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A federal judge issued a temporary injunction against Iowa’s law making masks in schools voluntary.
The ruling holds preventing mandatory masking in schools is discrimination and violating the disability rights of plaintiff students.
This ruling is so wrong on so many levels, and I encourage the State of Iowa to ignore it.
The federal laws say persons cannot be denied opportunities, excluded or discriminated against “solely by reason of her or his disability” or “by reason of such disability.”
Our state law in no way negatively impacts or singles out disabled students. It views and treats disabled students exactly like every other student.
School districts can and should make every reasonable accommodation/modification for disabled students, as required by law, according to their medical condition and the wishes of their parents.
However, it’s possible to provide for disabled students without disrupting and forcing mandates on every other student. Judge Pratt completely fails to discuss this point.
His ruling is fraught with double standards and errors of omission.
Nowhere does Judge Pratt feel it necessary to explain how, or by how much, universal masking policies actually impact transmission.
Nowhere does Judge Pratt explore how universal masking affects other children with disabilities, in fact he dismisses this question entirely.
The ruling states the opinion of pediatricians, saying the only guaranteed safe option for these students is remote learning. The plaintiffs elegantly argued the abysmal failure of online learning for the children.
(Of course there will be no relief for the many thousands of students forced into remote learning last year, but I digress)
Given Judge Pratt’s legal reasoning, plaintiffs could just as easily argue to overturn the state law requiring in-person learning; if they so argued that their disabilities necessitated a guaranteed level of safety at school and that other students learning in-person equals denied opportunities for said disabled students.
More urgently however, the judge’s ruling would also seem to indicate that a school board or school administrator is violating the rights of disabled students if they DON’T issue a universal masking mandate.
There’s so much more to be said on the absurdity of this interpretation of the law, but that’s the result of conforming legal rulings to communist beliefs that our children are owned by the government.
We must never allow our children to be governed by the whimsical dictates of petty bureaucrats.
