A Virginia mother delivered a rousing speech where she blasted her child’s school board over its mask mandate that she deemed to be “blatant political theater.”
Merianne Jenson ripped the Prince William County School Board to shreds for continuing to force young students to wear masks.
“I know there are many educators who want to protect children,” Jenson calmly began her address. “This goal is not different from my own. Our implementation preferences may differ, but we want the same thing: to get through COVID without harm.”
“Unfortunately, politics leads us to believe there is only one solution – masks,” Jenson said. “Yet thousands of schools around the country have been open during the entire pandemic without masks and no corresponding rise in serious illness.”
“There were not child coffins lined up as some educators in this county suggested would be the case,” the impassioned mother declared. “In fact, things have been going pretty much as normal. Kids are getting sick despite wearing masks. We are forcing healthy children home for ‘exposure’ despite them wearing masks. And we are segregating children by vaccination status and religious exemption status despite the wearing of masks.”
The other parents at the school board erupted in applause after Jenson asked one simple question, “So I ask you, if masks work, why don’t they?”
“I’d now like to cover the facts,” she pivoted. “Not policy as determined by the White House. Not CDC recommendations, which I remind you is still policy — policy, I might add, that changes by the day without any basis in science at all.”
“So here are the facts that are available to any one of you,” Jenson said.
She quoted Centers of Disease Control and Prevention data that revealed 49,000 Americans under the age of 18 have died of all causes during the pandemic, and only 331 of those deaths have been “COVID-related.” Jenson asserted that the COVID-related deaths in children were fewer than those who died from heart disease, cancer, suicide, homicide, and drowning.
“Yet we have turned kids’ lives upside down at school for what is essentially a non-risk,” she said. “We play politics with kids faces by placing restrictive fabrics over their noses and mouths.”
“This is asinine. This is blatant political theater, and it needs to end,” Jenson said to a cheering audience.
Jenson noted that she previously spoke to the school superintendent in November about the mask mandate, who claimed that her “hands were tied” over the masks because former Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam had imposed a statewide mandate. The school superintendent allegedly told Jenson if it weren’t for the state mask mandate, “Things would be different.” Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin rescinded Virginia’s mask mandate.
“You are on the losing side of history,” Jenson scolded the school administrators. “And it’s time to make that right for the children now.”
The Prince William County School Board made headlines last month for the way it handled the alleged sexual assault of a 13-year-old girl. A father was brought to tears during a school board meeting asking questions about his daughter’s alleged sexual assault at school. The school board members told the distraught father to send an email, and he was then asked to “step aside.”
