“Hey, parents — we know we’re only in the second week of a school year that was supposed to be mask-optional, but we changed our minds today. Oh, and if you want to exercise your right to free speech in person at our ‘public’ meeting, you can forget it. Put it in an email.”

That was the message sent by the leadership of Henry County’s public schools last week. Needless to say, some parents did not take it well.

Let me be clear; the behavior of certain parents at the most recent Henry County Board of Education meeting was inexcusable. I saw about two minutes of a random cell phone video shared on Facebook, and it was non-stop shouting with an assortment of f-bombs thrown in. I was wondering, “Do you kiss your kids with that mouth?”

But I digress. The language was not appropriate, but the frustration certainly was. You can hear it even at the end of the district’s official recording of the meeting. It was not a good look for the school board or the superintendent.

On the heels of the $1,000 vaccine bribe for employees, the decision was made Aug. 9 by Dr. Mary Elizabeth Davis, having been authorized previously by the school board to do so at her discretion, to implement Phase 4 of the district’s COVID management plan. Word spread quickly and a few hundred people made their way to the central office for that night’s regular monthly board meeting.

But wait. Phase 4 means the seating capacity for said meeting is automatically cut by more than half. You folks who weren’t among the very first to show up can just wait outside and find out what happens after it’s over.

Inside the meeting room, the superintendent’s explanation regarding her decision was made to sound like it was a last-gasp chance to keep in-person learning. (Phase 5 is a return to remote learning.) When the public participation item on the meeting agenda was announced, it was left to the school board’s attorney to announce that public comments could be sent to the district by email. No parents would be speaking from the podium tonight.

To assume that the timing of these moves is not suspect, or that none of these decisions could have been tweaked to allow for proper advance notification and the opportunity for citizens to comment publicly, is an insult to the intelligence of every family member in the district. Meanwhile, the day after the meeting saw the district’s PR team posting a link to a happy YouTube video with this comment: “The school year is rolling right along …”

Very few of the 100-plus comments on that Facebook post were from happy parents. As for the video, it was filled with kids on the first day of school, BEFORE the mask mandate’s return.

In Florida, which is led by the best governor in the universe, the state school board recently decreed that any local district which issues a mask mandate must provide parents the opportunity to opt out. Parental choice; what a novel concept.
It makes sense. Last year, in-person instruction was available in every part of Florida from day one for parents who wanted it. A number of districts in the Sunshine State were mask-optional all year, and the statistics in those counties regarding COVID-19 cases are indistinguishable from those who masked up.

Anyone who trumpets the overall effectiveness of masks as gospel is either ignorant or lying. You can easily find just as many reputable scientists who will make the case that they are useless political theater at best, or a detriment to the health of children at worst. (I will admit that it is getting harder to find some of these experts thanks to Big Tech censorship.)

So for the time being, kindergarteners will have the chance once again to breathe through uncomfortable face coverings while rarely, if ever, getting to see their friends or teachers smile at them.
Unless …

It would be great to see an organized effort by parents to counteract this madness. Pick a date on the calendar and have about 10,000 students walk into their classrooms without masks. Instead, each one would carry a respectful but firm letter from Mom and Dad stating that their kid will be just fine without it.

How would the administration react? They will be the ones tasked with handling it; it appears that the school board is not interested in hearing what the parents have to say about it.

If a parent wants to mask up his or her child, go for it. I understand that there are plenty who wish to do that for a variety of reasons. But the hysteria needs to stop.

One prominent social media influencer wrote this about the school board meeting: “Several members of the crowd loudly proclaimed they were unvaccinated and it was their right. Several rowdy protesters showed up wearing Trump logos and campaign shirts. … I was there in the back of the room masked and felt unsafe with so many unmasked people in the audience. To understand you had to be in there with people yelling and interrupting the meeting, possibly spreading the COVID virus while making aggressive gestures. … Board member Makenzie McDaniel was well intentioned but put himself at risk of contracting the virus going into a crowd surrounded by unmasked and unvaccinated individuals not realizing his mask was down. They were yelling and possibly spreading the virus. We need him and he is too valuable to be put in that position.”

This same Facebook page posted two weeks earlier that the Geranium Festival could become a “super-spreader” event because people dared to walk around OUTDOORS without masks in downtown McDonough. Whoever wrote either of these posts should just go home and stay there around the clock, under the covers in the fetal position. I cannot imagine living my everyday life with this kind of fear.

COVID is real. It has also been weaponized for political purposes unlike anything we have ever seen. Swine flu was quite dangerous a decade ago, killing tens of thousands, and the reaction from the government and the mainstream media was nothing like what we have seen the past 18 months.

For decades to come we will see the effects of forcing this generation of students to miss a year or more of learning. The shutdown of the educational system due to this pandemic is likely the worst public policy decision of our lifetimes.

I will be curious to know in two or three weeks if the county’s private schools see a spike in enrollment as parents decide they have had enough. It has been reported that the public school district’s Impact Academy, a long-established virtual program of which I am a big fan, has seen its enrollment explode of late — from around 500 in previous years to 4,500 now.

Thousands of parents have neither the resources for private school nor the flexibility for virtual learning. Judging from the recent actions of their public school district, they also have little in the way of parental choice at all.

Monroe Roark began covering Henry County news in 1992 and was a county resident for more than a quarter-century. He has had family members living in the county since before he was born. Since 2015 he has lived in the Tampa Bay region, the best place in America for a beach lover or a pro sports fan.