'A decision no parent should ever have to make': Families are suing over mask mandate bans
Samantha Boevers’s 4-year-old son, Porter, has made so much progress since being diagnosed with autism that he was assigned to a general preschool classroom this fall. So when Boevers dropped him off for his first day of school earlier this week, she wanted to feel all the emotions a parent should in that moment: excitement, pride, relief.
“The only thing I felt was heart-rending fear,” said Boevers, an instructional aide with a background in special education. “Because I didn’t know if he’d be safe.”
Porter’s disability puts him at heightened risk of getting sick from COVID-19. Mitigation strategies such as universal masking indoors, Boevers says, are critical to limiting that risk.
Yet Boevers and her family live in South Carolina – one of more than half a dozen states where schools are prohibited from requiring everyone on campus to mask up. Mask-wearing has been the exception rather than the rule in many of South Carolina’s school districts, and evidence suggests the trend has taken a toll. South Carolina has the third-highest rate of pediatric COVID-19 infections in the U.S., according to data collected by the American Academy of Pediatrics, with children accounting for roughly a fifth of the state’s positive cases.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/a-decision-no-parent-should-ever-have-to-make-families-are-suing-over-mask-mandate-bans/ar-AANRFqh
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