get to that mass story out of pacific Grove school district there is ready to reinstate their mask mandate if the county reaches *** certain covid 19 threshold to break it all down. We go live to action. News reporter Alani Letang, who's in pacific Grove tonight. Erin the board decided to look at two metrics when deciding when that mask mandate could be put back in place and that's the seven day case rate. And then the seven day test positivity rate and the board tells us that the community was really the driving force behind this. The parents and the families are asking pacific Grove Unified School District Hearing feedback concerns on cases in the county going up in mid february. The state shifted the school mask mandate from required to recommend it. Now, out of an abundance of caution, the PG Unified School Board voted to reinstate the mandate if the county reaches to covid 19 metrics, just trying to find some middle ground, you know, and be The interest of the students. Students will mask up if the seven day positivity rate is greater than 5% and the seven day case rate reaches more than 10 per 100,000 people. I'm very grateful that the board and the superintendent have made that policy. Robin Pelt has 1/4 grader and the kindergartner in the district, she tells us her kids have continued to wear their mask during school. My preference is that they be that everybody wear masks and you know, I understand the desire for parents to make their own choices for their kids. Um, so I understand that that's *** really difficult decision on the other side of the peninsula caramel Unified School District and Monterey Peninsula Unified School District plan to continue following county and state health guidelines and if they decide that we need to put the mask back on, we'll continue to follow that as well. I've seen *** great level of responsibility from our students and our staff with parents opinions sounding off on both sides of the argument. Carmel and Monterey are leaving it up to the health professionals to guide them when you step outside of that. Then it starts to get into *** lot of, you know what different individuals think is best who may not have the background that our health professionals do, pacific Grove says it's not like they don't believe local or state health leaders to mistrust at all of any of the health agencies. I think it was just trying to add on to that. Um you know, kind of the toolkit and erin you mentioned as of today the case, the seven day case rate sits at 10.4. That's above P. G's new threshold. But the testing positivity rate is 4.1. So that's below the threshold. The school would need both those metrics to be at that threshold that we talked about for them to reinstate the mask mandate. But there's only three weeks left of the school year here Reporting live in Pacific Grove, I'm Alani Letang KSTW Action News eight mm hmm.