CALIFORNIA: Authorities raid preschools for not masking toddlers
Officials from the California Department of Social Services (CDSS) descended on three preschool venues to investigate a complaint that the children weren’t being masked, says a recent Fox News report.
On January 19th, the CDSS authorities arrived at all three locations of the Aspen Leaf Preschool, where they separated the children from their teachers and began interrogating them about the preschool’s mask policy.
Howard Wu, one of the preschool’s owners, said the parents were furious.
"Every family we heard from after the inspections were furious about the interviews," Wu said. "We were open the whole pandemic about not masking children and the reasons why. The policy was on our website.”
Wu explained that COVID-19 can easily spread while the children are eating and napping, during which time they cannot be masked, so it’s pointless to cover their faces the rest of the time.
"Put simply, the mask guidance says children can NOT mask when eating and sleeping,” continued Wu. “In full day child care that’s 3 hours, so masking at other times offers no health benefit. All the families (except 1 in January) supported the policy."
The CDSS issued a citation to Aspen Leaf for a Type A violation, which is the most egregious type.
Children are now the only age group that needs to remain masked in many states, including California. State and local governments seem unwilling to budge on masking kids even as mandates are lifted for the rest of the population, including those who are at risk of dying from COVID-19.
Last month, the father of a disabled student confronted the Metro Nashville Public Schools Board of Education on their rigid mask policy. The father said that his daughter is blind in her left eye and needs to wear special glasses for her vision disability, but the mask keeps fogging up her glasses so that she can’t see at all. Her mask also gets tangled with her glasses, so the girl refuses to wear the glasses.
“If I told you that your child had to choose between being able to see and wearing a mask, what would you choose?” he asked the board.
The man said that when he approached the school to ask for special accommodation for his disabled daughter, he was told that she could “sit a little bit closer”.
“That’s like telling a person that’s deaf to turn up the radio,” he said.
Then he rounded on the school board members for the mask policy.
“Does every member on this school board wear a mask five days a week, seven hours plus?” he challenged. “You don’t, but you tell her she has to. If masks work, why don’t they work?”
On Tuesday, the man again confronted the board after the members not only did not provide any accommodation to his daughter, but called him “dishonest, unkind and disrespectful".
