A Salem group is planning a rally for mask choice at Salem-Keizer school district student services center on Friday, February 18 at 10:00am.

Salem Keizer We Stand Together is a nonpartisan group of citizens striving to encourage community engagement and advocate for parent’s rights, educational transparency, equal opportunity, academic excellence, and school choice for every student.

According to the group's chair, Linda Farrington, "We want our schools to offer an excellent education, free of opinions and progressive ideologies, because they are training the next generation. There are many important issues facing us today. But how our children think and the way they approach the world is the most important issue we have. It is the ideology that is at the root of everything else that happens. Children are our future and the perspective that is taught to them will affect every single one of us tomorrow.

Especially since vaccinations are readily available for those who are vulnerable to covid infection, Salem Keizer We Stand Together is advocating for parents to have the right to choose what is best for their children. Masking should be a choice - not a mandate! Parents know better than the government what their children need.

"Schools are only taking into account one side of the mask issue and appear to be completely ignoring the harms that are taking place in terms of increased mental health problems, increasing suicides, lack of communication, isolation, lost learning, lost recognition of social cues, and delayed speech and language development, hurting children with special needs, autistic children, and those for whom English is a second language, the most." Farrington continued. "Once the Governor decided to make the mask mandate permanent I think parents realized that nothing was going to change unless they got involved. Last week we had a rally for mask choice with over 200 community members attending. We decided to do it again this Friday because masking is harming children in so many ways with little measurable benefit. We couldn’t stand by and let them continue abusing children this way.”

For Farrington, the issue is serious. "At this point, going on three years, it is abuse. We know that children rarely get sick from COVID and even more rarely pass it on. Although many have tried to find evidence that masking children decreases the incidence of covid infection, close examination finds the claims are not substantiated. Although the CDC continues to recommend masking in school, the World Health Organization guidelines do not routinely recommend masks for children ages 6 to 11 because of the “potential impact of wearing a mask on learning and psychosocial development.” Masking children ages 5 and younger is not recommended because this age group is at low risk of illness, because masks are not “in the overall interest of the child,” and because many children are unable to wear masks properly. The WHO also explicitly counsels against masking children during physical activities, including running and jumping at the playground, so as not to compromise breathing.

In Oregon, the arbitrary rules about when it is or isn't ok to mask are inconsistent thereby pointing to a political issue underlying the mandates, not a medical one. All the emphasis on masks takes away from real mitigation efforts that could help the community like hand washing, taking extra vitamins, preventing obesity, and early at home treatment to stop the over inflammation of COVID infection that sends people to the hospital.




--Staff Reports

Post Date: 2022-02-16 09:39:21

Last Update: 2022-02-16 18:36:00