If you sent your kids to a private school, the private school decided that face masks would be optional, and you disagreed with that decision, wouldn’t you stop paying tuition and send your kids to public schools, where they had a mask mandate?

A Northeast Philly private school defied the city’s mask order. Philadelphia took it to court.

Calvary Christian Academy did not require masking, enable social distancing, or require those exposed to COVID-19 to quarantine, the city said in court filings.

by Kristen A Graham | Tuesday, November 2, 2021

For nearly two months, a Northeast Philadelphia religious school flouted the city’s mandatory masking order.

And though staff and children are now wearing masks after the city asked a judge for an emergency injunction, leaders of the church that runs Calvary Christian Academy have vowed to fight for the right to keep masks optional.

It’s another salvo in an increasingly bitter political battle over mask-wearing in Pennsylvania and schools across the country.

Since the beginning of the school year, CCA, a prekindergarten-through-12th-grade school on Philmont Avenue in the city’s Somerton section, “did not require masking, did not enable social distancing among the students, and did not require members of the school exposed to COVID-19 to quarantine,” according to court documents.

Though both Philadelphia and Pennsylvania issued mandatory masking orders this summer amid the continuing pandemic and rising case counts, CCA told parents in a Sept. 6 letter that despite government orders, “we will keep the current COVID protocol in place, which states that masks are optional.”

Some parents complained about CCA’s mask-optional policy at the beginning of the school year. Separately, the school came to the attention of health department workers monitoring COVID-19 containment through a number of cases reported at the school — 23 between Sept. 7 and Oct. 5.

Calvary Christian Academy is not the most expensive private school out there, but it isn’t exactly cheap, either. Tuition is $4,450 for Calvary Church members, and $5,850 for non-members,^[1]It’s quite common for parochial schools to have lower tuition rates for parishioners, and parishioners are expected to make contributions to the church. in the elementary school, $4,950/$6,350 for the junior high, $5,450/$6,900 for grades 9-11, and $5,850/$7,300 for seniors. If you were a Calvary parent, and disapproved of the optional mask policy, you could save a bunch of money by using the public schools.

Of course, for Calvary parents, that would mean sending their kids to the city’s disastrous public school system.

CCA staff told a city worker in late September they believed the school did not need to observe health department regulations because “CCA was a private religious school,” court filings show. The school also failed to submit to the city information about close contacts of CCA staff and students who tested positive for COVID-19.

Naturally, the city fought, and on Friday, October 29^th, Common Pleas Court Judge Joshua Roberts signed an order requiring all personnel, students as well as staff, to wear masks. The school will reluctantly comply, while continuing the legal battle to overturn the judge’s order.

But, as the Inquirer reported on Thursday, October 28^th, the mask mandate isn’t being strictly enforced in some public schools.

Sometimes when Lily Beard is running late for her second-period class, the only open seat is in front of a group of boys who don’t wear masks.

“They’re always coughing and being disgusting behind me,” said Lily, a ninth grader at Council Rock South High School, where, she said, it seems as if half the kids aren’t wearing masks.

“It’s completely unfair that we can’t go to school and learn and be safe.”

Then, don’t run late!

Of course, young Miss Beard is, one supposes, fully vaccinated, and the photo accompanying the article showed her mother and her wearing black, commercially-made masks. If the vaccines are supposed to protect the vaccinated, and masks protect the mask wearers, shouldn’t that be enough for the fearful?

Miss Beard complained that only about half of the students were wearing masks regularly, which tell you one thing: they don’t want to wear masks, and there’s no reason why their rights not to wear a mask should somehow be trumped by Miss Beard’s claim that they should.

Then, on Tuesday morning, the Inquirer raised the obvious question: at what point would Our Betters decide that the ‘pandemic’ was over?

Everyone’s asking when the pandemic will be over. Here’s how we’ll know.

If COVID-19 deaths and hospitalizations did eventually reach levels usually associated with the flu, would that be a reasonable benchmark for saying the pandemic was over?

by Tom Avril, Jason Laughlin, and Laura McCrystal | Tuesday, November 2, 2021

Throughout each day, Cheryl Bettigole receives granular, neighborhood-level updates on the numbers we’ve all been hearing for months. The percentage of people testing positive for COVID-19. Transmission rates. Hospitalizations, deaths, and progress with vaccines — in Philadelphia and beyond.

The lines on the graphs often bounce around like the stock market. Yet at some point the city’s acting health commissioner and policymakers throughout the country have to reduce it all to a pivotal yes-or-no question:

Is it OK to resume life as normal?

“Things are trending in the right direction,” Bettigole said last week. “But we’re not past COVID.”

It is now generally accepted that COVID will always be with us in some form, much like seasonal coronaviruses that cause the common cold. But thanks to vaccines and the lingering immunity that many have acquired through infection, the share of the population protected from severe disease continues to grow.

That trend has infectious disease experts predicting that sometime in the not-so-distant future, perhaps a matter of months, the disease will become “endemic” — still circulating, yet not out of control.

What level is low enough to know we’ve crossed that line? And who decides what is normal?

That last is the real question: just who gets to decide what’s “normal,” when the government will stop trying to run people’s lives?

The public are already deciding some of that for themselves. Roughly 2,300 New York City firemen and EMTs called out sick on Monday, in apparent protest over Mayor Bill de Blasio’s vaccine mandate. With 10,591 uniformed firemen, 4,274 uniformed EMS workers and 2,096 civilians, if 2,300 called out, that’s 13.56% of the workforce. As we have reported here, at least a couple of Kentucky school districts are lifting their mask mandates. My own observations at Lowe’s and Kroger indicate that mask wearing, even when the stores request it, is not being honored by roughly half of the customers.

But, what we will see is that while masking policies will fall away, because people are going to simply refuse, political leaders are going to continue to press for mandatory vaccinations, claiming that, if the virus is ‘endemic’ it still needs to be fought by requiring vaccinations. The Patricians will not want to give up control over the plebeians.