Pennsylvania’s Cumberland Valley School District Hit with Class Action Over Optional Masking Policy

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The Cumberland Valley School District in Pennsylvania and its board of directors face a proposed class action over the board’s January 2022 decision that made wearing masks optional for students districtwide.

The 35-page case was filed by the pseudonymous parents of a “medically fragile” school-aged child with disabilities who they claim now faces a higher risk of contracting COVID-19 and experiencing severe illness or death due to the optional masking policy. As the suit tells it, because masking is one of the only lines of defense against COVID-19 for disabled students, who are more likely to be at a “severely increased risk” of health problems from the virus, parents have been presented with the “brutal choice” of either pulling their children from valuable in-person education or risking their health by sending them to school.

According to the suit, the defendants have violated the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act by essentially denying medically fragile disabled students access to an in-person education by way of the optional masking policy.

The lawsuit explains that the Cumberland Valley school board, in a “dramatic divergence from the status quo,” voted on January 3, 2022 to impose an optional masking policy for the district’s students, faculty and staff as long as individual schools have infection rates below two percent of the overall population. Per the case, this threshold number is 200 times higher than that recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The board’s decision, the suit argues, ignores that the transmission rate of the virus within the community was still in the “high” category as of January 3 and that universal masking is an “essential” part of the multi-layered approach to preventing the spread of COVID-19.

Moreover, the board’s decision to implement optional masking ignores the fact that the district’s student population includes medically fragile students with disabilities who depend on universal masking to ensure that they can safely attend school, the lawsuit says. Importantly, the board did not make available the choice to enroll in the district’s virtual schooling option after “wantonly chang[ing] the policy,” the case adds.

“As such, those parents wishing to only send their children to school if universal masking remains in effect are nonetheless trapped by school policy to keep sending their children to in-school education despite the change in status quo regarding masks,” the complaint reads.

Per the case, the school board’s decision to implement an optional masking policy after the November 2021 municipal elections represents a departure from “the status quo, science, reason, [and] student and community safety” in favor of “minority fringe groups with farfetched conspiracy theories.” According to the complaint, reliable sources such as the CDC, Pennsylvania Department of Health, American Academy of Pediatrics, UPMC Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh and Penn State Health all agree that universal masking is “essential for preventing the spread of infection to children caused by COVID-19.”

The lawsuit argues that the board’s new masking policy essentially discriminates against children with disabilities by denying them equal access to a public education in violation of both the ADA and the Rehabilitation Act.

The complaint notes that this case is “identical” to another proposed class action filed against the North Allegheny (Pennsylvania) School District, in which the court granted a temporary restraining order to keep universal masking in place “for the same reasons and for similarly situated plaintiffs as Plaintiffs here.”

The lawsuit looks to represent all students with disabilities that make them medically vulnerable to severe infection or death from COVID-19 who attend public school in the Cumberland Valley School District. This includes current and future K-12 students attending or wishing to attend public school in the district during the COVID-19 pandemic who are unable to obtain a vaccine or for whom the vaccine is of limited efficacy due to their compromised immune systems, as well as students who have lung disease; heart disease; chronic liver or kidney disease; diabetes or other endocrine disorders; hypertension; compromised immune systems; blood disorders; inherited metabolic disorders; history of stroke; neurological or developmental disability; cancer or cancer treatments; and/or muscular dystrophy or spinal cord injury.

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