June 24, 2021

«Name»
«County»
«Street_Address»
«City», «ST» «Zip»

Re: Mask Mandates and COVID-19 Vaccine Requirements Since Passage of Senate Bill
187

PLEASE DISTRIBUTE TO ALL MEMBERS OF YOUR BOARD

Dear «Name»:

Please note that in no way are you or your LEA being singled out or targeted. The packet
that you are receiving concerning mask mandates and the court ruling from Williamson County is
being sent to every school board across the state of Tennessee simply as a notification of the ruling.
And I sincerely hope that this information is helpful to you as an elected official and school board
member.

In addition to the letter provided regarding the court ruling and masks, it is also worth
noting that in this year’s legislative session, we successfully passed SB187 / HB13 which creates
a new section in Tennessee Code Annotated Title 68, Chapter 5, Part 1 stating the following:

The governor shall not issue an executive order, a state agency or department shall
not promulgate a rule, and a political subdivision of this state shall not promulgate,
adopt, or enforce an ordinance or resolution, that requires a person to receive an
immunization, vaccination, or injection for the SARS-CoV-2 virus or any variant
of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

No state agency, including the public school system, may make rules requiring a vaccine
for COVID-19. As such, I would suggest that any efforts to segregate, mark, identify, or create a
set of circumstances by which a student is treated differently in any way due to the fact that they
have not received a vaccine for COVID-19 would also be unlawful.

As an elected official, it is your sole responsibility to understand the limitations of your

authority and act within the legal boundaries provided to you by the General Assembly. It has been
suggested by some constitutional law attorneys that knowingly promulgating rules which exceed
your given authority could be grounds for an ouster lawsuit in the state of Tennessee and perhaps
cause you to lose governmental immunity and be held liable for damages.

I am thankful that our state is entering into a season of recovery from all that we have
experienced over the past year. And I think we can all agree that families, students, and faculty
were put in impossible situations in dealing with various restrictions in all aspects of our lives. My
hope is that moving forward, we can all be honest about how we may have missed the mark in
how decisions were made and policies were put in place that damaged families and students alike.
Outside of general vaccine requirements approved by the Commissioner of Health and the State
Board of Education, the General Assembly has given no authority to local LEAs to manage the
healthcare decisions of the general student population.

Thank you for your service to our state and local communities.

Sincerely,

_________________________
Gary Humble
Executive Director