To mask or not to mask — that is the question that will plague students of SPF come March 7, 2022. 

On Monday, Feb. 7, New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy announced that the mask mandate in schools would be lifted beginning March 7; it is up to individual districts to decide whether to maintain or lift the mask mandate in accordance with state guidelines. A matter of hours later, SPF superintendent Dr. Joan Mast announced that the district would follow suit: barring unforeseen circumstances, masks will be optional in SPF schools. 

“I was just kind of shocked [when SPF announced the mandate would be lifted],” junior Anna Soifer said in a Feb. 7 interview with The Fanscotian. “I feel like my classmates speculated [about] it, I guess 45 days prior, when Murphy extended his emergency powers, but we kind of all thought that our school would keep the mandate on the local level. I feel like [the district has] tried to be as safe as they possibly can while being in-person and have done everything they can to avoid going back to virtual. Keeping the mandate would have been one extra safety precaution.” 

In a survey conducted by The Fanscotian with 308 respondents from the SPF student body, it became evident that SPF is split nearly down the middle in terms of their opinion. 51% said they believe it was safe to go unmasked, 49% said they did not — it doesn’t get much more divided than that. 62.7% reported that they did support lifting the mask mandate.

Senior Rebecca Strug believes that there will be three groups of individuals next week: those who immediately rip off their mask, those who keep it on regardless of the circumstance and those who will decide whether or not to wear one in each particular class. 

Strug is right that the SPFHS population is divided over whether or not they will wear a mask. 29.2% of the survey respondents said they would certainly wear a mask on March 7, 26% said they certainly would not, 13.6% said “maybe” and 31.2% said, “It depends on the class/circumstances.”

“I also think that it’s very much a social thing,” Strug said. “While people are going to say, ‘Oh, I’m not going to give in to the social-ness of it all, and I’m not going to take my mask off just because everyone else is,’ I think that’s a complete lie. If I were to sit here and say, ‘Oh, I’m definitely going to keep my mask all day’ it probably wouldn’t be true because as a lot of people will, I think I’ll go along with what [the mask climate] seems to be.”

Both Soifer and Strug noted that their main concern surrounded how much of the student body is vaccinated; if the person sitting next to them was both mask and vax-less, they would be worried about contracting COVID-19. Of the 308 students from the survey, 272 said they were vaccinated, 19 said they were not and 17 did not respond to the question.

“I’m not going to rip the mask off. I might peel the mask off,” Strug said. “I’m hoping that there won’t be judgment for either [those who do or do not wear a mask], but there definitely will be. I think just people have to understand that it is a personal choice at this point because we were told or we have been, we’ve been told that it’s safe to not wear the masks. People have to understand that it’s a personal choice and it should not be judging others either way for wearing their mask or not wearing it.”