Steven Singer, who teaches in Pennsylvania, is outraged that his school district refuses to mandate masks and treating mask-wearing as a personal decision, rather than a public health necessity.
He is worried about his daughter in classrooms where masking is optional.
He writes:
Nationwide, nearly 94,000 new child Covid cases were reported last week- a substantial increase,according to the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and the Children’s Hospital Association (CHA).
Even in the Pittsburgh region where we live, the number of kids hospitalized with Covid at UPMC Children’s Hospital has nearly doubled in the last week, according to KDKA. That’s 50 hospitalizations in the past month including 20 in the last week.
I went to the local school directors meeting and asked the board to follow recommendations of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and Allegheny County Health Department by requiring masking and vaccinations for eligible students and staff. They refused.
My daughter is scared? So is her daddy.
Now I’m stuck in the position of keeping my little girl at home for another year by enrolling her in the district’s terrible on-line program, Edmentum, or rolling the dice with in-person schooling.
I’m told there will be more synchronous teaching this year in the remote program, but I don’t trust it.
Last year, she only made it through because my father-in-law – a former math teacher – and myself basically taught her everything the on-line program struggled to get across…
I just don’t understand it.
Don’t my daughter and I have rights?
We hear a lot about the anti-maskers and the anti-vaxxers. A lot about their rights. What about our right to safe schools?
Why is it that the right NOT to wear a mask supersedes the right to go to a school where everyone is required to wear one?
Because it isn’t – as I told my daughter – a matter of everyone having to deal with just the consequences of their own actions. My daughter and I have to deal with the consequences of everyone else’s actions, too.
Or to put it another way – if one person pees in the pool, we’re all swimming in their urine.
That’s wrong.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
With the Delta variant raging in many states, should we even be having in-person schooling for the new school year? Remote learning is a poor substitute for the real thing but children and staff coming down with the latest variant is an unacceptable alternative. I have no answers but I am leaning towards in-person learning for the upcoming year here in NJ.
I watched a woman standing next to a doctor calmly assert that she did not believe the virus hype. I believe she still equates it with the flu. She was as much as calling that doctor, who reported the spiraling increase in cases in his hospital, a liar.
I just cannot wrap my head around such intransigence. What does it take to face reality?
Honestly, all it would take is a reporter simply asking her “Will you now publicly promise that if you or any of your extended family – including your children – gets sick, you will not be allowed to use any medical resources that you don’t believe in anyway?”
Would love to hear her answer. These people – like Gov. Abbott — always demand to be first in line for treatment.
Comparing Covid to a cold or the flu is a right wing false equivalency that needlessly puts more people in harm’s way. It is sad that some red state public schools are acting as though this is the case.
Who knows? I’ve had numerous encounters like the one you describe (and have had friends share experiences with me that are the same and worse).
I agree with Singer. Optional masking provides the reckless with more “rights” than the cautious, and the same can be said for those the reject getting the vaccine. We would not have so many breakthrough cases if we followed the CDC guidelines. The cautious are getting sick because the reckless have been given political priority. In matters of public health, masks and vaccines should be a priority, not politics. Administrators should not treat masking and no masking equivalents because they are not. Masking is pro-science and safety, and no masking is totally political. I applaud the superintendents that are mandating masks and social distancing. It is the best and safest public policy in a pandemic. Schools have an obligation to do everything in their power to keep their young people safe, and many of the superintendents are yielding to political pressure instead of doing what is right and safe for young people.
“Adjuvants in vaccines are synergistic with elements in geoengineering.” – Mary Nix Hollowell, a teacher in Atlanta https://twitter.com/NixHollowell/status/1397299661761916932
Your point being?
Through the use of paraphrastic casuistry, Wally Ballou was able to deceive the foreign potentate.
The anti-vaccers and anti-maskers are basically traitors and cowards and don’t really understand that their freedom to be an “ugly stupid a—— h————“ (USA! USA!) stops when they endanger others.
I cannot disagree with you Yvonne.
“if one person pees in the pool, we’re all swimming in their urine.”
I heard someone on a news show make this point recently, and I think it can’t be said enough.
When someone says they want the freedom to wear a mask, then they should be asked whether they also believe that people should be allowed to pee anywhere they want.
And those who deny the serious of the COVID epidemic should be asked: Okay, we will open schools as long as you publicly agree right now that neither you nor any member of your extended family, including your children, will be given any medical treatment period until the pandemic is over. As long as you are good with the medical community you don’t trust prioritizing the children and their families who do believe in masks and vaccinations, that is fine, and you can seek medical treatment from the internet since you are are publicly stating you reject the advice of doctors.
Someone should publicly make a list of all of the “doctors” and “medical personnel” who say masks and vaccines aren’t necessary and tell them they are now the ones who will treat the families of all who opposed masking.
