North Allegheny Parents File For Temporary Restraining Order Against School Board Over Overturned Masking Policy
PITTSBURGH (KDKA) - Less than 24 hours before North Allegheny School District's first day of school, a group of parents and students took legal action to try to get a mandatory mask mandate back in place.
North Allegheny School District students go back to school on Monday morning. On Sunday around 7 p.m., 11 students and 11 parents filed a complaint seeking to reverse the current optional masking policy, and around 10:30 p.m., they filed a motion for a temporary restraining order.
"My clients want to protect their kids. I'm a parent here in the school district, I want to protect my kids," said Alexander Saksen, an attorney with Goldbert, Kamin, and Garvin Law Firm.
The group of parents and students filed the complaint against the North Allegheny School District, the school board, and the individual board members seeking to reverse the optional masking policy.
On Wednesday, the school board overturned the superintendent's order requiring mandatory masking in schools.
Watch as KDKA's Briana Smith reports:
The injunction complaint said, "The board's decision violates Constitutional substantive and procedural due process and will result in irreparable harm to the Plaintiffs, NASD staff, students, and visitors, and the local community at large."
"There were some procedural errors that the school board undertook, there is some substantive constitutional violations that they did the way they did it," said Saksen. "That was what we had in place when we all made the decision not to go to cyber academy not to send our kids there," said Saksen.
The students and parents' attorney told KDKA they want masks to be required for the first day of school and that's why they later filed a motion for a temporary restraining order.
"We filed a complaint against the North Allegheny School District, the school board, and the individual school board members seeking to rescind their decision on Wednesday to overturn the masking policy throughout the North Allegheny School District. We will be filing later this evening a motion for a temporary restraining order, basically seeking that the decision on Wednesday be reversed immediately so that as soon as tomorrow morning, kids will be and staff and anyone entering our buildings will be wearing masks," Saksen said.
With an uptick in COVID-19 cases and concerns about the delta variant, Saksen said they felt this was the only option to protect their children.
"North Allegheny did a nice job last year protecting students and we really are only asking them to do the same this year and I think right now going back to school with masks is what the science, the psychology, and sociology all suggest," he said.
KDKA reached out to the school district for a comment Sunday night but has not heard back.
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