St. Charles School Board to hold emergency meeting following judge’s ruling on mask, vaccine mandates

In light of a downstate judge’s decision on Friday to temporarily restrain the district from enforcing Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s COVID-19 mask and vaccine mandates, the St. Charles School Board at 3 p.m. today will hold an emergency meeting.

The meeting will be held at the Haines Center, 305 S. 9th St. St. Charles and Geneva school districts were among more than 140 school districts around the state named in a lawsuit designed to prevent the school districts from being able to require masks and vaccine mandates. In filing the lawsuit, parents argued there was no due process in Illinois’ statewide mask order.

Sangamon County Circuit Court Judge Raylene Grischow issued her decision Friday afternoon. Pritzker issued the mask mandate in August to bring the state in line with U.S. Centers for Disease Prevention and Control guidance that says teachers and students older than the age of 2 need to wear a mask indoors, regardless of vaccination status.

As part of her ruling, Grischow stated that those school districts not named in the lawsuit “may govern themselves accordingly.” Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul has asked the Sangamon Circuit Court to stay its temporary restraining order pending the state’s appeal.

Following a closed session, the board on Sunday is set to act on the district’s 2021-2022 Return to School Plan. Before the governor’s executive order, school board members had voted unanimously to make masks optional for the new school year.

School board members took that vote before guidance was issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that everyone in K-12 schools wear a mask indoors, including teachers, staff, students and visitors regardless of vaccination status. At the time, CDC announced the guidance to prevent further spread of the highly transmissible delta variant.

Board members had discussed the district’s Return to School Plan at the School Board’s Policy Committee meeting on Monday

“I think we can anticipate changes coming out of the lawsuit and it behooves us to state clearly how we’re going to react to those changes and it provides us the guidepost for the process of how we’ll make those adjudications or decisions as a board,” School Board member Joseph Lackner said at the meeting.

Kane County Judge Robert Villa in September denied a request from Ferson Creek Elementary School second grade teacher Nicole Cournaya for a temporary restraining order to prevent District 303 from enforcing Pritzker’s order banning school workers from buildings if they are unvaccinated against COVID-19 and refuse to be tested weekly.

According to St. Charles Education Association President Joe Blomquist, any employee that has been excluded from working in St. Charles schools as a result of the governor’s mandate would be able to return to their position as soon as they comply with the executive order, he had said at the time. The St. Charles Education Association has come out in support of the governor’s vaccine mandate for teachers and staff to reduce the spread of COVID-19.