A parental rights group sent a demand letter to the San Diego Unified School District (SDUSD) after it issued an indoor mask mandate effective July 18, 2022, applying to all students, teachers, and visitors who enter any district building.
“SDUSD is not authorized to add mask requirement only for its students, while all other students in the approximately 1,000 other districts throughout the state are not bound by the same requirement and may attend school in-person and participate in athletics and extracurricular activities without wearing a mask,” wrote Let Them Breathe Attorney Arie Spangler in the July 25 letter.
Let Them Breathe demanded that the second largest California school district immediately rescind its district-wide mask mandate.
“They still have several weeks to address it before school starts and what we're trying to do is see if they're going to call a special meeting and revise it because they have said that they're going to readdress it before school starts,” said Sharon McKeeman, the San Diego mom who founded Let Them Breathe.
SDUSD announced it was reinstating the mask requirement due to a spike in the number of COVID-19 cases and the risk that it poses, according to media reports.
“We're already also seeing an exodus of people leaving the district over these policies, and we've got an alternative education conference this weekend to help those families get plugged in with something different,” Mckeeman told the Southern California Record.
LTB parents are disturbed that Board President Dr. Sharon Whitehurst-Payne thinks students should "just not return" if they don’t want to wear a mask and that they can "just go to school online" when school starts up again in the fall.
“Dr. Whitehurst-Payne’s flippant remarks and obvious lack of empathy for SDUSD students whose education and socialization have been negatively impacted by more than two years of distance learning and statewide mask requirements are sadly consistent with the burdensome, discriminatory, and overreaching Covid-19 policies that the district has unilaterally imposed on its students for more than two years,” Spangler said.
Whitehurst-Payne did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
“If we get closer to when school starts and they have not changed the mask mandate, then we’ll consider our next legal step,” McKeeman added. “It could be a Temporary Restraining Order, families practicing peaceful non-compliance, or it could be a mix of those things.”