Panther Valley School District has ended its mask mandate, one week before it was scheduled to expire.

School board members voted 4-2 during a special meeting Monday to make masks optional for students, staff and visitors.

“Obviously we set the date for next week, but in my mind we’re ready now. I don’t think it’s going to change in a week,” said David McAndrew Jr., Superintendent of Panther Valley School District.

The board voted last month, during the peak of the omicron surge, to keep masking in place through its Feb. 16 regular meeting.

Last week, the board scheduled the special meeting to consider ending it early. And on Monday, administrators said that they were comfortable with that, given changes in daily case counts.

“I’m all about data, the data shows it has dropped,” said Patti Ebbert, principal of Panther Valley Junior-Senior High School. Ebbert said during the last week, positives among students were less than half of what they were during January’s peak.

Board member Marco D’Ancona supported ending the mask mandate early. He said that students are regularly interacting with people without masks outside school, and that the vaccine has been available long enough for everyone who wants it to get it.

“Sometimes there are circumstances where you can undo things,” he said.

The district still plans to require masks on buses.

Renee DeMelfi and Shawn Hoben voted against ending the mandate early. Hoben said he took the administrators’ recommendations from the January meeting seriously.

DeMelfi said the board shouldn’t reverse course.

“We all agreed, we listened to our administration, to wait until Feb. 16. I don’t like flip-flopping,” she said.

Board members Bill Mansberry, Joseph Faenza and Gary Porembo were absent from the meeting.

The district kept its mask requirements in place even after the Pennsylvania Supreme Court threw out a statewide mask mandate for K-12 schools on Dec. 10.

With masks in place, the district did away with quarantining students who were exposed to someone who tested positive, but did not have symptoms.

Those rules will remain in place after mask requirements are lifted. The district encourages students to quarantine if they have COVID symptoms, but they don’t mandate it.

When the board voted in January, school administrators spoke in favor of keeping masks to avoid having to go virtual due to a possible surge in cases.

Ebbert thanked the board for following their recommendation as omicron peaked.

“I’m grateful the board listened to the administration because we saw the numbers coming in, and the numbers were scary,” she said.

Pennsylvania had 7,855 new cases reported Monday. After the holidays numbers reached 30,000 cases daily. Carbon County’s percentage of positivity over the past week has been 21.3%, 215 new cases reported.