Colorado teachers allegedly taping face masks to students’ faces

An investigation is underway at a US school amid allegations teachers are forcing students to tape on their face masks, causing outrage among parents.

An investigation is underway at a US school amid allegations that teachers are forcing students to tape on their face masks, causing outrage among parents.

Concerns were first sparked after a Year 6 student from Colorado’s Chinook Trail Middle School sent a selfie to her mother, with her mask taped to her face by painter’s masking tape.

The young girl’s mother, Stephanie Butler, told Fox21 she had posted the image to social media on Friday in a bid to make other parents aware of the school’s strict mask policy and to find out if other students were also “being taped”.

“It’s a type of restraint to me,” Ms Butler said. “With the mask mandates and everything … she likes them because they hide her face because of acne or whatnot. What really made me sad was that she didn’t see what was wrong.”

Ms Butler alleges her daughter was only given one warning to keep the mask properly positioned over her nose, and was told if it slipped again she would need to tape it to her face. She claimed teachers had been enforcing the policy for weeks.

“She said the teachers were wearing the masking tape around their wrists like bracelets and whenever someone’s mask would fall down, they would tape them,” another parent, Tori Skeldum, told the news outlet.

“It’s sad that our world is coming to this and teachers would think it is OK.”

A Year 6 student sent a selfie to her mother with her mask taped to her face. Picture: Facebook

Texts between Ms Butler and her daughter. Picture: Supplied

“It’s a type of restraint to me,” Ms Butler said. Picture: Supplied

While Academy School District 20 (where Chinook Trail Middle School is located) has had a mask mandate in place since late September, parents think teachers are now taking the policy too far.

“It’s developing some sort of mentality in our children. Your face is you, that is how people know you,” Ms Butler said.

“They are just doubling down on hiding you and not letting you breathe and … it’s conformity to the extreme.”

Speaking to the Daily Mail, Ms Skeldum said she was considering pulling her daughter from the school, describing the alleged tape use as “a type of punishment for the mask falling down”.

Colorado State Representative Shane Sandridge wrote in a September 27 letter to Superintendent Thomas Gregory that the mask mandate (independent of the tape allegations) “is long on political trends and short on scientific facts”.

“Parental choice associated with a child’s health is sacred, and a school district should not override a parent’s decision to mask, or not mask, their child while attending taxpayer funded public schools,” he added.

“I support local control of school policy, but local control starts with parental control, especially with healthcare decisions of their child.”

In an email to parents, the school district said it was taking “the appropriate steps to address these serious allegations”.

“We’ve heard rumours that students did it on their own; we’ve heard rumours that teachers handed out the tape; we’ve heard rumours that teachers joked about it, but the students got the tape,” the district’s chief communications officer, Allison Cortez, said.

“There are so many versions of this story. That is why we need to actually talk with every single student and find out what really happened.”

Ms Butler’s daughter will attend school online until the investigation – which will involve interviews with more than 100 students and staff members – is complete.

The US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommends – in light of the more contagious Delta variant – “universal indoor masking for all teachers, staff, students, and visitors to K-12 schools, regardless of vaccination status”.