Two separate medical systems — one manned by anti-mask doctors and medical professionals that must treat the families of all anti-maskers and one for the others. We don’t know how many hospital patients died because doctors and nurses were giving Gov. Abbott special treatment at the Governor’s Mansion instead of caring for the people in overcrowded ICUs. But it is appalling that the people forbidding masks for political reasons then take vital medical resources away from the people who are sick and need it more.
And as my brilliant wife just said: If one person poops in the pool, the pool is shut down.
Our school has been in session since August 4. At least two COVID positive students have been in my classroom that I know of. Since kids are not regularly tested, there’s a good chance that many more have been releasing virus into my classroom air. Now wildfire smoke fills the air and we’re told not to open windows. This is not good.
The adage says it all. Well-put, NYCPSP.
“Now I’m stuck in the position of keeping my little girl at home for another year by enrolling her in the district’s terrible on-line program, Edmentum, or rolling the dice with in-person schooling.”
My own district used Edmentum. I have exactly the same view of it. In all fairness, on-line programs are generally no better over all.
Because it’s all about “choice”.
We’ve redefined public education to be an individual consumer product. The only person who matters is your child.The school as a whole is not a community or group of people who have to find some common ground and serve all the students – its just “a building” to quote Betsy DeVos.
It’s fine. If the ed reform “movement” get their way there won’t be any public discussions of school rules for the general good. Everyone will take their universal voucher and purchase edu product that meets their needs, wants and desires. They won’t have to compromise or even consider anyone else. All the children’s needs will be met individually without any downside or compromise to the rest of the students because that’s the magic of markets in the ed reform narrative.
They fundamentally don’t buy the concept of public education.
Public schools can continue to pretend they can somehow co-exist with the ed reform “movement”, but that’s a fantasy. Ed reform can’t encompass public schools. The two concepts are at odds. It’s either a public good and a public project or it’s not. They chose “not”.
I love the “pees in the pool” analogy. A variant [sic] of this post’s title: Why does your right to unmask your child usurp my child’s right to life?
I can see it just getting nuttier and nuttier. Why should any parent follow any school rule that doesn’t directly benefit their child? Why have compulsory schooling at all? If it’s “parents choice” no schooling at all should certainly be a choice.
I’ve decided to school my children exclusively through having them watch cartoons on you tube. It’s my choice and as ed reformers tell us “my choice” is paramount and trumps any other consideration.
Talk about reap the whirlwind.
Ed reform is incoherent. Their ideological belief in markets is inconsistent with a public system and every time it comes down to going with the market theory versus the public good theory they choose market theory. They capitulate every single time.
There’s no “public” left in ed reform. They handed it over without even a fight or a word in dissent. Now they have a market system and no one has to compromise or even consider compromise.
I don’t think there was ever a coherent or thought out concept of “public good” in ed reform, which is why they capitulated to the radical free market sector of the “movement” so quickly.
They had nothing to defend “public” with. They had already defined education as an individual consumer good. When it was attacked they were reduced to ineffective market tweaking to attempt some semblence of “equity”. They can’t even manage to regulate the privatized systems they create properly.
Liberal ed reformers don’t have a theory of public education, so they ended up with Barry Goldwater’s.
When my youngest was in middle school the public school tried a program where they mixed kids who were struggling with kids who were not struggling. Deliberately. So mine was not struggling and that was also true of many of the others and the parents of kids who were doing better complained. Honestly we probably wouldn’t have noticed but the school announced this in the interest of transparency.
The school accomodated the complaining parents by adding a staff member to the class. The idea was the struggling kids would benefit from the kids who were doing better but we had to mitigate any harm to the more advanced students by adding a teacher. I don’t know if it “worked”. They still use a modified version of it.
In ed reform’s concept of “public education” we would all just pull our kids and start a pod for the students who were doing better. Because why think about it at all? Just plug in a new edu-product. Why should I have to think about my community at all, really? MY CHILD was not the first priority in the original plan and that’s unacceptable. It’s not MY concern how the class or school or town does as a whole. I’m just a shopper for services.
The next delighful battle we all have to look forward to out of ed reform is the battle where all the parents who are taking low value vouchers object to the higher funding of the public schools.
Comprehensive public schools cost more than low value edu-purchase vouchers. They’re already pushing vouchers as a low cost way to provide a “public education” and that will accelerate as the ed reform echo chamber takes more and more of the “public” out of public education.
But they don’t discuss any of this in the echo chamber. They’re way too busy engineering privatized systems to stop and consider what it is they’re selling. They’re selling public education as a consumer product. They have excised all community and public responsibilty for it. It is for and about the individual. No common duty or project at all.
They shouldn’t be suprised when the downside of that approach appears. It will.
But there’s never any discussion of possible downsides in ed reform either. There isn’t the slightest mention of the risk inherent in radically restructuring a system that serves 50 million children. Hubris.
