Growing up in Mt Sterling, Kentucky, in the 1960s, air conditioning in the public schools was not something we had. Mt Sterling High School, from which I was graduated in 1971, was a 1937 Works Project Administration / Civilian Conservation Corps building, with 12-foot ceilings and very tall windows, which could be opened to let outside air in the bottoms and the hotter inside air out the tops, so it was with some amusement that I noted this article from The Philadelphia Inquirer: 100 Philly schools closing early Tuesday, Wednesday because of heat: Extreme heat will cause 100 schools that lack air conditioning to close three hours early Tuesday and Wednesday. The rest of the district’s schools will remain open as usual.

In the hotter, more humid South, if the schools closed early due to the heat, summer vacation would have lasted from the middle of May until the middle of September.

This story was more important:

Philly schools are going mask-optional, but kids and staff must mask for the first 10 days of class

“Our schools are hubs for our community and are among the safest places for our students to be,” said Tony B. Watlington Sr., the district’s new superintendent.

by Kristen A Graham | August 12, 2022

Philadelphia School District staff and students must mask for the first 10 days of the 2022-23 school year, but masks will then be optional — but “strongly recommended” — as long as case counts do not spike.

“We are committed to keeping students in school for in-person learning,” Kendra McDow, a pediatrician and epidemiologist and the district’s chief medical officer, said at a news conference Friday.

A mask mandate will be reinstated if the COVID-19 community transmission rate, as determined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, becomes high. (It’s currently in the medium range.)

“Our schools are hubs for our community and are among the safest places for our students to be,” said Tony B. Watlington Sr., the district’s new superintendent, who with McDow detailed the district’s 2022-23 health and safety protocols.

Though they have a plan in place, things may shift, district officials said.

“It is important that we remain flexible, as we have done for the past 2½ years,” said McDow.

There’s more at the original, and while I think the Philadelphia School District is being overcautious and silly — the masks the students have do nothing to stop the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus — that isn’t my focus here.

What is my focus? Mayor Jim Kenney, who used to style himself on Twitter as “Jim ‘Mask Up’ Kenney”, though, sadly, I didn’t take a screen capture of it before he deleted the ‘Mask Up’ from his handle, was at the Dunbar Elementary School for the first day of school .  .  . and, as the screen capture of KYW radio’s morning news reporter Tim Jimenez’s tweet shows, neither Mayor Kenney, nor school’s Superintendent Tony Watlington Sr., nor state Representative Malcolm Kenyatta (D-181^st District), all happily cheering the returning students, was wearing a mask! Some of the students were — albeit some of them improperly — but the people and politicians who were forcing the students to wear the masks did not think that the rules applied to them!

If you click on the link to the original tweet, you’ll find not just a still photo of the event, but a 16-second video of it.

Of course, Mr Kenney never thought the restrictions he imposed on others really applied to him. In September of 2020, when the city’s restaurants had been closed to indoor dining, the Mayor was spotted, and photographed, dining indoors in Maryland.

We see this all the time, from Governor Gavin Newsom’s (D-CA) infamous dinner photos, showing him breaking the rules he imposed on others, for which he publicly apologized, or at least was sorry that he got caught, to ‘climate envoy’ John Kerry’s fossil-fuel-guzzling private jet trips, to Secretary of Transportation (allegedly) biking all the way to-and-from a White House meeting, with a gas-guzzling security detail SUV following him, is it any wonder that so much of the public just don’t trust Our Betters telling us what we have to do?