The Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) reached an agreement Friday with the United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) to allow schools to drop indoor mask mandates for teachers and students, and only “strongly recommend” masks.

Local ABC affiliate KABC-7 reported:

Los Angeles Unified School District students and staff will be able to remove their masks indoors, with the district announcing Friday it has reached agreements with its labor unions to lift the face-covering requirement.

The district announced it will now only strongly recommend masks indoors. The new policy will begin no later than Wednesday, March 23, officials said in a news release.

According to LAUSD, the new agreement still needs to be formally ratified by union members, but that process has already begun, and the mandate is expected to be lifted by Wednesday.

As Breitbart News reported, Los Angeles County had canceled its mask mandate for schools in the county, effective March 11, after the State of California dropped its own indoor mask mandates. But the UTLA refused to allow the mask mandate to drop for schools in the district, citing collective bargaining rules.

The delay was attributed to “science,” and made Los Angeles one of the last major cities in the country to drop its mask mandates for children, widely seen as the group least susceptible to the coronavirus.