Mountain View school booted 4-year-old for not wearing mask

In a sign the pandemic policy wars that have riven school communities still simmer, a Mountain View district that was among a few to mandate face masks in an effort to keep COVID-19 in check kicked a 4-year-old out of class over the last week for not wearing a mask in class.

The boy’s back in school now, as Mountain View Whisman School District eased its mask policy Friday after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed that Santa Clara County is no longer at the high COVID-19 risk level. The federal health agency urges that everyone wear masks indoors at that level.

But that change didn’t come in time to head off a confrontation at the child’s school that his father video recorded and posted to social media. In the recording the unmasked little boy is walked out of class and the exasperated principal tells his dad to take him home and summons a sympathetic but firm campus cop. Though temperatures have cooled, the boy’s father and other mask mandate opponents are girding to fight a return to mandatory face coverings with the next wave of COVID-19 cases.

“The policy still exists,” said the boy’s father, who like many parents, asked not to be identified out of concern the family will be mistreated for speaking out against a policy many in the district support. “I always wanted peace and a choice.”

The district school board discussed the policy for the first time at a meeting Thursday night, and most of the trustees and those who spoke to the board supported the mask policy.

Superintendent Ayindé Rudolph and Board President Laura Blakely feared that outbreaks as students returned this fall would leave schools without enough teachers. Rudolph likened it to the staffing troubles that plagued airlines over the summer.

“I didn’t want to start the year off with a bunch of substitutes,” Blakely said. “The point is to run schools so kids can learn. If you don’t have a teacher there, it can’t happen.”

The Silicon Valley district is one of few places where COVID-19 policies have become divisive this fall. California was the slowest state to return to in-person learning last year after shutting classrooms when the pandemic erupted in March 2020. The state was also among the few to require face masks in school and among the last to make them optional, drawing criticism from parents who wanted schools back to normal sooner.

The California Department of Public Health in June issued new guidance for the fall that strongly recommended but did not mandate face masks indoors. Major districts like Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco, Oakland and San Jose unified have made masks optional this fall.

Mountain View Whisman’s policy says “masking for students and staff members is required indoors and optional outdoors based on current transmission rates” published by the CDC, and “will be required for singing/wind instruments and for all events, concerts and assemblies.” Though masks were optional starting Friday, they still will be required on buses, in band and choir, at large events and for campus visitors.

“We’re an outlier,” said Lori Brody, whose two kids attend Benjamin Bubb Elementary in the Mountain View Whisman district. Though they’re all vaccinated and boosted and have no problem with others wearing masks, she said her kids weren’t happy about the mask mandate and don’t want it to return.

“It’s going to constantly go back and forth,” Brody said. “That’s not what anybody wants.”

The 4-year-old boy’s father said his son finds face masks particularly uncomfortable. When he started transitional kindergarten last week, his father said he came home crying about his teacher trying to get him to wear a mask.

“He was inconsolable,” said the boy’s father, who attempted on multiple days to have his son admitted to class without a mask. After school officials said they couldn’t make an exception and would send the boy home if he kept refusing a mask, his father recorded what happened at his son’s next trip to school.

In the video, a woman identified as Theuerkauf Elementary Principal Michelle Williams offers the boy a mask as he runs past her to class. Williams tells his father “I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again, I want him here but it is our district’s policy that students have to wear a mask.”

After the boy is escorted from the classroom, Williams tells his father “I cannot keep spending time on this same issue… I’m going to have to have you removed from campus if you don’t leave at this time.” A campus police officer then speaks with him and after a cordial discussion the father leaves.

At Thursday’s board discussion, trustee Christopher Chiang urged parents not to post video on social media if they have a complaint, saying that “there’s so much nasty politics and dangerous rhetoric out there” that “what that does is bring risk upon our children.”

Trustee Devon Conley said parents upset over masks are being manipulated by fringe scientists and activists. But Trustees Ellen Wheeler and Laura Ramirez Berman were less comfortable with the mandate and said even without it most kids would wear the masks.

Rudolph defended the district’s decision to have a mandate while others haven’t, likening it to cities having different water restrictions amid the ongoing drought.

“It’s not to say one is right, one is wrong,” Rudolph said. “It’s just that everybody is looking at data that impacts them and acting in their best interests.”

But the 4-year-old’s dad says the mandate is a misplaced priority.

“Am I sending my kid to school for mask enforcement?” he asked. “That’s not an education.”