Our community of students, teachers, staff, and parents of Burr Elementary School is bound together by our collective mission and commitment to keeping our students in a safe, inclusive, innovative, and service-oriented education setting. Burr is more than a school; it is a community where our students, staff, and families help each other and look after one another. 

This petition is to affirm our support of Principal Klimowski and the Burr administration’s mask policy to allow students in the same homeroom to be outside without masks, but when interacting with students in other classrooms, masks must be worn. We believe that given the low vaccination rates in the Burr community, the recent FDA approval of vaccines for children 5-12 years of age, and the recurring quarantining of classrooms due to confirmed positive cases in the community justify the continuation and enforcement of this policy. Principal Klimowski and the Burr staff and teachers have done a wonderful job keeping our students safe under evolving federal, state, municipal, and board policies. Our primary goal is to keep as many students and staff in person for the school year, and we unequivocally support the Burr administration’s health and safety protocols. 

The recent segment by Megan Hickey of CBS 2 Chicago highlighting some parents’ dissenting views of Burr’s mask policy does not reflect the opinion of this community of parents. We believe that it is important for everyone in the Burr community to do our part in keeping our masks on throughout the day when interacting with classmates across homerooms in order to keep our collective risk and exposures to a minimum. We unequivocally support Principal Klimowski and the Burr administration’s mask policy.