Schooling DeSantis
Public school administrators around Florida are defying Gov. Ron DeSantis’ threats to cut off funding, mandating masks for kids as they return to school. Conservatives who claim to support local control of education and purport to revere the sanctity of human life should stand with them against a tyrannical state chief executive.
DeSantis’ order, couched as protecting parents’ rights, in fact constrains the liberty of thousands of moms and dads who seek only to send their kids — about half of whom are too young to be vaccinated — to classrooms with reasonable safeguards against COVID’s highly contagious delta variant. In Tampa’s Hillsborough County schools, a permissive opt-out policy made masks wholly optional. Little coincidence, just one week into the academic year there, more than 10,000 students and 300 staffers have been quarantined or isolated for contact with COVID-positive people.
Wednesday, as President Biden said his Education Department will stand with the locals, the state’s largest district, Dade, bucked DeSantis and required face coverings, joining second-largest Broward and Alachua counties, and Hillsborough smartly tightened its opt-out to medical necessities. Thursday, a judge let pro-mask parents’ lawsuit against the DeSantis ban proceed. (Outside Florida, a small Texas district has cleverly broken Gov. Greg Abbott’s asinine mandate ban by amending its dress code. If schools can say no to short skirts, they sure as hell can require face coverings in the heat of a pandemic.)
Seven in 10 Americans support school mask mandates, and for good reason: Research proves face coverings are a cheap, easy way to frustrate the spread of the pathogen when unvaccinated people are clustered indoors. That’s urgent as kids return to class and reports surface from frontline doctors in Arkansas, Texas, Louisiana and elsewhere that the delta variant is infecting many more kids.
Youngsters are still relatively safe from COVID: Among states reporting data on child COVID cases, only about 0.03% of pediatric COVID cases have resulted in death. But do the math: If all those 10,000 quarantined Hillsborough children were to test positive, three at most might die. Only three dead children sacrificed to play to the anti-mask cheap seats.