Yesterday a student declared emotionally that vaccines were just a way the government was trying to control us. There being no time to engage this student in a conversation, I assume that she was just reflecting conversations she had in her family and community. It made me reflect on why I feel the way I do about various issues.
While I would like to think that I carefully consider each source of information I read, I think that I am not too different from my student, taking cues from my millieu in order to arrange my opinions about some important issues. Covid is among them. While I had a pretty rough bout with Covid, I discount my own experience somewhat and consider the data I read or anecdotes I hear from those who see covid patients. But mostly, I listen to those I trust. Some of you have impressed me with your depth of understanding and influence me in no small way.
This is the problem. If you do not trust the way you perceive science to work, you will distrust scientific elements in the national conversation. If you have no understanding of the constant revision of science, it will appear to you the same way it looks when someone just changes their mind for no reason. Added to the confusion are the really egregious errors science has committed in the past, none of which I care to bring up here due to the dearth of space.
So what are we to do? Society used to have a press that curated reading material to some extent. Now the media are mixed with websites and twitter accounts that spread misinformation on purpose and by mistake as well. It reminds me of the books the English Puritans read about the atrocities of the Thirty Years War. The real things they read gave rise to much of the fake news of that day, riving English society in a way that ultimately produced the Civil War and the end of Charles I.
It Worries me.
Roy,
If you do have a chance to engage this student, you should ask her if she is vaccinated against tetanus, against mumps and measles and polio, against rubella, and does she reject that meningitis vaccine?
It would not surprise me if she and her parents got many of those vaccines. Aren’t they already “controlled”?
Will she refuse to give her own children any of those vaccines?
Usually it makes them change their tune to “this vaccine” is government control but “this one” isn’t.
NYC: Good idea. I would fear that such a question might make her reject those vaccinations as well. There is a group that has so been alienated from the idea that government can do anything correctly that a Democratic president could suggest the second coming and they would reject it. Only Trump has gotten the alligiance of this crowd in recent history.
There is so much hypocrisy and ignorance in this politicization of mask wearing and vaccination. When everyone’s health and well-being is on the line, there can be no personal choice to forego what keeps everyone safer.
Why is it these people insist they can mandate what a woman does with her body or who can and cannot marry, but not that we all wear masks to keep everyone safer?
If one can’t wear a mask out in public for a health reason (which, for the life of me, I can’t think of), perhaps one shouldn’t be out. If you’re a professional athlete competing closely against others, you should be required to be vaccinated. If you are a spectator in the stands, you should be vaccinated. If you’re a teacher, a bus driver, a nurse or doctor or receptionist, etc., etc., you should be vaccinated.
I wear a mask for the same reason I drive on the correct side of the freeway. I wear a mask for the same reason I drive on the road instead of on the sidewalk. I wear a mask because it helps protect my young grandson who has a heart condition and lives in my home. I wear a mask because it is the right and intelligent thing to do.
No one has the right to put the lives of others at risk by not masking up or being vaccinated.
I have two good friends who will not consent to vaccination. One does not trust the process, suggesting that it was overhasty. The other feels that it is nothing but a cash cow for the companies that made it, and complains that laws allowing for companies to not be responsible for the rare but real side effects of the vaccines means that no one has any motivation to look for the side effects. Neither of these people goes around others.
I also have a friend who thinks that vaccines are a government plot to control us. This friend goes out among the people quite freely.
Somehow I see these folks differently.
You are much more charitable and forgiving than I would ever be! My patience with vaccine deniers is at an end.
Why do we even have speed limits or seatbelt laws? Should we ban all baby car seat requirements? I didn’t have to ride in a car seat 50+ years ago, so no baby should be required to and all restrictions must be banned.
Will Republican Governors ban all cars that beep unless the front seat belts are on?
Why do Republicans believe that people don’t have the right to show you their dirty feet but they do have the right to infect you with COVID?
I see the seatbelt law and the baby seat law very differently. I see neither as analogous to the regulations concerning vaccinations.
The baby restraint law governs how we treat others (for the most part, these others are the most loved of our immediate life). The seatbelt law governs how we treat ourselves. Like tobacco use, failure to use seatbelts has the potential to harm only ourselves, unless you take into account the harm your absence due to a wreck or a cancer.
Vaccines are a different matter. Some of us are teachers, seeing a large vulnerable population of students daily. It seems logical to me that I should have to accept vaccination as one condition of my employment due to my exposure to these people. So also workers in nursing homes should bear the requirement to be vaccinated. As a matter of fact, anyone who is not a complete recluse needs to be vaccinated unless their doctor specifically suggests they are a big risk.
I see these issues differently.
Roy, thanks for that perspective.
I don’t call the anti-maskers, anti-vaxxers “freedumbshitheads” or “freedumbfuckheads” for nothing.
The struggle to return to sanity continues: https://lawandcrime.com/high-profile/group-of-children-with-disabilities-sues-texas-governor-claiming-ban-on-mask-mandates-is-discriminatory/