Posted on 01/28/2022 6:57:43 AM PST by george76
Standoffs on the ground between parents and school districts continue, as a battle in the courts looms...
Defying an executive order issued by newly-elected Gov. Glenn Youngkin that renders masks optional in public schools, several Virginia districts responded by suspending students who decline to wear a mask, segregating them into isolated rooms, and calling police on mothers who advocate for them.
After the issuing of Executive Order 2 on Youngkin’s inauguration day, January 15, Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS) went into action by joining a seven-district lawsuit against the order and directing their administrators to suspend students without face coverings as a new provision of the dress code.
With Youngkin’s order taking effect on Monday, handfuls of students arrived for school this week seeking to exercise their parents’ right to opt them out of the district’s mask mandate.
Luke Rosiak from the Daily Wire reported the scene from one school included a teacher peering through the glass of an exterior door wearing “a dark mask and a full-face plastic shield, resemble[ing] Darth Vader.” When “seeing a masked child out front, [she] opened the door a crack to let him in.”
Carrie Lukas, a mother of two children at Forestville Elementary School, arrived with her smiling kids ready to learn, Rosiak wrote. But before she could make it to the doorway, “she was confronted by an assistant principal who said the children would not be allowed in the school,” and was then shadowed back to her car by a security guard as she “retreated.”
While Lukas said school administrators were polite, the security guard hired by the FCPS was “aggressively barking” at the small number of parents who attempted to drop their kids off for school without covered faces, reported Jordan Boyd of The Federalist.
In fact, they called the police on Rosiak because he would not fall back to a “media staging area.”
...
If you’re just a mom who wants to express her opinion, it’s incredibly intimidating to have them calling the police. It was just totally weird and unnecessary,” Lukas said. “And I think, at least for me, it confirmed that Fairfax County [schools] … are basically making it seem as though parents, as if we were a threat.”
Stephanie Lundquist-Arora, another mother in Fairfax County, told Boyd that her three children were “suspended from learning” for a second day for violating the district’s mask requirement.
Though she said many parents are at least uncomfortable with their district’s mask policy, they go along with it to avoid retaliation.
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I’m in touch with a lot of friends who, some of them, didn’t want to defy what the superintendent was saying because they were afraid of the suspensions,” Lundquist-Arora told Boyd. “They have kids on athletic teams and stuff like that. So a lot of my friends who have problems with this are afraid to stand up because their children have a lot more to lose.”
In Loudoun County, Rosiak reported a dozen students and vocal adults gathering before their high school opened to “prepare for resistance” and the entering if the building without face coverings.
In response, administrators segregated the students and many others who were non-compliant in the school auditorium, though they were equipped with a copy of Youngkin’s order and a note from their parents opting them out from the district’s policy.
Though these students were also required to remain silent for the school day and do schoolwork online, they enjoyed great support from many parents who encouraged them, even delivering pizzas to them during their lunch hour.
At least one teacher, Karen Mineo, was also sent home “and put on leave without pay for refusing to wear a mask,” Rosiak reported.
Complaining about the treatment of these students on Tuesday, a parent, Clint Thomas, wrote Loudoun Superintendent Scott Zeigler, “We have just learned our girls and other maskless students in confinement are now being denied the ability to get water? … We’re told an admin is now guarding the door to the aux gym in case any else tries to leave. Is this now a prison or a school building?”
Studies reveal masks are ineffective and damaging..
Available evidence suggests that masks have played little, if any, role in reducing COVID-19’s spread across the United States, such as the U.S. Centers for Disease Control’s (CDC’s) September 2020 acknowledgement that masks cannot be counted on to keep out COVID when spending 15 minutes or longer within six feet of someone, or a May 2020 study published by CDC’s peer-reviewed journal Emerging Infectious Diseases that “did not find evidence that surgical-type face masks are effective in reducing laboratory-confirmed influenza transmission, either when worn by infected persons (source control) or by persons in the general community to reduce their susceptibility.”
