McLean County Times

State Sen. Sue Rezin (R-Morris) questioned whether or not the Illinois State Board of Education (ISBE) has the power to punish school districts by threatening to withhold state funding for not following Gov. J.B. Pritzker's (D-IL) mask mandate. 

Rezin listed the issues she had with the move at a Sept. 14 Joint Committee on Administrative Rules (JCAR) hearing. 

"During our JCAR hearing, I voiced my serious concerns with ISBE's continuous overreach of authority when it comes to the governor's mask mandates in schools, particularly in how they have treated nonpublic schools differently and denying them their basic right of due process," Rezin wrote in a tweet. 

Rezin went on to tweet about the end result of the hearing. 

"After some deliberation, the members of JCAR encouraged ISBE to place all policy and guidance in rule and recommend ISBE provide an update to the Committee within 30 days," Rezin wrote in a tweet. 

The debate comes after Pritzker signed an executive order in early August that dealt with COVID-19 school safety protocols, and later issued an indoor mask mandate for everyone over the age of 2, the Rockford Sun reported.

"Illinois will join several other states that have reinstituted statewide indoor mask requirements, regardless of vaccination status, effective on Monday (Aug. 30)," Pritzker said, according to the Rockford Sun.

According to the same article, 47 school districts originally faced disciplinary action for defying the mask mandate. As of Sept. 3, 19 of those districts decided to impose a mask mandate. 

The Rockford Sun reported that professors from the University of Illinois at Chicago wrote a commentary that cited studies that found that "cloth masks and face coverings are likely to have limited impact on lowering COVID-19 transmission because they have minimal ability to prevent the emission of small particles ... and offer limited personal protection with respect to small particle inhalation."

Another study by the Center for Biosecurity Disease found that "the ordinary surgical mask does little to prevent inhalation of small droplets of influenza virus (because) the pores in the mask become blocked by moisture from breathing, and the airstream simply diverts around the mask," the Rockford Sun reported.