Archdiocese of Washington drops mask mandate for DC Catholic schools after parents sue district
The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Washington has dropped its mask mandate for Catholic school students as two parents have sued District of Columbia Mayor Muriel Bowser for an exception to masking requirement for their children.
Kelly Branaman, the archdiocese’s superintendent of schools, informed parents in a letter published Wednesday that students attending Catholic schools in D.C. would no longer have to wear masks at school.
“Following Mayor [Muriel] Bowser’s recent communication making mask mandates a local decision, Archdiocesan Catholic Schools in the District of Columbia will no longer require face coverings for students, staff, or visitors beginning March 9, 2022,” she said in a statement.
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“Depending on the needs of each school’s leaders to prepare, schools will transition between March 9 and March 14,” she indicated. “We appreciate and will fully support whatever decisions that parents make for their own children regarding whether to wear a face covering in school or not. Enforcement of this decision is between parent and child, not school personnel.”
Guidance from D.C. Health Department updated Tuesday, a day after the lawsuit was filed, states that “most people no longer need to wear masks indoors or outdoors at educational facilities unless COVID-19 community levels are HIGH.”
Branaman noted that “the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Washington lifted the mask mandate on February 21, 2022 in Maryland,” suggesting that Bowser and city officials prevented the archdiocese from doing the same in the city. In addition to D.C., the archdiocese serves five counties in Maryland.
The announcement from the archdiocese and the new guidance from D.C. Health Department came after two parents, who have a combined seven children attending a Catholic school in the city, filed a lawsuit against Bowser, the District of Columbia, Director for the D.C. Department of Health Laquandra Nesbitt and the D.C. Department of Health.
The complaint was filed Monday in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.
The complaint contends that the mask mandate violates the First Amendment’s Free Exercise Clause, the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.
The lawsuit, announced by the legal nonprofit Alliance Defending Freedom Tuesday, comes as states and other major cities rolled back mask mandates and coronavirus restrictions two years into the pandemic.
“Mayor Bowser is unconstitutionally burdening these religious schools and the children who attend them by still requiring that they wear masks when she has lifted this mandate for almost every other privately run business and organization in the district,” said ADF Senior Counsel Matt Bowman. “It’s legally baseless to say that private schools can’t make their own decisions regarding masks while nearly all other private entities can.”
Bowman contended that the private schools were being “unfairly punished.”
“In most counties, private schools weren’t even required to wear masks, and in most public schools, the mask mandates are lifted,” Bowman said. “We urge Mayor Bowser to repeal her illegal mandate on religious schools immediately.”
One of the parents who filed the lawsuit, Sheila Dugan, cited the “stress and discomfort” caused by forced mask-wearing as the motivating factor behind the legal challenge.
“There’s no excuse for freeing bars and strip clubs from mask mandates while forcing my kindergartener to wear a mask to read, pray, and play dodgeball,” Dugan argued. “As a Catholic, I’m obligated to protect my children from harm; that’s why we filed this lawsuit.”
The lawsuit claimed that under the old policy, a child could sit for hours at a Washington Wizards basketball game at the crowded Capital One Arena without wearing a mask but had to cover her face for seven hours per day while inside a Catholic school building.
“Masks prevent students and teachers from clearly articulating their words, from effectively being heard, from learning language skills and enunciation, and from communicating with the full range of human emotions and facial muscle groups during the education of the whole person,” the lawsuit stated. “Masking children and teachers significantly injures socialization, emotional intelligence, mental health, and the complex relationship between words and facial features.”
The lawsuit highlighted specific impacts faced by the plaintiffs’ children due to the mask mandates, including “headaches that were not present before the institution of the mask mandate but only surfaced with the mask mandate” and “difficulty in breathing.” A dislike of the mask-wearing caused one of the plaintiffs’ children to beg his mother not to send him back to the school, the complaint alleges.
While the lawsuit asked a federal court to declare the mask mandate void, it also sought “nominal damages” for the plaintiffs as well as payment of their attorney’s fees. The complaint was filed about a week after the plaintiffs’ attorneys wrote a letter to D.C. officials seeking a “discretionary exception for all private religious schools to the mask mandate.”
The city responded by maintaining that it needed “additional time to review the revised [Centers for Disease Control] guidance as well as the parents’ request.” The lawsuit asserts that the D.C. Department of Health never responded to a subsequent inquiry asking whether its director was “willing to waive enforcement of the mask mandate on Catholic school children during the time it takes Defendants to reconsider the Mayor’s Order.”
Ryan Foley is a reporter for The Christian Post. He can be reached at: ryan.foley@christianpost.com
