Kids are starting to show their faces in class once again in some schools along the Front Range. Most of the students, no doubt, find it refreshing – literally.

Students in Colorado Springs Academy School District 20 and Colorado Springs School District 11 as of this week are no longer mandated to wear a mask while attending classes. The policy change means well more than 100 schools in the city joined 33 Douglas County schools in choosing to return public education to the pre-COVID normalcy of schooling sans masks.

Meanwhile, down in Pueblo County, the push is on from the School District 70 Board of Education to have the county’s Board of Health amend or remove a mandate that affects thousands more students in another of Colorado’s population centers.

The recent developments – which come not long after federal emergency authorization for kids as young as 5 to receive COVID vaccinations – likely signal more change is coming. Local governing bodies now are reaching this crucial checkpoint amid what at times seems a perpetual pandemic. It’s the latest pivotal juncture that, yet again, presents the powers that be with a critical choice they’ve wrestled with for more than a year – whether to continue school mask mandates or leave it up to individual kids and their parents.

The epidemiological, philosophical and practical realities of mask mandates aside – and, assuredly, there is much nuanced debate to be had there – reasonable Coloradans seeking cordial compromise should celebrate these local decisions. In our current culture of tribal allegiances influencing individual opinions on masks, the U.S. constitutional standard of federalism is the rational response to the reality that there’s no statewide consensus on whether school kids should still be masked.

As The Gazette reported last week, the newly elected four-member majority on the Douglas County school board said their votes to end the mask mandate “represented the will of the county.”

One of the Colorado Springs districts observed in a public statement: “(T)he use of facial coverings/masks was never meant to be permanent. Instead, it was a temporary measure to help keep our students and staff out of quarantines and in the classroom until changes in our environment occurred.”

Those environmental changes are here. All people 5 and older who want to get the vaccine can get it. And other treatments, namely monoclonal antibodies, are available and effective.

As in Douglas County, the Pueblo D-70 school board realizes that the level of government closest to the people is also in the best position to make the most informed decisions. The D-70 board wrote to health authorities that, “…(I)t is becoming evident within our schools that these measures are being detrimental to our children. …The duty of keeping kids in school and in a prosperous learning environment should be left up to the district.”

“The decisions to mask or vaccinate children should solely rest on the students, their parents, and their doctors.”

As time goes by and the virus continues to pursue a path of its own, more and more Colorado school districts may wind up heeding that same wisdom.

Colorado Springs Gazette editorial board