When Ponderosa High School Teacher Mike Wilkes was placed on paid leave for lending support to students who removed their masks in protest of the state COVID-19 requirement to wear them, he wasn’t surprised.
“I understood the consequences and the irony is we're in a system where adults are all afraid to do the right thing, including many who agree with me, but we're being pitted against each other,” Wilkes told the Southern California Record. “It takes people to stand up and live true to their convictions in order to fix the problem in California.”
The 38-year-old, who teaches business technology and an AVID course, is still on leave even though it’s been nearly a month since some sixty El Dorado Union High School District students staged a mask-off day on Oct. 25.
“They ended up sitting all day in what the kids call ‘mask jail,’ which is a separate classroom where students were being held because they weren’t wearing masks,” Wilkes said.
Last week, the El Dorado County Board of Supervisors passed a resolution in opposition to a state student vaccine mandate.
“It shows that there are more and more people in power who are willing to express support for parents being the ones who make medical decisions for their children,” Wilkes said. “Next, what we need is school boards to make clear definitive statements that they will not enforce a vaccine mandate upon children as young as five years old and be party to coercing parents into medical decisions against their will at threat of losing their education.”
The Board of Supervisors desires to express opposition to vaccine mandates in both public or private context,' the resolution states, according to media reports.
Although he is raising three kids of his own, Wilkes doesn’t regret taking a stand.
“When you have a mask on, there’s a higher CO2 percentage in your air all day,” he said. “These classrooms are not surgery rooms where you have professional doctors wearing N95 masks who change them every three to four hours. These are children muzzled with some sort of cloth mask that they don't wash. It can become bacteria-infected. It's under their nose. They're touching it all day. It's the difference between those that want to look at this in a vacuum of perfect science and the reality of what happens in the classroom.”
Wilkes added that he’s only been a teacher for five years but he is willing to lose his job for the cause.
“I left an incredible business career that I spent 11 years in and became a teacher at my hometown high school that I love because I wanted to give back to my community,” he said. “I was born and raised here. This is the place I love and a place worth standing up for.”