Our school district dropped the mandate a couple weeks ago. My kid said a little less than half of the kids and most of the teachers are still masking. We left it up to the kids and they both decided to stop wearing a mask. I had them pack one just in case they changed their minds, but there was enough of a mix of masking and not that they didn’t feel out of place.
Yep. And while we’re agreeing on things, can we agree that in general, politicians doing photo ops or pressers with kids is just almost guaranteed to be awkward & possibly creepy?
My point is that many of the people who are now asking for compassion & patience for them to become comfortable with removing masks & returning back toward normalcy are the same ones who were much much uglier over the past 2 years toward people who saw the cost/benefit of masks & mask mandates differently or who needed more time to become comfortable with the risk/reward of an experimental injection.
This is a bit absurd. The anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers have, as a whole, been complete self-absorbed and uncivilized for the past two years.
This was a war against a virus that led to millions of casualties, and it did not have to be that bad.
You will get none of my compassion.
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Early on, there were healthcare workers stripping on their porches and spraying off with Lysol, sleeping in campers, garages, tents, etc, or sending their kids to stay with relatives out of fear of infecting their families. There was a lot of unknown back then, no vaccines, insufficient PPE, and not much by way of treatment. Armchair quarterbacking 2 years prior is sad.
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Yes for the pressers. I don’t feel that strongly about a school visit to read a book or give a “you are the future” speech and just so happens to provide a photo op.
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This has not been my experience.
Of course you cannot see into peoples’ hearts.
But I think most of these people have believed bad information (much of which starts as lies from politicians or pundits.) Or they were not good a processing the chance of death, which was always pretty small compared to the kinds of numbers most people deal with in their every day life.
I had something else mind. Even if the number is right- for example. 1 in 1000 chance of death- i’m not sure most people know what to do with that number.
The interesting thing about the question in that survey is that it depends heavily on the population of people who get sick.
I wonder if people would have done better if they had been asked something like: suppose 100 otherwise healthy young adults get covid how many of them will go to the hospital? Or: suppose 100 70 year olds with heart disease get covid, how many will go to the hospital ?
It is fascinating to me how the framing of covid may have affected peoples perception of its risk.
People tend to judge things much riskier if they are a) brand new, and b) seem to threaten a ton of people. Think nuclear radiation or terrorist attacks.
And notice that the democratic politicians tended to talk about covid in those terms: unprecedented, could kill many people (focusing on total number instead of chance per person) etc.
Many republicans took the opposite approach: it’s just like the flu, your individual chance is low (the important part maybe being to frame it not as a threat to many people) etc:
Desantis was just being an asshole because he is attached to an agenda that cheers it on. Many of those others have agendas as well, but many 1) aren’t governors of the third biggest state, and 2) aren’t attacking kids in front of cameras, where the kids and cameras are there because of the governor.
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No, i think i may have not given enough context. Someone sets the rules. If the rules are that you must wear a mask in a certain area (perhaps because there’s a highly infectious disease going around and masks prevent the spread of it), then it’s not abusive to make a kid wear a mask there. If the rules are that you aren’t allowed to wear a mask in a certain area (perhaps because it’s important for security reasons to see a whole face) then it’s not abusive to make someone remove their mask.
But when the rule is “you may wear a mask or not”, then it’s an asshole move to pressure or shame someone to either remove it don a mask.
I recall a time pre-Covid when my bank had a sign specifically disallowing ski masks and other face coverings. (If you were going to rob them they wanted your face on camera.)
So to answer your question: yes, but they’re a little unusual.
My understanding was that the decision made the statewide mandate null & void but placed the decision with the individual districts which were still free to require masks.
So while I don’t approve of their enforcement tactics, assuming it was a violation of district rules then the child in question was not exercising an option that was actually available to him/her.
In IL school districts do not have the authority to impose a quarantine, which includes forcing someone to mask (defined as “modified quarantine” in IL law).
So sure, it was a school rule, but an illegal one.
Apropos of nothing: Whatever happened to that Stanley Milgram poster from the AO? 
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Do they have the authority to make their own dress codes? A mask might be part of a quarantine, but there are a lot of other ways to require masks. (And “wear a mask” is a far far lesser restriction than most anything else that would be considered “quarantine”.)
IL law includes masks under its definition of “modified quarantine.” Dress codes are under the authority of local school boards but are subject to religious objections.
Most of the districts in the state embraced the freedom to go mask optional. Many gave some gentle coaching on respecting different families’ decisions on the topic. Some districts, like you, looked for legal loopholes to keep force-masking children, while Elgin apparently decided to escalate to those more restrictive measures & subject dissenting students to solitary confinement.
That’s not how the article I posted made it sound. They specifically state that it’s up to the districts to make rules regarding masks.
But we all know the media doesn’t always get these details right, so I concede that it’s possible my source is wrong.
Do you have a source saying that districts aren’t allowed to require masks?
from the person defending bad behavior by a person on their team by identifying bad behavior on the other team and demanding we all see it and wanting it all to be eqaul. we all have our nits it seems.
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our school is likely going the same way. the board has been following cdc/doh guidelines and those have been updated. school not moving as soon as those guidlelines changed owing to some how the rule was implemented and the next board meeting being the 7th.
So masks were a part of “modified quarantine”. It’s frankly ridiculous to read that too imply that quarantine is the only reason to wear a mask. I wore a mask when i was quarantining and had to leave my bedroom. I also wear a mask every time i go grocery shopping. I’m not doing some kind of quarantine every time i go to the grocery store. In fact, i didn’t go to the grocery store at all when i was quarantining.