Lake County Gazette

District 115 parent Hollis Blume is demanding that the local school board allow parents a say in the ongoing mask debate involving their children.

“I can't speak for all of the parents, but I would say in general that the majority of us feel that we would like the school board to stand up and to give us a choice as to whether the children wear a mask or not,” Blume said. “We don't mind if some children choose to wear the mask and others do not. But it all boils down to letting the kids make the choice, because much of the information that we see, the science behind this is that the kids are not in the big danger zone.”

Last month at a District 115 School Board meeting for Lake Forest schools, parent Alyssa Sinclair took the floor to blast school board members for following Gov. J.B. Pritzker's executive orders on masking.

“I'm going to read a quote,” Sinclair said. “It's by Ronald Reagan. ‘Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.’ We didn't pass it on to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for. It must be protected and handed on for them to do the same. Or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it was once like in the United States when men and women were free.”

Sinclair went on to remind board members that they took an oath to protect the Constitution when they signed on to take on the job of protecting students and classrooms.

“Go back and talk to who you need to talk to and have the courage to give kids choice, give them choice, let ISBE send you a letter and threaten you to shut down your school and take back the diplomas, because it is not a law, it is not a law,” she said. “Nothing was passed in legislation for them to take those things away. Say it again, freedom of thought. Freedom of choice. There is no law written that says our kids need to wear these.”

Blume is in agreement.

“There aren't a lot of fatalities from within their age group,” she said. “And yeah, so we would just like choice because we don't feel that the masks are healthy. There are a lot of studies out there that show that the masks cause a lot of problems, both physically, socially, emotionally. And I would also say that I think the general feeling is that the governor and the Illinois State Board of Education have pretty much overreached their boundaries.

Pritzker’s latest edict on masks comes as University of Illinois Chicago respiratory protection professors Dr. Lisa M Brosseau and Dr. Margaret Sietsema wrote on the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy website that "cloth masks and face coverings are likely to have limited impact on lowering COVID-19 transmission because they have minimal ability to prevent the emission of small particles and offer limited personal protection with respect to small particle inhalation."

Brosseau and Sietsema concluded “we don’t recommend requiring the general public who do not have symptoms of COVID-19 like illness to routinely wear cloth or surgical masks" at least partly because they argue there is no scientific evidence they are effective.