On Tuesday, Gov. Tom Wolf announced the Pennsylvania Department of Health is mandating face coverings for everyone in the commonwealth’s K-12 schools beginning Sept. 7 — coincidentally the first day of classes for students in the Warren County School District.

While one can understand why this action was taken — the uptick in COVID cases due to the delta variant, especially among the unvaccinated, which includes everyone younger than the age of 12 — it would appear the governor has learned nothing from what the voters of Pennsylvania plainly told him and his administration in the spring primary when it curtailed his authority to unilaterally impose restrictions upon them by enacting a pair of constitutional amendments that would largely prevent that in the future.

Now, before anyone accuses our opposition to what the governor and his administration is doing as being “pro-COVID,” we want to make clear we are anything but. We’ve advocated regularly for people to choose vaccination if they can beacuse they’ve been proven safe and effective. We’ve advocated for unvaccinated individuals to continue to voluntarily wear masks because it helps reduce the spread of COVID-19. Both are indisputably good ideas backed up by mountains of data.

But we’ve stopped short of calling for a mandate to do those things, primarily because we also believe in personal freedom and call the United States of America our home.

We believe that in most cases, the more locally decisions can be made and the more they can be made on an individual basis, the better those decisions will be. It’s because one-size-fits-all policies are rarely helpful and can often backfire. It’s because the people making local decisions are usually local people who are much more familiar with the local area and its needs than someone who may not even be able to find Warren, Sheffield, Youngsville or Russell on a map, let alone been here before.

But even if you agree with the decree from the Department of Health — a key detail, as the governor will argue the health department is allowed to take such action despite the constitutional amendments restricting his own authority — and as well-intentioned as it may be, the timing of this announcement couldn’t have been worse.

As state Senate President Pro Tempore Jake Corman, R-Bellefonte, pointed out in a statement released after the announcement, school boards all over Pennsylvania have endured highly-contentious meetings involving members of the public debating whether to mandate masks in their individual districts that has often included yelling, accusations being levied and on occasion threats being made. Some districts have already begun classes.

Now, after months of these meetings dividing communities across the commonwealth and Wolf — rightly we might add — choosing not to intervene, many of them will have to change course immediately because the governor decided to change his mind at the last minute.

Large cities and sparsely-populated rural areas are not one and the same. We wish our governor, in a state as large and diverse as Pennsylvania, would trust local leaders to make the decisions they were elected to make because when people feel like they’re not being heard by those in positions of authority, they’re less likely to comply with what is being asked or required of them by those same people.

We have no doubt there will be angry parents who will defy the order, send their kids to school maskless, and it will be left to the local school administration — some of whom may not even agree with the mandate themselves — to enforce it.

The late President Ronald Reagan once said the nine scariest words in the English language are, “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”

Gov. Wolf’s pandemic “solutions” have often proved President Reagan right. We unfortunately feel this one will, too.