It’s one of those stories that you have to see to believe. A student protest against face mask mandates in California has turned into a back-and-forth battle between righteous discontent and the proprietors of tyranny representing the public school system.
Students in the Oakdale Joint Unified School District began protesting this week with more students joining every subsequent day. At first, the few students who were protesting were sent outside, but the protest numbers have swelled to over 200 students. With temperatures as low as 43 degrees, the Superintendent was chastised by parents.
“That was a mistake. That was a miscalculation on my part, and I took responsibility for that,” Superintendent Dave Kline said. “I apologize to both parents that that took place. That is not how we want to treat our students. We still want to be respectful.”
The next day, students were put in a large gymnasium. The doors were locked and barricaded with folding tables and the temperature was turned down to its lowest setting. Law enforcement was called in to do a welfare check. They had the tables removed and the heat in the room turned on.
After later “escaping” the freezing gym, the kids marched to the district headquarters in protest. pic.twitter.com/Mz95ySlOTR
— Reopen California Schools (@ReopenCASchools) February 4, 2022
Today, an organization called Let Them Breath reported that the students were not allowed on campus:
The students are done. Let Them Breathe! We are legally supporting these Oakdale students who were first segregated in the gym and now are not being allowed to access their campus to get an education.
We have already sent a demand letter to Oakdale and are following up today. pic.twitter.com/lQquJQdYCj
— LET THEM BREATHE (@letthem_breathe) February 4, 2022
Public school districts in California claim they are facing a conundrum due to California Governor Gavin Newsom’s face mask mandate. They claim they would risk losing funding if they disobey the order. This is disingenuous as they know if they were to oppose the face mask mandate, the state would never allow the horrible optics of defunding them.
It should be the school districts who are leading the protests on behalf of the students, not bowing to an oppressive and hypocritical government. Newsom has repeatedly disobeyed his own orders and mandates, demonstrating that he sets rules for others but not himself.
Any school who hides behind the Governor is either lying or ignorant. The reality is they fully deny the science surrounding Covid-19, which poses such an infinitesimal risk to school-aged students that it’s almost statistically insignificant. Most public school administrators adore the slave masks, vaccines, and authoritarian powers they’ve acquired through Pandemic Panic Theater.
School administrators such as those at Oakdale Joint Unified School District are not taking actions on behalf of the students because they don’t actually care about them. If they did, they would fight on their behalf, not lock them in gyms.