue a “mask mandate” requiring students, faculty and staff mask up on campus, the school board simply adapted the district’s dress code to include a mask requirement when classes start there tomorrow (Thursday, Aug. 19). The change passed on a 5-1 vote with the single dissenter, Trustee Clifton Fendley, explaining that he was not against mask wearing instead that the district was “using a loophole to circumvent Gov. Greg Abbott’s anti-mask mandate, and he believed that was against the oath of office, The Paris News reported.

According to a press release issued after the meeting, “The Texas governor does not have the authority to usurp the board of trustees’ exclusive power and duty to govern and oversee the management of the public schools of the district. Nothing in the governor’s Executive Order 38 states he has suspended Chapter 11 of the Texas Education Code, and therefore the board has elected to amend its dress code consistent with its statutory authority,” the newspaper according to the Paris News article written by Klark Byrd.

The change is not permanent, the article notes, and will be revisited regularly.

Paris News also noted that the vote to change the dress code came after a more-than-hour-long meeting in which board members “from district employees, parents and members of the local medical community expressing opposing views. Doctors, parents and staff implored the board to protect children and staff by requiring face masks as local active COVID-19 cases continue to rise rapidly. Several parents and staff members urged trustees to allow families to choose for themselves whether their children would wear masks.”

Dr. Amanda Green with the Paris-Lamar County Health District and Paris Regional Medical Center said 70 active cases had been reported by the health district Tuesday on top of 435 existing active cases, and that PRMC had run out of ventilators and had to find others, she said.

Statistics compiled and updated daily by the Texas Department of State Health Services show that both the daily number of new cases and the seven-day average of new cases have been trending steadily upward since the first of July, as have the daily number of and seven-day average of fatalities, although fatalities are not rising as steeply as they did in the winter surge between late October last year and mid January this year.

Demographics info from the state, updated each Friday and based on completed case investigations (comprising about 3.2 percent of all confirmed cases in the state) indicates that the majority of those cases were among whites (34.9 percent) and Hispanics (35.8 percent). Asians — who have seen hate-based violence directed at them exponentially increasing since the start of the pandemic, fueled largely by some people’s insistence on blaming the virus on China — make up the smallest percentage (1.2 percent) of COVID cases in Texas, DSHS statistics show.

Infection rates among children were, comparative to the overall numbers, consistently low in the first year of the pandemic, the number of children falling ill, and the number having to be hospitalized and who have died, has grown steadily over the last three months, as the Delta variant of the virus has spread. According to the Texas Tribune, as of Aug. 12, “From the start of the pandemic through Aug. 9, over 5,800 children in Texas have been hospitalized with COVID-19, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. There were 783 children admitted to Texas hospitals with COVID-19 between July 1 and Aug. 9. Nationwide, nearly 94,000 children contracted COVID-19 [the first week of August], according to the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Children’s Hospital Association.”

Those numbers have continued to climb as schools across the state and the country have re-opened.

The latest data from the DSHS COVID-19 dashboard, last updated at 5:35 p.m. Tuesday, Aug. 17, shows 20,123 new confirmed cases recorded in the state in the preceding 24 hour period, with an additional 4,299 new probably cases, and 96 newly-reported fatalities. Since the pandemic began, Texas has seen 2,834,135 confirmed cases of COVID, 519,913 probable cases and 53, 196 confirmed fatalities.

— Tammye Nash