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It’s about students, but more than students

What about teachers? What about cafeteria workers?

Talk about those categories of people has been largely missing from the debates about whether school districts should comply with a state-level mandate that says students attending schools must wear masks in most cases.

We haven’t heard much about whether the adults who work within schools should wear masks themselves — or whether having unmasked students in classrooms, gyms, cafeterias and hallways poses an unacceptable risk of them contracting the sometimes serious, too often fatal COVID virus.

“You school directors work for us!” say some parents who are urging their school districts to defy the state mandate.

Well, yes and no. School directors work for parents, yes. School directors also work for people like me, who have no children in school. Those directors also work for taxpayers who never have had children in school but can sicken and die from COVID.

For example, school directors approve annual school budgets. Parents don’t approve the school directors’ decision. All any of us as voters do is “hire” (elect) school directors to use their best judgment. If we think they have not done so, we can elect someone else at the end of a director’s term — IF anyone else runs for that often thankless, often controversial job.

Before the COVID pandemic hit us in early 2020, almost nobody objected to state requirements about vaccinations, dress codes and the like. Some children got medical exemptions. A few contrarian parents argued, sometimes correctly, that the rules were goofy or unreasonable. But by and large, we just went along with the requirements.

What is different now?

Politics and religion.

But the relationship between masks and COVID is not a political issue. It is not a religious issue. It is a public health issue, just like sewers, influenza, polio, giardia and a zillion similar issues. Politics and religion don’t affect the COVID coronavirus. It is a mindless bit of living material, trying to survive and killing some of us in the process.

Some parents want to have the ultimate say about how their children are educated.

They already can. It’s called “home schooling.”

But most of us choose to have our children educated in groups within schools, so that we can concentrate on things like earning a living. We ante up the taxes to support public schools, and we elect representatives to use their best judgment to run the schools generally along lines that we support.

This mask/COVID debate is highly emotional, and no wonder. Kids die from COVID. Their grandparents — people my age — die from COVID. Teachers die from COVID.

Even the most fervent proponents of having children wear masks in school admit that mask wearing does not stop COVID. It does seem to slow the spread of viruses, if we look past the emotion about COVID and study what happened last year with the influenza virus. We had the fewest deaths in the 2020-21 season that we have had since we started tracking them reliably, according to what I have read.

Did masks do that? Saying that is too much of a stretch. We did many things differently in 2020-21, including hand washing, social distancing and staying home. But masks were part of that equation.

Some parents claim that their children are “suffering” anxiety because of being “forced” to wear masks. Anxiety is a normal condition, just like fear, anger — or joy, cheerfulness. Dealing with anxiety is a learned behavior, in and out of school.

Back in the 1940s-50s, some school children got to sit in hallways and tuck heads between knees, or crawl beneath desks and hide. Those tactics are now known to be totally useless in escaping death from nuclear explosions, but we did them.

Were we anxious? I sure was. But I learned to control my anxiety and to function by coping with stressful situations. That is a skill that is really needed in adulthood.

So what should local school directors do about requiring students to wear masks?

I don’t know. I am not a school director or an epidemiologist. I haven’t studied the effects, pro and con, the way the experts have done.

I do know this: I wear my mask when I am around groups of people. At my age, 78, and with my health history, cancer, heart attacks, emphysema and more, I would be reckless to not wear one.

Does wearing my mask prevent me from getting the COVID virus? Nope. But from what I know, it reduces the odds. That’s good enough for me.

Student anxiety is an issue, but just one issue. Lives are also at issue. Those include the lives of the more than 600 adults who are employees of the DuBois district, Clearfield County’s fourth-largest employer. If infected, they could spread COVID to spouses, friends — our entire communities.

That is who school directors are responsible to answering to: Our communities, including parents, but not just parents.

Denny Bonavita is a former editor/publisher at newspapers in DuBois, Brookville, New Bethlehem and Warren. He lives near Brookville. Email: notniceman9@gmail.com

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