But this time, their governor, newly inaugurated Republican Glenn Youngkin, has their back and is fighting for them.
Brave parents, teachers and schoolchildren in Northern Virginia are waging a valiant struggle for students to attend school unmasked, even as the public schools bureaucracy acts to punish them for their heresy.
This latest skirmish arose because Virginia’s new Republican Governor, Glenn Youngkin, signed an executive order that allows individual parents to decide whether their children will attend school masked or unmasked.
In so doing, Youngkin is keeping faith with the voters who elected him, as parental rights was a major campaign issue in his 2021 race for governor.
Virginia parents, like parents nationwide, had reached their wits end because of schools that would not open, teachers who would not teach, and a curriculum that would not steer clear of far-left political and cultural indoctrination.
Yet, some prominent school districts in Northern Virginia remain obstinate and unmoved. They literally are turning away unmasked students, or isolating them and segregating them from the classroom.
The issue will soon be taken up by the Virginia State Supreme Court. Gov. Youngkin says he is confident that his executive order will be vindicated by the Virginia jurists. Virginia code § 1-240.1, he notes, says “a parent has fundamental right to make decisions concerning the upbringing, education, and care of the parent’s child.”
The problem is that the Virginia state legislature passed a law in 2021 requiring school boards to adhere
to the maximum extent practicable, to any currently applicable mitigation strategies for early childhood care and education programs and elementary and secondary schools to reduce the transmission of COVID-19 that have been provided by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The CDC recommends “universal indoor masking by all students (ages 2 years and older), staff, teachers, and visitors to K-12 schools, regardless of vaccination status.”
Of course, the science behind this CDC recommendation is utterly lacking.
Students are not efficient transmitters of the coronavirus and teachers are not at serious risk of contracting COVID from students. “A North Carolina study conducted before vaccines were available,” write Drs. Marty Makary and H. Cody Meissner
found not a single case of student-to-teacher transmission when 90,000 students were in school. The faster-spreading Delta [and Omicron variants have] emerged since—but many teachers, parents and children 12 and over have also been vaccinated.
And masks—especially the cloth masks that most students have been wearing and are still wearing—do little to nothing to stop or slow the spread of COVID.
In fact, when, in 2020, the CDC actually studied the efficacy of masking schoolchildren, it found that, in Georgia, “the lower incidence in schools that required mask use among students was not statistically significant compared with schools where mask use was optional.”
To date, some 862,000 Americans have died with or from COVID. Nearly 75 percent of these deaths have been people 65 years of age or older.
Only 4.2 percent of these deaths have been people 45 years of age or younger. And only a minuscule fraction of one percent, less than 1,000 deaths, have been people 17 years of age or younger.
The idea that schoolchildren need to be masked to protect them and others from COVID simply is not borne out by either the science or the data.
Thus the Northern Virginia school districts that insist on masking schoolchildren are acting in defiance of the science and, arguably, in contravention of state law. They also are acting against the express wishes of most Virginia parents as shown by Youngkin’s election as governor.
For this reasons, school districts ought to allow parents to decide whether their children should be masked, especially while the issue works its way through the judicial system. That is the right, just, and honorable thing to do.
Instead, schools are punishing students for following a lawful gubernatorial executive order. This is wrong and unconscionable, and the school administrators who are doing this ought to be held accountable by their school boards and by the parents whom they are supposed to serve.
Feature photo credit: Parents protest against school mask mandates and remote learning in Trenton, New Jersey, June 3, 2021, courtesy of Jose F. Moreno, in the Philadelphia Inquirer.