Last May, another study found that though mandates effectively increased the use of masks, that use did not yield the expected benefits: “mask mandates and use (were) not associated with lower SARS-CoV-2 spread among U.S. states” from March 2020 to March 2021. In fact, the researchers found the results to be a net negative, with masks increasing “dehydration … headaches and sweating and decreas[ing] cognitive precision,” and interfering with communication, as well as impairing social learning among children.
Data also shows that children are at little to no risk from the virus. Last summer, a team of researchers with Johns Hopkins School of Medicine “analyze[d] approximately 48,000 children under 18 diagnosed with Covid in health-insurance data from April to August 2020,” and found a “mortality rate of zero among children without a pre-existing medical condition such as leukemia.” The lead researcher, Dr. Marty Makary, accused the CDC of basing its advocacy of school COVID vaccination on “flimsy data.”
Legal arguments going forward...
Opponents of Youngkin’s order argue that it is in conflict with a law passed in the state last year requiring schools to resume and maintain in-person instruction while adhering “to the maximum extent practicable,” to recommendations issued by the CDC, which still supports universal masking.
But Ilya Shapiro, vice president of the libertarian Cato Institute and a resident of northern Virginia, argues that in stating such mandates are “have proven ineffective and impractical,” the governor’s executive order determines that the CDC’s recommendations in this respect are not “practicable” for government schools, and while taking into account other aspects of state law as well, including parental rights, Youngkin renders such mandates illegal.
In addressing actual harms that are being inflicted upon children by these mask mandates, Shapiro goes on to state how the governor’s order promised “welcome relief to parents who are hardly unreasonable for being worried about cognitive development, language learning, mental health and other issues that have arisen from the coronavirus pandemic. My own kindergartner son has been diagnosed with a mild articulation disorder, for which he was evaluated without lowering his mask.”
Just Double-Dog-Daring him to make a move and then get him in court.
They are some devious bastards. Can’t have their way so they throw a temper tantrum.
Reagan went to “people power” when this sort of thing happened.
“calling police on mothers who advocate for them”
The police should tell the school to go take a hike and only call when a crime has been committed. This type of behavior is extremely unprofessional and police should not support this idiocy.
Insurrection!!!
They should be arrested and held in isolation for a year!! Just like the Jan 6th protesters. They are a threat to democracy!!!
We need to play by their rules, and hold them to the same standard.
Democrats love segregation and miss it badly. The mask issue gives them another opportunity for this.
PUT ASSES IN JAIL
The Governor needs to have swat teams show up at each school and areest these insurrectionist little hitler school officials.
The Governor should have the national guard escort these maskless students into the schools ala 60’s in the deep south.
Northern Virginia schools segregate. The same Northern Virginia who is super pissed because they couldn’t overwhelm yet another election and force their liberal will upon the rest of the state.
Opponents of Youngkin’s order argue that it is in conflict with a law passed in the state last year requiring schools to resume and maintain in-person instruction while adhering “to the maximum extent practicable,” to recommendations issued by the CDC, which still supports universal masking.
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This statute will be a problem, but Youngkin can press for its repeal and declare political war on school boards supporting it.
Exactly!
Those leftist love to force nasty muzzles on children. They are sick, power-hungry people.
This has just crystallized the side that voted the Democrats out and has made the conservatives that much more focused.
And this is turning people who were nominally on the Democrats side against them. This next cycle of local elections for school boards and local offices is going to be very interesting.
Northam and the Democrats were able to turn VA blue by sympathizing and sounding like conservatives or at least moderates. These episodes are proving to everyone, that there is no such thing as a moderate Democrat, and they are making a lot of people really angry.
Maybe they want something bad to happen?
Why, it’s almost like the demo-commies knew they would be tossed out of the majority eventually and passed ‘laws’ that would allow them to control things from the federal level where they are heavily embedded.
compliance is more important than science
doncha know?
Any idea when the courts will act on this?
The best slaves, serfs, peons, etc., are the ones who have cognitive development issues, don’t you understand?
Get your children out of the government schools. Homeschool, pod, do something else. Because they want your children for their plantation and they will start a war to get them.
Arrest the Superintendent and remove their Teaching Certificate.
That’s the cure.
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