 on mask mandates at government-run schools, most of which will open their doors tomorrow.
On Monday, four senators – including the chamber’s ranking Democrat – wrote to Peeler urging him to call a “special session of the South Carolina Senate to reconsider restrictions on school districts and mask mandates.” Meanwhile, multiple school districts across the state – including the Charleston county school district – have indicated they plan to impose mask mandates on students, teachers and staff whether the legislature rescinds its ban on such edicts or not.
According to opinions issued by S.C. attorney general Alan Wilson, that would put these districts in direct violation of state law.
As this news outlet noted several weeks ago, school districts are being pushed to defy lawmakers by über-liberal SC for Ed – which earlier this year announced its opposition to any face-to-face instruction in the state’s failing K-12 education system. SC for Ed is part of “Red for Ed” – a left-leaning national organized labor movement. In 2019, this group organized teacher walkouts across the state over education funding complaints – even though funding for government-run schools in the Palmetto State has soared in recent years (with no corresponding increase in academic achievement, incidentally).
Anyway, mask mandates and so-called “vaccine passports” have been hotly debated in recent weeks – and a pair of high-profile cases related to the legislature’s muddied handling of these issues could soon be addressed by state courts.
In the interim, the issue has become a political hot potato among legislative leaders …
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DON’T MISS A STORY …
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As I have previously noted, South Carolina is no longer under the perpetual (and legally dubious) state of emergency which accompanied the initial Covid-19 panic. As a result, the “emergency” powers previously exercised by S.C. governor Henry McMaster are back in the hands of the state’s legislative branch.
Unfortunately, the S.C. General Assembly has failed to pass a law definitively addressing these issues. Instead, lawmakers sought to weigh in on mask mandates and vaccine passports piecemeal – on a temporary basis.
To that end, they inserted a trio of regulations addressing masks and vaccines in the fiscal year 2021-2022 state budget. These regulations – called “provisos” – took effect on July 1, 2021.
Unfortunately, only one of the provisos – the one banning mask mandates at taxpayer-funded K-12 schools (1.108) – was clearly and unambiguously worded.
“No school district, or any of its schools, may use any funds appropriated or authorized pursuant to this act to require that its students and/or employees wear a facemask at any of its education facilities,” the proviso noted.
While lawmakers wait for the courts to address their “handiwork,” liberal lawmakers – including “Republican” S.C. Senate judiciary committee chairman Luke Rankin – are pressing Peeler to take action on K-12 mask mandate ban.
Rankin was one of the four senators urging Peeler to bring lawmakers back to Columbia for the purpose of scrapping a “House-inserted budget proviso (which) demanded schools not mandate masks or risk being defunded.” The others were Senate minority leader Brad Hutto of Orangeburg, Democrat Ronnie Sabb of Greeleyville and “Republican” Sandy Senn of Charleston.
(Click to view)
(Via: S.C. Senate)
So far, though, Peeler is not bowing to the pressure …
The 72-year-old Gaffney, S.C. native has the support of House speaker Jay Lucas in his stance, multiple sources familiar with the situation told this news outlet. In fact, one of Lucas’ allies told me Republicans in that chamber were done waving the “white flag” and accommodating additional Covid-19-related mandates.
“I get that four Democrats in the Senate want to continue capitulating to the national teachers union but where are we going to draw a line in the sand?” one ranking House member told me late Monday. “They are already calling for virtual schooling in some districts. Where do they really think this is going?”
Another lawmaker said science should guide these deliberations, citing the low percentage of Covid-19 cases, hospitalizations and deaths across the state (and nation) impacting fully vaccinated individuals.
“People need to be getting their jabs,” the lawmaker said. “That’s what this is about.”
The lawmaker added that school districts and other government agencies in the Palmetto State were free to impose vaccination mandates on their employees if they chose to do so.
Is that accurate? Are state agencies (and political subdivisions of the state) allowed to mandate vaccination of their employees? Last time I checked, that was still an open question.
(Click to view)
(Via: Columbia S.C. Photographers Travis Bell)
Even if Peeler and Lucas were to call lawmakers back to Columbia this month, the path toward a repeal of the K-12 mask mandate could still prove arduous. First of all, any attempt to amend the budget document containing this provision would require the approval of two thirds of both chambers of the legislature.
Is such consensus likely in such a hyper-ideological climate?
Those seeking to overturn the mask mandate ban dispute this interpretation, however, saying lawmakers are allowed to address any Covid-19 issue under the terms of the adjournment resolution they passed earlier this year.
“It’s not a supermajority requirement,” one lawmaker who supports mask mandates told me on Monday.
Still, if the governor – an ardent mask mandate opponent – were to veto such legislation, overriding him would require a two-thirds majority of both the House and Senate.
Do mask supporters have the votes? We shall see …
Or if Peeler continues to hold his ground, maybe we won’t.
Time could be on Peeler’s side as lawmakers are expected to return to Columbia sometime in September to address the first round of funding tied to the most recent federal “stimulus” package from Washington, D.C. Depending on how the next two weeks go, the calls for an “emergency session” could be rendered moot. Still, House leaders acknowledged the “winds were picking up” on the issue – with one source tracking the discussion telling me there was some concern Peeler was “waver.These days it’s still pretty common to talk about social business, mobility, analytics (especially when it’s called big data), cloud, and the Internet of Things — SMACT is the current acronym for all this — as on the agenda of key digital improvements underway in the typical enterprise. While many organizations have executed solid starts against these fronts, and are usually just at the end of the beginning overall in incorporating these technologies into their business, the majority still have a good way to go for reasons I’ve explored recently on ZDNet and elsewhere.
In recent months, I’ve started to be asked what’s coming next in digital and the enterprise. While I examined the more strategic up-and-coming technologies for the last year, this doesn’t really begin to paint the strategic picture that organizations must manage to now. After all, a laundry list of technologies is just that, and won’t create results by itself. But carefully situating emerging technologies within a business in a way that truly takes advantage of their innate and unique abilities to realize value creation does, and is the essential description of the hot topic today among CIOs and others in the C-Suite, digital transformation.
After all, the whole point of digital transformation is realizing that technology fundamentally changes how you do business in just about every way. It therefore poses very difficult questions to business and technology leaders: Who best should do our work today? Where does the value come from? What do these new ways of working actually look like? How can we best organize to achieve them? To answer these questions, we must understand the overall narrative of our modern digital journey: Where is technology actually taking us? What is it making possible that wasn’t before? How can these possibilities give rise to uniquely valuable new types of assets that would allow us to sustain our businesses?
These are a lot of open questions, but we do have a sense of some of the answers now. For example, in terms of who does the work and where value comes from, we’ve learned that the network can and will (and should) do most of it, if we only enable the possibilities through platforms and digital communities. The answers to other questions are more complex, though their broad outlines are becoming clear as well, such as how can we best organize this year to achieve digital change. Why are they tough quetions? Because while digital devices and networks enable broad and reasonably well-understood realms of possibility, how precisely they apply to our industry, our business, and our corporate culture is often very different between organizations.
So when we talk about framing up the overall digital journey we are all on, the discussion is often about “computing eras”, or the emerging of new types of platforms (the cloud, for instance.) while these views are often gross simplifications, these are also useful conceptual frame-ups. Probably one of the most widely referenced view these days is IDC’s articulation of a vision they’ve dubbed the 3rd platform. In the large, this view does indeed describe what’s happening, though it leaves out some of the unique flavor of what’s special about what’s happening in digital today. I’ve previously described some of the more detailed possibilities in a view I called Web OS, but this really never became a popular way of thinking about it, though it did provide