DeKalb County legal, school district officials give state mandates status update weeks into school year

SYCAMORE – As students continue to follow indoor mask mandates and school districts scramble to get their staffs vaccinated in one week, legal resources maintain Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker has the authority to issue such mandates under the Illinois Emergency Management Agency Act.

DeKalb County State’s Attorney Rick Amato said Thursday he was not surprised to hear Pritzker announce the new mandate requiring school staff to be vaccinated a week ago. He said Pritzker “pre-played this move” the week before in a previous statewide COVID-19 news conference.

“And with the [U.S. Food and Drug Administration] approving the Pfizer vaccine, it was pretty predictable that this mandate was coming,” Amato said.

Most legal complaints over the governor’s executive orders and mandates that have brought to court have been dismissed or Pritzker has won. That includes DeKalb County restaurateurs suing Pritzker and Dr. Ngozi Ezike, the Illinois Department of Public Health director, in one case which was dismissed in November 2020, according to DeKalb County court records.

One exception included a judge in downstate Clay County, which voided Pritzker’s executive orders in a sweeping order that he tried to apply to the entire state. However, Sangamon County Judge Raylene Grischow essentially voided Clay County Judge Michael McHaney’s July 2 order that sided with Illinois State Rep. Darren Bailey, a Republican from Xenia in southern Illinois, who sued the governor over his response to the pandemic, Capitol News Illinois reported in December 2020.

Bailey, who is seeking the Republican nomination for governor, was kicked out of an Illinois House of Representatives session after he refused to wear a mask.

Pritzker’s lawyers asked Grischow in November 2020 to “reconsider” the July 2020 order from McHaney, who initially presided over Bailey’s case before it was transferred to Sangamon County to be combined with related cases that were pending there. Grischow found in December 2020 that the Illinois Emergency Management Agency Act allows the governor to issue more than one 30-day disaster proclamation.

In her December opinion, Grischow wrote her interpretation of the Illinois Emergency Management Agency Act is consistent with a 2nd District Appellate Court decision from November in the case of FoxFire Tavern LLC v. Pritzker, et al. The referenced case involved a Kane County restaurant suing the governor, arguing that he exceeded his authority under the law by imposing a ban on indoor dining.

The appellate court had ruled in favor of Pritzker in the case involving the Kane County restaurant, Grischow wrote.

“The Appellate Court expressly found that the IEMAA authorizes the Governor to issue successive disaster proclamations stemming from one ongoing disaster,” Grischow’s opinion states.

Amato said the county is “edging closer to being back at the beginning where everything is changing daily on how to handle” the COVID-19 pandemic. He said case numbers are rising again and mandates are increasing as well.

“We are back at the drawing board,” Amato said. “It’s not a criticism – just a commentary on it.”

Checking in on indoor mask wearing in schools

Genoa-Kingston School District 424 Superintendent Brent O’Daniell said Friday the district “has had some hiccups” with students and staff wearing masks while indoors in schools, but it was “nothing that you wouldn’t expect” in the first couple of weeks of school. By “hiccups,” he said he meant students and staff needing further clarification about when it is OK to take masks off, when it’s permissible to take a break from the masks and overall understanding of the procedure.

“It’s just one more thing that everybody has to get used to,” O’Daniell said.

The superintendent said there was only one quarantine-related incident so far, when about five students were affected by one positive COVID-19 case on a bus. He said students don’t have to be distanced on buses and the district is still short three full-time bus drivers, with transportation administration helping to fill the gaps in the meantime.

O’Daniell said schools within the district “haven’t had any disciplinary issues with masks.” He said kids sometimes forgot the masks walking into the building and would be told to put on a provided one at the door. But “there’s been no total belligerence no I’m not going to wear a mask or anything like that.”

“It’s starting to feel like school again a little bit up here,” O’Daniell said.

DeKalb School District 428 Superintendent Minerva Garcia-Sanchez declined comment for an update on how universal indoor mask wearing is going district-wide, citing not having “an opportunity to check in right now.”

“We are an all-mask district, as was recommended and voted on by the Board of Education,” Garcia-Sanchez wrote in a Thursday email.

O’Daniell said he also recently received an email from Laurie Borowicz, president of Kishwaukee College in Malta, about students attending classes at the community college and that the district was told students in those college classes also must be vaccinated. He said he plans on checking with school district lawyers on that, along with whether students who take Kishwaukee College classes with instructors coming into the high school campus also have to get vaccinated.

O’Daniell said parents and students have been “vocal at board meetings,” but he added “that’s the place to be vocal.”

“They haven’t staged a protest or anything like that,” O’Daniell said.

Overall, he said he’s thankful the public has been flexible and understanding with the policy changes.

“I recognize how frustrating this could be for students and parents alike,” O’Daniell said. " … They’re helping to make the best of a difficult situation and we’re very appreciative of that.”

Sycamore School District 427 Superintendent Steve Wilder said the district also hasn’t had any issues with students defying the indoor mask mandate.

“Every once in a while, we have a student who comes in without a mask, but that’s only because they’ve forgot it in their car – they go right back out and they’ve got it,” Wilder said. “Or a younger student comes in without one and it’s the same thing, that they forgot it. And we have, of course, disposable masks at all of our buildings and we hand them one and they put it on and then they keep going.”

Wilder said it has been “very reassuring” for him to not hear of significant issues following parents and students previously being vocal about wanting the district to either make masks optional or to go up against the governor’s mandates.

“But in the end, students have complied, staff has been good and parents continue to kind of let us know how they feel,” Wilder said. “But they’re not sending their students to school to defy or do anything like that.”

School staff COVID-19 vaccine next steps

Amanda Christensen, superintendent for the DeKalb County Regional Office of Education, confirmed the office held a Monday morning meeting with regional education and DeKalb County Health Department officials about the governor’s recent mandates. She said her office also will further look at what the governor’s mandates mean for the county’s substitute teacher pool.

Christensen said the main theme of the meeting was that school officials will do what they can to make sure staff gets at least a first dose of the vaccine in the tight week-long time frame they have to implement the staff vaccine requirement.

“A deadline of having this implemented by Sept. 5 is absolutely unreasonable and is obviously coming from a place of not understanding how schools function.”

• Capitol News Illinois contributed to this report.