With the 2021-2022 school year rapidly approaching, please consider this petition-

On Friday, July 30th 2021 the Department of Secondary Education (DESE) released it's recommendation for the new school year:

“This fall, DESE and DPH strongly recommend that all students in kindergarten through sixth grade wear masks when indoors, except students who cannot due to medical conditions or behavioral needs. Masks are not necessary outdoors and may be removed while eating indoors." DESE is basing this mask guidance on guidelines from the CDC, Centers for Disease Control. It is not a government body or a law enforcement agency and merely makes recommendations and suggestions. That being said, the CDC is not the end all be all, especially considering how wrong and conflicting the statements they have put out have been throughout this time period. It is crucial now moving into the 2021-2022 school year we follow guidance that factors in what we have learned over the course of this pandemic.

The CDC’s website itself states: "Children do not seem to be major drivers of transmission, despite the high proportion of mild or asymptomatic infections”. Another quote states that “So far, data suggests that children under the age of 18 represent about 8.5% of reported cases with relatively few death rates. Children appear to be largely spared from the direct mortality aspects of covid-19”. Perhaps most profoundly, the CDC points out that “Fewer children have been sick with covid-19 compared to adults. Reports suggest that limited in-person instruction during the pandemic may have led to negative effects on learning for children, and on the mental health and emotional well-being of both parents and children. For schools and ECE programs the benefit of in-person school and caregiving need to be balanced against the risk of acquiring and spreading the SARS- COV- 2 in these settings.”

By the CDC's own admissions quoted above, kids are safe from covid-19 and have always been. The CDC states that among children the mortality risk from covid-19 is actually lower than that of the flu and the risk of severe disease or hospitalization is about the same. It is also the same for the other variants along with the original strain, but most remarkably has been known to be true since the earliest days of the pandemic. To children, covid-19 represented only a tiny threat of death, hospitalization, and/or severe disease. Not one child in Massachusetts has died of Covid. Over the course of the pandemic, 49,000 Americans under the age of 18 have died of all causes according to the CDC. Only 331 of those deaths have been from Covid, and less than half as many died from pneumonia. To put this into perspective, in 2019, more than 2,000 kids and teenagers died in car crashes and this number is relatively steady each year according to estimates. About 1,000 kids die a year from drowning. Fewer kids died of covid-19 then heart disease, suicide and homicide- not to mention birth defects.

All told, 600,000 Americans have lost their lives to COVID-19 over the course of this pandemic and just 0.05% of those were under the age of 18. The largest group is the 80% of American deaths have been among those aged 65 and above. According to the white house, 90% of American seniors are now fully vaccinated which means that while more cases are likely and some amount of hospitalization and death is possible, vaccines have eliminated the overwhelming share of American mortality risk with the disease now circulating almost exclusively among people who can endure it much better, especially kids.

The risk to children is dramatically smaller still than the CDCs baseline, according to one much cited paper. It notes that the infection fatality rate for those aged 5 to 9 is less than 0.001%. This suggests that children in this age group, even if sick, face roughly 1/10,000 the mortality risk of an 85 year old. Statistically speaking, if a kid comes down with a coronavirus infection, they are facing a threat to their life equivalent to that of the flu. In a large study from the UK, 126,000 British people have died from covid since the onset of the pandemic, but just 26 of those were under the age of 18.

Did you know that the world health organization (WHO) doesn't even recommend universal mask wearing for kids younger than 12? Researchers would have expected, based on local transmission rates, about 900 cases of COVID-19 among a group of North Carolina students observed last fall. It turned out only 32 transmissions in total took place over that whole timeframe. Another study done among 20,000 Nebraska students attending school all year found in total two cases among them. Even if the numbers were higher, the risk would not have been borne by the kids themselves, but the grandparents and the other vulnerable members of the community- of whom there are many many fewer of now thanks to the vaccines.

Children learn from faces. They need to see eyes, mouths and the expressions of their peers and teachers to learn such a wide scope of skills- from academic and language to the social and emotional. Children are falling behind and it is abhorrent that we continue to mask a population that is not at risk to begin with. This is causing far more harm than benefit to our future!

I'm asking you as a parent of 3 elementary aged kids, one of which is special needs, that you stand with me and do what is right for our children. Let's unmask our children and let them have the school year that they should have had a year ago! Allow them to play with their friends and fully interact, engage and most importantly socialize and build lasting friendships. Allow the teachers to see the happy faces on the children as they return to school. This is first and foremost a parental issue. We as parents should be the deciding factor. If you're uncomfortable with your child wearing a mask at school, it's your right for them to not to have to do so; if you as a parent feel safer with your child wearing a mask that is your right and you should have the freedom to do so.

Thank you for reading!