Hinsdale Central High School is isolating a growing number of students who refuse to wear masks into the school auditorium. The push has been occurring all day, parents and students alike have told DuPage Policy Journal.
Video of the scene shows students milling about, loudly conversing in the auditorium.
The scene is one of many unfolding across Illinois today as students fatigued from two years of COVID-19 protocols opted to go to school without masks.
Melissa Lane said her maskless daughter was corralled into the auditorium with a growing group, rumored to be in the hundreds now.
Lane said the actions by school officials are entirely unnecessary.
“I believe there are only 12 states where the entire state is still requiring masks in the schools,” Lane told DuPage Policy Journal. “There's only 12 states (mandating masks in schools) and the rest of the states are doing fine. Kids aren’t dropping dead in the streets."
Today’s actions come in the first day of school after Sangamon County Judge Raylene Grischow deemed Gov. J.B. Pritzker's blanket state emergency school requirements on masks and tests through the Illinois Department of Public Health "null and void" in a 30-page judgment delivered Friday night.
“Statutory rights have attempted to be bypassed through the issuance of executive orders and emergency rules … This type of evil is exactly what the law was intended to constrain," she wrote.
Grischow said that the governor and his agencies were imposing rules on students without their consent.
“As far as I know, there's been about 600 kids that have died from COVID over the past year, and four times as many have died in car accidents. If the schools really want to do something, they should probably be helping with car accidents. This isn't really as bad as they're making it sound,” Lane said.
The same tactic of herding maskless students together in a central location is being used at Hinsdale Middle School which is one of the party school districts in the lawsuit.
Attorney Tom DeVore, who successfully was granted a temporary restraining order on behalf of his plaintiffs last Friday, said he will start pursuing criminal complaints for contempt of court against school officials who abuse the rights of plaintiffs in the suit.
“If I can confirm that the Hinsdale School District or any school district is isolating children that are plaintiffs in this case, and I know that to be true, I'm going to ask the judge, 'Put somebody in the county jail' as soon as I have the first available opportunity,” DeVore told DuPage Policy Journal. “That's what I'm going to try to do because they cannot do that.”
DeVore is the attorney who brought the case on behalf of 145 school districts across state state. He said the ruling technically only extends to the children involved in the complaint directly, but that school districts as as whole have decided to go mask optional based on liability concerns.
“If they want to do it to children not named in the complaint that's not a violation of the court's order,” he said.
DeVore vowed to go after any school officials violating children’s rights to be mask optional.
Pritzker has filed an emergency appeal in the case.
DeVore anticipates the appeal will be heard over the next two weeks. Until then, he noted the conversation about whether to expand the order to other school districts will be moot.
"Does that Face Mask Really Protect You," a 2010 research article by Larry E. Bowen of the Southern Research Institute in Birmingham, Ala., is one of over 20-peer reviewed articles finding masks do not offer much protection. In that study Bowen fit various types of masks on a mannequin to study their effectiveness, found that wearing surgical, bandana and dust masks offer "very little protection" and concluded that "wearing these face masks may produce a false sense of protection.”
Alerts Sign-up