What I Saw at the School-Board Meeting

A snapshot of the dysfunction ravaging American politics and culture

M y daughter’s best friend went to school without a mask earlier this week. She’s in second grade. She’s been wearing masks every day, and for longer each day than most other people in the country. She wears them at school. Then wears them while dancing at a local dance studio. But for one day this week — after the New York supreme court threw out the state’s mask mandate, and before a stay was granted ahead of an appellate court’s taking up the case — she went mask-free in an act of defiance.

And it was this sudden doubt thrown over the mandate that caused me to go to the most recent school-board meeting, and what I saw there was a snapshot of the dysfunction ravaging American politics and culture.

I had tried to mount a campaign over the summer and heading into September to change school policy. But the district insisted that the chain of authority went all the way up to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The guidance from Washington was translated by New York State directly into regulations at the state and county levels. But this week, suddenly, it seemed possible that authority over the school’s masking policy would drop down to the school-district level. A number of districts in Westchester County where I live have already indicated that when the mandate expires, they will go mask-optional. This was my chance to influence our own district.

So before what I saw at the board meeting, there was what I envisioned for it.

I prepared my argument. If you follow my writing here, you can probably guess what it was. I would say that the approach advocated by the CDC — masking all children two years and older, with the only exemptions granted to special-needs children who physically resist the mask and go into rages — was excessive, and out of line with its own evidence and the practice of the rest of the world. I’d argue that CDC school-mask guidance was supported by studies with questionable data. I’d note that the World Health Organization recommends against masks for children under six, citing potential social and developmental impairments. It has recommendations for how children older than twelve should be masked but basically says they should follow adults. Adults are congregating all throughout the county unmasked. I tried to follow the evidence as presented in the Urgency of Normal toolkit, which has been prepared by mainstream, rather than dissenting, doctors.

I wanted to say that some peer countries had not masked young children at all during the pandemic and experienced no obvious poor outcomes. Further, the U.S. surgeon general had reported on an astonishing mental-health crisis among young people related to pandemic restrictions, including an astonishing rise of suicidality among young girls. Masks made the rapport that teachers must build with students harder to establish and mortified student friendships. If given the chance, I’d say that Leana Wen, an adviser to the White House on the pandemic, had argued that the cloth masks my kids and their peers wore were “little more than facial decorations” and therefore, if the results with these masks were acceptable over the last year, so too would be the results without masks.

More personally, I wanted to say that masks literally effaced our children and impaired their friendships. It was unjust and possibly deranging to treat children as if they were in more danger than they were or as if they themselves were the danger. I had seen my daughter struggle with anxiety, precisely because she was at an age at which she could understand that the masks were about preventing illness and death, but not mature enough to fully grasp a one-in-millions chance, or to comprehend the indignities that liability insurance and lawsuits make necessary in our world. The district’s own speech therapist had said that the mask was an impediment to my son’s progress in his speech therapy (which, yes, legally must be conducted through a mask, despite the availability of a vaccine for the speech therapist). These children had visited a country over the summer where children were never masked, and I wanted to say that they immediately internalized the cultural expectation around them. And I felt as I watched them over there that they were more sure-footed and confident moving through the world. They were treated as sturdy, happy, romping children, not as vectors of disease.

Obviously, by that point the board would be staggered, and in tears. There might be a full long pause of silence before they would rise from their seats, applauding my facts and logic. They would ask me to supply the sources of my information and would announce the off-ramp toward a mask-optional policy. They would promise to confront any health bureaucrat or state authority that stood in the way of doing what’s right for children. Such is the power of a father’s heart.

Well, here’s what actually happened.

First thing through the door, I realized that the mask policy wasn’t even the topic of the meeting, as I had heard rumored through social media. Instead, my fellow anti-maskers in the audience stood and listened to a 40-minute presentation of possible renovations to the high school. When asked by a board member what the pedagogical value of all these transparent walls and “collaborative spaces” was, the superintendent gave a bunch of slogans.

