Last night, Orange County education leaders voted to recommend the reopening of schools without the mandatory use of masks or increased social distancing, although they suggest that there should be daily temperature controls, frequent hand washing, and the use of hand sanitizers, along with nightly disinfection of classrooms.
Jocelyn Gecker has been reporting to the California Associated Press about the school’s reopening debate. As she says, on the one hand parents say: that children are children. They oppose masks and social distancing in classrooms, arguing that both could harm the well-being of their children.
On the other hand, there are parents and teachers who ask for guarantees that would have been unimaginable before the coronavirus pandemic: part-time school, coverage for all or a completely online curriculum.
“Don’t tell me my son has to wear a mask,” Kim Sherman, a mother of three in the city of Clovis, in central California, who describes herself as very conservative and very pro-Trump, told Gecker. . “I don’t need to be dictated to tell me how to better educate my children.”
Some parents have threatened to withdraw their children and the funding they provide if masks are required. Hillary Salway, a mother of three in Orange County, California, is part of a vocal minority that calls schools to open up completely with “normal social interaction.”
If the district requires masks for her son’s kindergarten class, she says, “I don’t know if my son will start his educational career in the public school system this fall.”
She wants him to feel free to hug his teacher and friends and can’t imagine sending him to a school where he will be reprimanded for sharing a toy. He started a petition last month urging his district to “keep facial expressions visually available” and helped organize a protest of more than 100 people outside the district office, with signs saying “No to masks, yes to recess “and” Let me breathe. “
Supporters argue that facial coatings are ineffective, give a false sense of security, and are potentially harmful.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say the masks can help prevent infected people from passing the virus on to others, and they urged students and teachers to wear them whenever possible. Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom has ordered Californians to wear them in public.
Brooke Aston Harper, a liberal parent who attended a particularly lively Orange County board of education meeting recently, said it was “horrible” that the speakers “were imposing their little worldview on us.”
“I’m not looking for a fight, I just want us to take precautions,” said Harper, whose children are 4 and 6 years old.
He also started a petition, asking schools to follow state guidelines that include masks for teachers and students, constant social distancing on campus, and other measures.
“For each school board, the question will be: what does our community want and who is the loudest?” she said.
“I will wear a mask, a face shield, possibly gloves, and I am even considering putting on some type of body covering,” he says. Stacey Pugh, a fifth grade teacher in the Houston suburbs. She hopes that her Aldine district will order masks for the students. “When fall comes, we will be the frontline workers,” said Pugh.
Many small, rural communities argue that they should not have to comply with the same rules as large cities, where infection rates are higher.
Craig Guensler, superintendent of a small district in Yuba County, mostly rural California, says authorities will try to comply with state mandates. They have spent $ 25,000 on what he calls “saliva guards, for lack of a better term”: cleaning the plexiglass dividers to separate desks at all four schools in the Wheatland Unified School District.
Eighty-five percent of parents said in a survey that they want their children in school full time. Officials will space the desks as much as possible, but they still wait as many as 28 in each classroom, Guensler said. Many parents insist that their children do not wear masks, and he suspects they will find loopholes if California requires them.
“Our expectation is that we will be beaten with pediatricians writing notes, saying, ‘My son cannot wear a mask,'” he said.
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