By John Oyewale
A federal court dismissed a case Tuesday against Republican Iowa Gov. Kimberly Reynolds’ prohibition of mask mandate in school districts across the state, official documents showed.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit found “persuasive” the argument that “the general risks associated with COVID-19, even though COVID-19 remains an ever-present concern in society, are not enough to show ‘imminent and substantial’ harm,” court papers showed in part.
The court also decided that “because Plaintiffs have only alleged the potential risk of severe illness should they contract COVID-19 at school, the risk of harm is too speculative to satisfy the injury in fact element” and that “[e]ven if Plaintiffs could show injury in fact, they cannot carry their burden to establish traceability,” according to the papers.
The ruling was in response to the nearly two-and-a-half-year-long legal challenge by eleven parents and a disability rights group, The Arc of Iowa, to an Iowa law, House File 847, that prohibits school districts from imposing mask mandates in schools. The plaintiffs filed the lawsuit Sep. 3, 2021, arguing that it was to protect children too young to be vaccinated and who suffered from “disabilities, including underlying health conditions” that made them “particularly susceptible to severe illness, long haul COVID symptoms, or even death from COVID-19,” an American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) press release noted.
ACLU of Iowa Legal Director Rita Bettis Austen claimed that the law was “a civil rights violation that puts vulnerable kids in a dangerous situation.”
Reynolds appeared satisfied with the ruling, saying that children were “the least vulnerable” but “paid the highest price for COVID lockdowns and mandates” and that Iowa was “the first state to get students back in the classroom and we prohibited mask mandates in schools, trusting parents to decide what was best for their children.”
“Elected leaders should always trust the people they serve, and I promise I would do it again,” she added.
The ACLU, which had filed 145 legal cases since the start of COVID-19, was disappointed by the ruling but “proud of what this case was able to accomplish for vulnerable children in Iowa,” adding that the case provided “early relief for our clients,” the Associated Press (AP) reported.
Reynolds was an appellant in the case, being dissatisfied with a federal judge’s Nov. 2022 ruling in favor of the parents and disability rights advocates that schools must consider a mask mandate as a possible, reasonable modification to the state law to make accommodations for disabled students, the AP report noted.
The U.S. Eighth Circuit’s Tuesday dismissal of the appellees’ case reportedly marked the end of the case.