We were told public comment would be open to two- or three-minute comments from the public. Another father from the same dance school my daughter and her friend attend got up and began his soliloquy with the U.S. Constitution. He demanded full attention, presenting himself well as the very image of an indomitable man. He then proceeded to make an argument about the illegality of the actions of the board and school administrators. They had enforced “fictitious laws” and “illegal orders.” He cited law codes. And told them that legal action would be taken, and damages sought — that these monetary damages would be so great that the liability insurers who give coverage to administrators and public servants would drop them. They’d be out of a job. “You’ve already woken up Mama Bear,” he said, referring to his wife. “Now you have to deal with Papa Bear. It ends here.” The board was silent. Basically every person from the public who had come to the meeting applauded and lustily stamped their feet.

Then it was my turn. I croaked out roughly 30 percent of what I had planned to say. I caught a few eyes on the board, and I thought they had listened sympathetically. When I was finished, the crowd roared again.

And soon I realized, this was a Tea Party movement in miniature. Others got up to speak, and made versions of the same argument the indomitable man had made. The board members were criminals awaiting the day of judgment and justice. They were violating the Bill of Rights. There were plentiful references to Nazi Germany, the perfidy of pharmaceutical companies, which had bought all the politicians. One of the speakers wasn’t even from this town.

This was not a discussion at all. It was a kind of confrontation. And it’s impossible to ignore that it was a class confrontation. The board, phlegmatic in tone, or silent. The people, choleric, voluble. Professionals versus workers, on the whole.

If I understand the class, cultural, and worldview biases of the kind of members who sit on the board — and I think I do — I would not be surprised if many of them viewed their critics as not just misinformed, but possibly dangerous, or lunatic.

At the end of the public comment, the board said nothing in response and moved on to other business. The anti-maskers walked out all at once, before the meeting was over. They took their masks off in the hall and exchanged their impressions of the event with each other. They exchanged contact info, and someone passed around a newspaper saying that children were over 100 times more likely to die from the mRNA vaccines than from Covid.

Many of them have been actively fighting this fight and for a much longer time than I had. One of them explained to me that the boards are populated by useless rule-followers. Nothing could be said to them to appeal to their consciences. They would never do anything out of line or against the narrative. The people at that meeting that night were part of a larger, emerging movement of dissenters in deep-blue school districts, who were threatening the only thing that the board members would understand: their self-interest, their bonds and insurance policies, without which they could not hold office.

I confess that I don’t think that strategy is going to work at all. There will not be Nuremberg-like justice being meted out over mask mandates. Ever. I’m still of the belief that most pandemic excesses were due to panic, not plotted. I expect a drip, drip, drip of studies and statistics over years showing that this policy was harmful to the social development and mental health of children and achieved little good for public health. And I expect that all the good professional silent people will slowly revise their own personal histories, claiming to have been opposed to the worst of it all along.

The indomitable men have principles. But the phlegmatic administrators ride and rise on trends and slogans. Like the drivel we heard earlier that night to justify the proposed school renovation, with its transparent walls, open spaces, and a library mostly denuded of books. This is being done, we were told, because education in the 21st century is about “collaboration and creativity,” or something. The idea that students have needs as human beings and young scholars that don’t just change with the passing of years would be laughed at. Truths? Please get with the times.

What I saw at the school board was the compact drama of institutional impotence and populist chaos. The law, as it stands, removes responsibility for the mask policy up to Albany, and then beyond to Atlanta with the CDC. The structure of the problem forbids the people in that middle-school auditorium to act like members of a community, accountable to each other, and deliberating as a self-governing body of citizens. In the face of this institutional impotence, the dissenters have gone searching for some lever — a trick, an angle — upon which they can exercise even the slightest bit of power. The search is driving them mad in every sense of the word.

And the fact is, this mad populist force is on my side. That one of my sons has had to do speech therapy through a “useless facial decoration” for nearly a year after his therapist had a very effective vaccine available to her is a madness far more inexplicable than any one overwrought analogy to the Bundestag in the 1930s. I resent that the district has complied with a mandate that leads to such obvious perversities. And I won’t stop resenting this fact even when they finally relent.

The state of exception must end; it is deranging the body politic at the cellular level. Normal self-government has been ruled out. So go ahead, give me another pamphlet with crazy theories about the vaccines. I don’t care if it says Prince Charles is collaborating with Bill Gates to depopulate the Earth of humans in favor of the Patagonian toothfish. If I can’t learn anything from it, I can at least ball it up and throw it at the quiet, successful people who sit in seats of authority but have no power just yet to do what is right.