Wear a Mask at School! Protect Our Children!

Stock photo. [image description: A young boy (left) with pale skin wears a blue surgical face mask and yellow shirt and carries a royal blue backpack. He elbow-bumps a young girl (right) wearing an identical face mask who has pale skin and braided hair. She wears a blue-striped shirt and carries a pink backpack. The two stand in front of a school building.]

Joyful, silly, and smart are words my husband and I would use to describe our six-year-old son. He is a child who knows no stranger, genuinely loves everyone he comes across, and is obsessed with cars. The world is his oyster, and he loves being an active participant in life! He loves to play, explore, and tell knock-knock jokes--his favorite being one about an interrupting chicken. 

If you were to meet our son, you would think he's a typical child, but on the inside his windpipe and bronchial tubes are partially collapsed all the time. They collapse 100% when he coughs. Our son has a "hidden" disability called Tracheobronchomalacia. It is a rare and incurable airway disorder that can potentially be relieved, but not cured, by a series of highly specialized and complicated surgeries. 

As I sit in a dark, cold, and cramped hospital room writing this while also watching machines read out a myriad of information during my son's third sleep study in his six years of life, I wonder what it must be like to have a “typical” child. It must be freeing to not sit and stare at a pulse/oximeter all night when your child has a "little cold" or watch to make sure your child's chest rises and falls, not because that's "what all parents do" but because there's a very real possibility that your child has completely stopped breathing in the middle of the night. 

My son doesn't just get a two-day cold, he gets a two-week cold because of his airway disorder. This means that every little cold he gets is trapped deep down in his lungs and turns to pneumonia. Now imagine having a child with this condition during this global pandemic and you can maybe emphasize with a fraction of the terror we feel daily in making basic decisions like, should my son go play outside with friends? 

Other than chronic lung disease, during COVID there have been no limitations on my son’s ability to participate in school or extracurricular activities, except one: he must be around others that mask to protect his airway. This means when a school has a universal masking policy for the classroom, but fails to require masking during gym, music, recess, after school activities, and has little-to-no mitigation strategies during lunch, a child like ours has to sit alone in an alternate space to eat. He has to sit alone in his classroom during gym and music and watch a simulcast of his classmates having fun. To add insult to injury, his parents are told after school activities hosted by the PTO are "not a good fit" because masking is no longer required. Each of those things is a daily reality for our kindergartener. But why? 

Last year our school district, Indian Hill Exempted Village, did a remarkable job of keeping children, faculty, and staff safe all year. It never shut down once because of its strong masking policy and mitigation strategies. But now, despite a more highly contagious variant of Covid circulating, our district is suddenly dropping all those tried and true mitigation measures. Why? 

Does my child’s school truly value GOP political pressure over the lives of their students, faculty, and staff? That's certainly how it feels from our perspective. 

And then there is the option of virtual schooling. If you were told your child could either learn in-person (studies have shown that it is a healthier environment for success), or stay at home with no social interaction, learning only math and reading, what would you choose? Forcing a child to have an inequitable education because of a medical condition or disability is both unacceptable and illegal.

The one thing that can protect our son, and so many other children like him, is the small “ask” of wearing a mask at all times indoors. That's it. If all his classmates wear a mask in gym and music, our son can finally participate fully in school without risking his life. If all his classmates wear a mask in the classroom, he can receive the equitable education he is entitled to. 

That's it, just a mask. Just a mask until he and all children under 12 are able to receive a vaccination. A piece of cloth to save a life. How could that even be a second thought for anyone? 

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The author of this important message on children's public health requested anonymity because of recent death threats individuals advocating for school masks in their area have received.