A California School administrators gave a brazen shrug when asked about students unhappy about the reintroduction of a school mask mandate.
“You really should wear the mask,” Dr. Sharon Whitehurst-Payne, president of the San Diego School, grimaced and shrugged during an interview with KUSI News.
The principal said if they don’t like it, they can stay at home.
dr Whitehurst-Payne made her disdain clear when asked about students who had started summer school when there was no such mask mandate, only to be told to wear a face covering at all times indoors.
San Diego School Board President Dr. Sharon Whitehurst-Payne said if students don’t like masks they can stay at home and study via Zoom
San Diego County summer school students are now required to wear masks indoors despite a two-month low in infections
“They should make it known that they are unwell and just not going back at this point,” she said.
On Monday, the San Diego Unified School system reinstated mandatory indoor face coverings for all summer school students, despite a drop in cases.
The seven-day average for infections is 39.5, the lowest since early June, according to the San Diego County Communicable Disease Registry.
Cases have risen and fallen over the past month and a half as the highly transmissible but less deadly BA.5 variant has spread across the country.
Whitehurst-Payne said the school board had set an infection level for the return of indoor mask regulations and the community had reached that level.
“As a reminder, the district established criteria approved by our board on May 24, 2022 that, if met, would require a return to indoor mask requirements. This week, one of those criteria was met when San Diego County entered the “high” COVID-19 community level, according to an announcement on the San Diego Unified School District website.
Whitehurst-Payne said the board of education would be going on vacation soon and wanted to start the policy change before they left.
“The board will be on vacation and absent, but we wanted to put in place a policy that respects the dates,” she said.
dr However, Kelly Victory, an emergency medical technician and disaster specialist from Steamboat Springs, Colorado, said masks have never been an effective way to stop the spread of Covid-19.
“I have over 200 published scientific studies disproving the effectiveness of masks in stopping respiratory viruses,” she said KUSI News. “Let’s talk science. Let’s not talk about what is politically correct and what serves a different narrative – scaremongering.”
dr Kelly Victory, an emergency medical technician and disaster specialist from Steamboat Springs, Colorado, said masks have never been an effective way to stop the spread of Covid-19
She said that if masks could stop Covid-19, “we wouldn’t be in the pickle we’re in because the places around the world that were fussy about their mask mandates wouldn’t see significant case numbers anymore. “
Studies have shown that children are less susceptible to the coronavirus and wearing masks can affect learning, especially in younger children.
“They always fail to acknowledge or address the increasing number of negative effects of wearing a mask,” Victory said. “We know that regardless of the social impact, face masks have had many effects on children’s ability to speak properly, recognize facial expressions, interact socially, and so on and so forth.”
She said educators are not weighing the negative impact against the negligible effectiveness of the masks when deciding to reinstate the policy.
Two child development quotient tests were also conducted, which show a significant decline in children’s language and other abilities compared to a sample of youth of the same age since the beginning of the pandemic
The report found that results measuring children’s intelligence quotient have fallen by 23 percent since the pandemic began. The results showed that the composite mean early learning score fell by a whopping 23 percent, from a peak of just under 100 in 2019 to 77 in 2021
The study’s findings come as parents around the world grapple with the idea that wearing masks could interfere with their young children’s natural learning experiences and communication skills
“It’s hard to imagine why they would continue to propose these,” Victory said.
Social distancing measures, including face masks, are suspected to have reduced infant development by as much as 23 percent during the COVID pandemic, according to a Brown University study using data from 1,600 children.
York University researchers found that face masks made it 20 percent harder for children to recognize faces, compared to just 15 percent for adults.
