Students, staff and visitors at two Pikes Peak-area school districts will be required to wear masks after Labor Day due to rising COVID cases and outbreaks.

Harrison School District 2 will require masks in all schools and offices beginning after the Labor Day holiday, according to a Thursday message from Superintendent Wendy Birhanzel.

Widefield School District 3 will also require masks after Labor Day, Superintendent Kevin Duren wrote in a Thursday letter to families.

Harrison’s announcement comes after three Harrison schools reported COVID-19 outbreaks over the past week, Birhanzel said: Sand Creek International Elementary School, Carmel Community School and Sierra High School.

“Our goal is to safely keep our schools open and keep our students in school,” Birhanzel wrote. “Therefore, we are implementing a mask mandate in order to keep our schools open and reduce the number of students and staff quarantined.”   

Widefield has a “significant number of students and staff with positive cases which have resulted in hundreds of students and staff quarantined across the district,” Duren wrote, adding that the district has an active outbreak.

“Positive cases and presumed positive cases lead to quarantines for staff and students, which takes away from consistent in-person instruction,” he wrote. 

The district is also facing a major substitute shortage, he added.

“Our to start the school year was to have as ‘normal’ of a start as possible,” he wrote. “Unfortunately, hundreds of our students were not able to experience normal. In light of the uptick in positive cases and quarantines, we believe adding an additional layer of mitigation is appropriate at this time.”

Widefield’s mask mandate, which applies indoors, will be re-evaluated in four weeks, he said.

The districts join Cheyenne Mountain District 12, Manitou Springs District 14 and Colorado Springs School District 11 in requiring masks inside its schools and administrative spaces. District 11 on Wednesday announced that all staff members will have to wear face coverings indoors beginning next week.

Harrison’s decision comes as several Colorado Springs-area school districts deal with active coronavirus outbreaks. Districts 20, 11 and 49 have all experienced recent outbreaks, leading to at least three schools shifting to some form of distance learning. None of the districts currently require students to wear masks to school.

In a Wednesday letter to families, District 11 said that if the community COVID transmission rate remains at or over 200 cases per 100,000 residents per seven days for five consecutive days, “students, staff and visitors in our elementary schools … will be required to wear a mask/face covering while indoors, regardless of vaccination status” for 30 days.

The community transmission rate surpassed that threshold on Aug. 26 but dipped under on Sunday, coming in at 199. On Monday it hit 219 and has remained above 200 since, according to county health data.

The district anticipates the elementary student mask mandate going into effect on Tuesday.