 I'm non-experiment. I'm a real human being. I will no longer allow this board to make decisions for my family. Regardless of your vote today, I am taking back full power and control by withdrawing my healthy children out of BPS. This is what I think about masks. Should kids have to wear masks at school? And for how long? 18 states require kids, some as young as two years old to mask all day in school. Nine states have banned school districts from requiring masks. In Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis issued an executive order in July to stop mask mandates, writing that a right to a normal education is imperative to the growth and development of our children and adolescents. The order came in part thanks to the activism of parents like Tina Discovich. We support parental choice in masking always. We believe a parent has the ultimate authority, the ultimate right to the fundamental right to guide and direct the upbringing, the medical care and the education of their children. Discovich is a former member of the Brevard County School Board and co-founder of Moms for Liberty, which has 160 chapters and more than 70,000 members nationwide and advocates for parental rights. She says mask requirements drove parental engagement like she's never seen before. Annie and all school board members that quote yes on this mandate, you're fired. Masks work and you know that. You refuse to, and if you refuse to understand that then you have no business being on a school board. Peaceful non-compliance will be our only way forward. If they make the mask mandate where we have to wear a mask, I will not be attending school and be doing FLVS because I cannot breathe. The bottom line is this is wrong and it is illegal. They showed up to talk about the concerns they had for their individual child. They didn't really care or know about the bigger picture, but they knew their student, a mother of a deaf student spoke, parents of students with MRSA on their face, students with Infantigo on their face. My son has a rash all around his mouth and has for three months now. These parents are, you know, they're not out for a crusade. They're not on a big mission. They know their child. They see what's happening. And so they come in front of the school board to speak. Discovitch says compulsory masking caused her 13-year-old son to become obsessed with the fear of getting sick, a psychological disorder known as contamination OCD. He's a very shy child. He's very much an introvert. And as COVID was unfolding, he really started experiencing some mental health issues. He would hide behind the mask and I think he would be unseen and he would blend in. And I was watching him closely because the mental health issues were escalating. After the Brevard County School Board voted to extend the mask mandate several months before the DeSantis executive order, Discovitch pulled her son out of public school. I knew at that moment that I lost the vote that I couldn't keep him in our school system. I was a school board member of our public schools. It broke my heart to pull him out of the district. I shed a few tears over it, but it was necessary for his health and well-being. These decisions that parents are making are not necessarily coming from a place of science. It's coming more from just personal preference. Lisa Goyne is the president of the Florida chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics which supports in-school mask mandates. She testified against the state of Florida in a lawsuit challenging DeSantis' executive order. But the judge in that case sided with the governor stating in his decision that the school boards failed to prove that the state's mask opt-out rules facilitate the spread of COVID-19 in schools. This is why judges should remain in the courtroom and not in the clinic because everything that he said is totally wrong. Goyne acknowledges that COVID-19 poses a low risk of serious illness to young children, but says mask mandates are necessary because they can still spread the disease to adults. A lot of parents that I've heard talk about this feel like there's not a clear end in sight. And in the meantime, their children have to wear these masks six, seven hours every day and that that has its own costs in terms of being able to communicate and socialize with peers during a sensitive developmental period. How do you think about those trade-offs? Wow, have these parents been inside a classroom? Okay, if you ask teachers the same question, you know, kids are adjusting. That's what I love about working with children is they're very resilient. I mean, I get that kids are compliant and a lot of them are resilient, but are there any potential long-term psychological effects that parents should be concerned about? No, not that we've seen. I mean, we look at this, you know, again, we're advocates for the health and wellbeing of children. We would never make recommendations that weren't vetted by experts and the AAP continues to recommend universal masking of kids in the classroom, end of discussion. In early December, the U.S. Surgeon General announced that COVID has added an unprecedented impact on the mental health of America's youth, though it didn't specifically cite mask wearing. The COVID-19 pandemic further altered their experiences at home, school, and in the community it found. Because compulsory all-day masking is a new phenomenon, there are no long-term studies on its effect on childhood mental health and development. So, are the benefits worth the potential costs? The masks, we think of them as a completely benign intervention, but they are not. Jay Bhattacharya is a professor at Stanford and testified as an expert witness on behalf of the state of Florida in the lawsuit over the governor's executive order. We essentially have reorganized our society around the control of a single