Updated at 9:15 p.m.
It was supposed to be an unremarkable Wednesday night school board meeting.
But it devolved into shouting when a group of parents began castigating pediatricians who had been invited to answer questions about masks.
During the public comment period for the Franklin Northeast Supervisory Union’s board meeting last week, a small group of parents, spread out in the mostly empty pea-green auditorium, stood up one by one to disagree with the district’s policy to require universal masking in schools.
One father, face mask in hand, repeatedly asked why students should mask up in school when no children in Vermont had died from Covid-19, according to a video recording of the meeting.
The board had anticipated some concerns about the mask policy and invited two Vermont pediatricians to the Aug. 18 meeting to help answer questions from a medical perspective. They included Dr. Rebecca Bell, a critical care pediatrician and president of Vermont’s chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics, who had called into the meeting on Zoom.
After listening to the public comments, Bell took a moment in her remarks to rebut the use of child deaths as a public health metric.
“I unfortunately deal with a lot of child death,” she said at the meeting. “It’s never easy, and it’s never OK.”
A few moments later, the shouting started.
Several voices from the audience are largely unintelligible in the recording of the meeting. At least one member of the school board tried to calm the in-person crowd and said, “We’re gonna take a pause if you cannot stop screaming at me.”
One attendee’s voice then broke through the melee and responded, “I am not screaming at you, but you’re wrong and offensive to liberty and justice, goodbye.”
Wednesday’s school board meeting was just one instance where local school administrators say they have faced pushback from parents who oppose school mask policies.
State officials have left it up to local school districts to decide their own Covid-19 protocols this fall, which has left school administrators who support indoor masking largely on their own to enact and defend the policies.
“I am hearing direct reports of personal fear from principals and superintendents,” Brigid Nease, superintendent of Harwood Union Unified School District, wrote in an open letter last week. The school district recently announced it would require staff to get vaccinated against Covid-19.
In the letter, she writes that parents have left screaming voicemails, letters threatening to storm the first day of school and even a death threat against a superintendent colleague.
Heather Bouchey, Vermont’s deputy secretary of education, also took a moment at Gov. Phil Scott’s weekly press conference Tuesday to denounce threats against school administrators. She said cases of aggressive parental pushback were limited but unacceptable.
“School boards, school administrators and educators are working hard and making decisions in the best interest of health and safety for everyone,” Bouchey said. “You can disagree with their decisions, but it is not OK to threaten or intimidate them, and threats of violence are never acceptable. I also ask that folks please not disrupt the start of school in any way.”
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Academy of Pediatrics Vermont chapter have all recommended universal masking in K-12 schools.
School administrators “are just following that guidance,” Bell said in an interview. “Yet, they are the ones that are having to deal with all of the really personal attacks, and this drain on their time and energy by parents who really feel like they could decide something different.”
Bell has volunteered support from the American Academy of Pediatrics Vermont chapter to have pediatricians come into school meetings and answer parent questions about Covid-19 protocols.
“I am again just floored by the work that educators and school nurses and school administrators have to do to figure out how to keep students safe in the school building. It’s a lot of work,” Bell said. “And I think that they do know their school districts best, but they also need support from experts, like the health community.”
