Pa. court rules against parents who challenged masking at Pennsbury and other districts

A Pennsylvania court has ruled against parents who challenged their school districts’ authority to require masking, dismissing the lawsuit as no longer valid.

Given that the six districts that were sued — including Pennsbury in Bucks County — have all dropped mask mandates, Commonwealth Court Judge Christine Fizzano Cannon wrote in an opinion Thursday that the case was moot.

» READ MORE: A wave of Philly-area schools dropped mask requirements Monday after the CDC changed its guidance

The decision was welcomed by school districts, which have argued they were within their rights to continue requiring masks after the court struck down the statewide school mask mandate in November 2021.

“The outright dismissal of this case is an important victory for school districts statewide,” said Peter Amuso, a lawyer who represented the Pennsbury district in the case. “It ends the one central attack on their basic rights as locally elected bodies to make decisions for their staff and students” based on the advice of health officials.

The case was filed in February, before the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention dropped its recommendation for universal masking. That shift in health guidance prompted a number of area school districts to end their mask requirements.

While the court didn’t address whether districts have the authority to require masks, Amuso contrasted its handling of the case with a lawsuit brought by a western Pennsylvania school district challenging the statewide school mask mandate. The court issued an opinion in October determining that the issue in that case — brought by the Butler Area School District — wasn’t moot.

The Commonwealth Court and state Supreme Court have been concerned with statewide mandates, “as opposed to these local districts making decisions,” Amuso said.

The parents could appeal, Amuso said, though he argued that the court had sent a signal that such challenges were unlikely to succeed. A lawyer for the parents did not return a request for comment Monday.

In her opinion, Cannon said the masking issue was unlikely to resurface.

“The current availability of effective vaccines, the CDC’s widespread abandonment of masking recommendations for non-high-risk individuals, and the trajectory of the COVID-19 pandemic in terms of the decreasing virulence of successive variants all suggest that fears of a return to masking requirements are more hypothetical speculation than concrete likelihood,” she wrote.

The court also declined to address whether Pennsylvania’s then-secretary of education, Noe Ortega, erred in notifying school districts that they could still require masking after the court struck down the statewide mandate. When the Pennsylvania Supreme Court affirmed that ruling the following month, Ortega again told districts they could — and were “encouraged” — to require masks.

For the court’s purposes, it doesn’t matter whether Ortega was right, Cannon said — his emails to districts weren’t orders, and the court doesn’t weigh in on such types of communication.