infectious disease when in fact, health is plural. Health has many, many, many inputs. Public health is therefore going to be complicated. Public action that benefits reduction of one disease might hurt another disease. We have to think about these trade-offs all the time. Bhattacharya pointed out an independent study of Florida's school system showed no statistical differences in the case rate between school districts that required masks and those that didn't. On net masks are probably more harmful than good in schools. I don't believe that there's any evidence that it actually did much as far as COVID-19 spread. For kids to wear masks. The most widely cited study in favor of mask mandates to use data collected in North Carolina schools, which the authors wrote about on the New York Times op-ed page. But that study suffered from a fundamental flaw. As the researchers admitted, because North Carolina had a mask mandate for all K-12 schools, we could not compare mask schools to unmasked schools. CDC director, Rochelle Walensky, recently shared a graphic claiming masks in schools reduced the likelihood of outbreaks by three and a half times. But that study didn't even account for whether schools were open during the period in question. Tracked outbreaks as opposed to cases and didn't control for vaccination status. You can't learn anything about the effects of school mask mandates from the study. Jonathan Ketchum, a public health economist at Arizona State University, told David Zweig of The Atlantic. There's no randomized evidence at all on masking children at zero, like none. No high quality evidence in terms of controlling disease spread. That's what leads to this kind of scientific uncertainty. Badacharya, who's an informal advisor to DeSantis, appeared with the governor on a panel in March that YouTube removed from its platform because they questioned the efficacy of masking children, which contradicted guidance from the Centers for Disease Control. I was stunned in that environment to shut down debate like YouTube did or to attempt to anyways, is absolutely responsible. The CDC has an absolutely extreme position on masks. It recommends masking toddlers two and up. The World Health Organization recommends against that. It says two to five don't mask. And for six to 11, it says, think about it very carefully because there are some harms to them. It depends on sort of the language development and other developmental issues. The European CDC in particular says no masking at all below 12. But some parents of immunocompromised children say that DeSantis infringed on their liberties by making it dangerous for them to come to school. We have a child here in Florida. She was suspended because she wouldn't wear a mask. What about her access? You know, it's really unfortunate that we have to pick and choose. The vaccine is now available and 95 masks are available, which have been proven to keep out a portion of the virus. And so if you are concerned about your child's health, you will probably wanna make sure they're vaccineed if they're high risk and that they are very well masked and that they have a well fitting mask. But the blanket statement of masking on another person's child who may have other issues is unacceptable. And some local officials say that DeSantis' order amounts to executive overreach and undermines local decision making. What do you think about that? Is this setting a bad precedent in terms of what a governor can do? It's an interesting argument. I believe in local control. I'm a champion of local control and I think education needs to have more local control. But on this one issue of government overreach, I think the role of government is to protect its citizens and to defend their individual liberty. And if the governor or a higher level of government needs to step in to protect individuals and their liberty and their ability to raise their children in the way they see fit, I think that's the one instance that it's okay. The Florida Department of Education also made available vouchers for any parent looking for an alternative masking policy then in place at their district school. The Scovitch supports this move but says the state should do even more to accommodate parents looking to exercise choice. I think it's welcomed but there are a lot of problems there. So, especially here in Florida, one of the problems with school choice is transportation. The ability to get from one school to another, if you're a family that can't afford that, that's not a choice for you. Your school choice options have been shut down. For now, Florida has won its standoff with the federal government, which dropped its cease and desist order against the state for withholding funds from school boards resisting DeSantis' anti-mandate order. No school districts in Florida currently have a mask mandate in place. There's this tension that has come to the fore between personal choice and bodily autonomy and public health. How do you think about those questions, especially when they come into conflict? Okay, if we're gonna just toss out public health measures, where do we start? Where do we go from here? Do we start allowing people to not wear our seat belts? If you wanna do whatever you wanna do with, you know, in the privacy of your own home, that's one thing. But if your behavior affects somebody else, we as public health professionals have to make those decisions to do what's best for the entire community, not just for that one individual's rights. Long term. This isn't about masks. This isn't about vaccine mandates. This isn't about COVID policies. This is about the role of the parents in a child's public education. It's fundamentally a complicated thing. And so to turn into a morality tale of you must stop the spread of this disease at the expense of all else in life, I think was an enormous mistake.