The South Carolina Department of Education on Wednesday said that it will follow a federal judge’s recent order blocking the state\u2019s ban on school mask mandates, informing school districts that they \u201cnow have the discretionary authority to require masks.\u201d<\/p>\n
The state\u2019s education superintendent, Molly Spearman (R),\u00a0informed local school district leaders<\/a>\u00a0across South Carolina that U.S. District Judge Mary Geiger Lewis\u00a0on Tuesday approved<\/a>\u00a0a temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction prohibiting the enforcement of the statewide mask mandate ban.<\/p>\n The measure, known as Proviso 1.108, had been written into the state\u2019s budget and effectively put school districts that imposed mask mandates at risk of losing state funding.<\/p>\n Despite a statement from Gov. Henry McMaster\u2019s (R) office shortly after the decision saying that he planned to challenge the ruling, Spearman wrote Wednesday that the \u201cimmediate effect of the Court\u2019s order is that both the state and local school districts are prohibited from enforcing Proviso 1.108 and school districts now have the discretionary authority to require masks.\u201d<\/p>\n However, the superintendent noted that the state education department \u201cwill continue to monitor further action taken by the judicial system that may alter the aforementioned guidance and correspond with schools and districts accordingly.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The South Carolina Department of Education...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-40591","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-health"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40591","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=40591"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40591\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":40592,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40591\/revisions\/40592"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=40591"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=40591"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=40591"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}