Issue: Covid Regulations

Stephanie Lundquist-Arora is a contributor for the Washington Examiner, a mother in Fairfax County, Virginia, an author, and the Fairfax chapter leader of the Independent Women’s Network. This piece originally appeared on Washington Examiner.

In Fairfax County’s public schools, where drug possession on school grounds does not necessarily result in suspensions, political infractions, such as attending school maskless or “misgendering” peers, have been severely punished.

Fairfax County’s code of conduct transcends “the science.” Even students in elementary school know from the highly technical “smell a fart test” that masks do not stop the transmission of COVID-19. But this fact seems to have eluded the district’s leadership for years.

In January 2022, when the harms of mask mandates on children had become abundantly clear, the recently elected Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R-VA) implemented Executive Order Two, which gave Virginia’s parents the ability to opt out their children from wearing masks at school. In a defiant political response, Fairfax County’s school district leadership, including its 12 Democratic-endorsed school board members, surreptitiously altered its dress code to include masks in order to circumvent the governor’s executive order.

When the district’s students, including my sons, exercised their rights under state law and arrived at school without masks, school principals were forced to issue suspensions based on the new dress code. It is the first time in the district’s history that students were suspended for multiple days based on the dress code. The draconian punishment is almost laughable in light of what some students are wearing to school with impunity. 

And in case it was unclear before, now we know without a doubt that Fairfax County Public Schools’s “dress code” policy and its resulting punishment were based on something other than science.

Anthony Fauci, the nation’s coronavirus adviser during the pandemic, testified in front of Congress last week that the recommended six feet of social distancing was not based on science. Earlier this year, Fauci further admitted that he could not recall reviewing studies that supported the masking of children in public schools.

As the mother of three students in Fairfax County’s public schools who were suspended for a cumulative total of 39 days for not wearing their masks, I think it is past time for the district to apologize to all of the students it unjustly suspended, and then issue expungements.

Yet last year, adding insult to injury, the school district’s seemingly vindictive leaders denied the expungement request for my sons, who were in third, fifth, and seventh grades when they were suspended. Notably, the suspensions will remain on my oldest son’s disciplinary record when he applies to college.

Each day that the elementary and middle school principals suspended my sons, they expressed regret. They also said that the appeal process would be at their discretion and requested that I appeal for expungement. But at some time between suspensions and appeal, the district commandeered that decision. I received two identically worded letters of refusal – one from each principal.

Perhaps relatedly, the district’s principals are leaving in droves — maybe because district leadership is creating a toxic environment for its school principals. I would imagine that many principals, for example, likely do not support the district playing games with children’s futures for political reasons and usurping their local discretion. In fact, from the 2020-21 school year to November 2023, 53 principals in Fairfax County’s public schools resigned or retired. Meanwhile, only nine principals in neighboring Loudoun County left during the same time period.

The mask suspensions and the leadership’s subsequent refusal to expunge them highlight its glaring hypocrisy. The Fairfax County School Board has had many meetings in the past couple years about how to reduce the district’s out-of-school suspensions for infractions such as drug possession and physical altercations. The district’s present concerns of chronic absenteeism also did not seem to be an issue for district leadership as it banned my young children from their classrooms for several days — 15 days for my then 8-year-old son. 

How do we not interpret such decisions as clear examples of a two-tiered justice system in public schools? In the case of masking, the penalties for students found guilty of political transgressions are far more substantial than those committing more dangerous and violent infractions.

And now, Fauci has confirmed that the “science” school district officials claimed to follow was in fact not science after all. Fairfax County’s public school officials owe an apology to my sons and other students in the district who clearly were suspended in the name of politics, not science.

Stephanie Lundquist-Arora is a contributor for the Washington Examiner, a mother in Fairfax County, Virginia, an author, and the Fairfax chapter leader of the Independent Women’s Network. This piece originally appeared on Washington Examiner.

On Friday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention dropped its recommendation that people testing positive for COVID-19 isolate for five days. COVID-19 isn’t much of a thing anymore, but the government’s response to it wreaked havoc on our society and freedoms. We must reflect on the damage so that we do not repeat our mistakes.

Last month’s conclusions from a study of more than 99 million people in eight countries, for example, demonstrated that the rushed COVID-19 vaccine’s “adverse events of special interest” were more common than the public expected. The public couldn’t have been so unsuspecting of vaccine injuries without the help of Big Tech and the Biden administration. They intentionally worked together to hide evidence and speculation about the vaccine’s now-proven role in causing Guillain-Barre syndrome, brain blood clots, and heart and spinal cord inflammation.

Recently, a pediatrician told me that with these new revelations, she nevertheless would have taken the COVID-19 vaccine herself but would not have subjected her children to it. How many parents share the same regret as this medical expert?

Sadly, our federal government didn’t want to give its citizens information and a choice concerning the vaccine. They instead engaged in Draconian measures to suppress evidence of vaccine injuries and force mandates. Some school districts even implemented COVID-19 vaccine mandates for children. Anthony Fauci, the government’s COVID-19 czar, supported mandates for children despite the minuscule risks if they contracted the virus. 

At the national level, in President Joe Biden’s September 2021 executive order to mandate vaccines for federal employees, the stated intent was to “halt the spread” of the virus. Biden even promised us, “You’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations.”

Following the vaccine mandate for federal employees, Biden said COVID-19 was “a pandemic of the unvaccinated.” The bar had shifted, much like many metrics during the pandemic, from preventing infection to decreasing the likelihood of serious illness. Yet unquestionably, the answer to everything was for everyone of all ages to get the vaccine and get boosted. This ad brought to you in part by Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson and their investors — right, Fauci?

But vaccine mandates weren’t the only way our governments abused us during the pandemic. The destruction waged by these self-interested virtue-signalers will reverberate through generations. Teachers unions led a mob to lock our children out of schools for a year and a half. Despite the resulting arguably insurmountable learning loss, teachers unions’ leaders continue to wash their hands of responsibility. And instead of focusing on academic excellence and learning loss recovery, they now focus on teaching our children about gender identity, social-emotional learning, and critical race theory.

The Branch Covidians also demanded isolation throughout the pandemic. Without real evidence for effectiveness, they mandated that we remain 10 feet apart from one another both inside and outside for months before the powers that be settled on 6 feet of “social distancing” indoors. Basketballs were sanitized at halftime in youth games, and parents were told to remain in their cars due to pandemic capacity restrictions in the gym.

Mask mandates were in effect nearly everywhere, especially in schools — the teachers unions made sure of that. More than two years later and despite the fact that almost no students wear masks now, Fairfax County Public Schools administrators refuse to expunge my sons’ 39 cumulative days of mask suspensions, all acquired after Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s (R-VA) Executive Order Two made masks optional. These school administrators, to this day, are not sorry for usurping power and persecuting students.

The self-proclaimed monopolizers of moral truth also closed our businesses across the country. For three months in Virginia, most businesses, including mine, were forced to shut their doors. There was a pandemic of permanent business closures across the country that couldn’t weather the government’s storm. Restaurants, hair salons, dry cleaners, gyms, and other businesses crumbled with many families’ dreams.

People living in isolation during the pandemic became depressed. Suicide rates and alcoholism spiked. Divorce rates also skyrocketed. 

What was actually worse for our society: the disease or the so-called cure? As I watch many of the Branch Covidians continue to drive around with their “Be Kind” magnets and wear their N-95s alone in their cars, I wonder if they realize how much better we would have been without their “help” during the pandemic. Certainly, those now suffering lifelong conditions from mandated COVID-19 vaccines would be faring better.