School districts are defying state governments to implement mask mandates for students. Plastic barriers didn’t work, and Vox is mad businesses won’t mandate vaccines.
Summary
School districts in major cities in Arizona, Texas, and Florida have defied their governors by implementing mask mandates for students.
- Texas Governor Gregg Abbott lost an appeal to the Texas Supreme Court that would have settled that state’s fight on school mask mandates.
- Miami-Dade County Schools in Florida is the latest district to require masks, a move praised by the local teacher’s union.
- The inability of the federal government to impose a nationwide mask mandate in schools is creating what has been called a “messy patchwork of policies.”*
- The coronavirus is not the only flashpoint in the culture war trickling down to school districts: A suburban DC school board in Virginia is facing recalls after the board voted to “expand the rights of transgender students.”
- Amid mask mandates, the newly announced third shot booster for vaccinated Americans is leading some scientists to question the evidence supporting it.
- CNN’s analysis of the school mask mandate stories characterize the situation as perilous for President Biden and as “revolts against Republican governors who blocked mask mandates” as a measure of fealty to Trump supporters.**
- Vox laments corporations’ hesitancy to implement masking and vaccine mandates for their employees, as “front line” workers at Walmart and McDonald’s are not facing the same vaccine mandates as their corporate offices.
- The New York Times reported on research showing much of the preventive measures like plastic sheeting and barriers “can make things worse” by impeding “normal air flow and ventilation.”
- Newsmax reported on Palm Beach County defying Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ orders banning school mask mandates, characterizing the move as “remov[ing] parents’ ability to exempt their children from wearing masks in public schools.”
- Fox News reported on a handful of blue states requiring vaccines for teachers (and state workers) or weekly testing (The United States’ largest teachers’ union is not supporting vaccine mandates for their members but is supporting mask mandates).
- Townhall piggybacked off the New York Times’ report on the effectiveness of plastic dividers, saying it became “a trademark of society’s fear of invisible COVID particles”.
Author’s Take
*Sure, Axios had to come up with a catchy headline to grab readers’ attention. But this “messy patchwork” of school mask mandates does not matter to parents because they only need to worry about ONE potential mask mandate: their own district’s. It’s just more fear and outrage porn.
**It’s as if CNN doesn’t understand the Constitution or American society at all and simply wants to score cheap, and silly, anti-Trump points for its increasingly small audience. The federal government should have no jurisdiction or authority over local and state school policy. Zero, none.
The New York Times’ report on the effectiveness of some mitigation measures shows how simplistic and counterproductive “doing something” just to make everyone feel better is.
One would hope, after a year and a half of data and personal experience, the United States could have a rational, thoughtful, data-driven discussion on what worked, what didn’t, and how actually mitigate serious illness from the coronavirus. But the outrage-porn media will never let that happen.
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© Dallas Gerber, 2021
