Alachua County Public Schools will require employees, volunteers and visitors to wear masks when they return from winter break on Tuesday due to the uptick in COVID-19 cases.
ACPS has been monitoring the rise in cases in Alachua County, ACPS spokesperson Jackie Johnson said. In the last two weeks, county COVID-19 cases increased from 677 to more than 2,000, contributing to Florida’s nearly 300,000 cases this past week. ACPS announced the change in mask requirements for staff Sunday in an update for families on its website.
As people head back to Alachua County, ACPS felt that mandating masks for everyone except students was an appropriate step to combat the spread of COVID-19, especially the Omicron variant, Johnson said. She hopes the mandate will be temporary.
ACPS cannot mandate mask-wearing for students, due to a Florida law, but strongly encourages students to wear masks.
The school district and state government struggled in a legal battle over masks for months. Back in July, Gov. Ron DeSantis issued an executive order to ban mask mandates. Alachua County defied these rules and established a mask mandate for the beginning of the school year.
Then, in September, ACPS filed a lawsuit against the Florida Department of Health to challenge the surgeon general’s rule that limits mask mandates in public schools and allowed parents to opt their students out of wearing a mask. Now, there is a new state law in which public schools cannot impose mask mandates for students, and...
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