Growing up, I had a very common fear about speaking in public.  My fear wasn't that well hidden either, as my 1982 graduating class at Mason County Central Schools voted me as the "Most Bashful" among my peers.  If I had the choice between root canal work and delivering a speech to a group, bring on the drill.  

Over the course of my life, that fear had lessened substantially as some of my jobs have required me to get in front of groups and speak; being a substitute teacher for a time was particularly helpful in allaying fears as just about any type of scenario could develop-- but usually didn't.  

I have pretty much overcome that fear over the last decade and if I were to acknowledge somebody helping me accomplish that feat, I would have to point to the former Ludington City Manager John Shay whose totally unethical conduct during the latter part of his tenure in Ludington seems to have allowed me to channel any fear in my system into outrage and righteousness.  

Fortunately, I have not limited myself to use only those replacement emotions when I speak to public bodies.  Anger and steadfastness might work in certain situations to assert the point of my comment, but they often have an unintended effect as far as the listener is concerned, especially when they are undeserving of strong critique.  Ideally, I would like to use more positive emotions like love and hope in a presentation, but these rarely act as a catalyst for action for the public body audience.  If one could package those emotions among the mask mandate debate with a call to action, perhaps the board could reconsider their earlier 4-3 decision to require masks this fall.

That was the point of my latest public comment in front of the Ludington School Board on the night of September 8th at a special meeting designed primarily to choose an interim superintendent to replace Fruitport-bound LASD Superintendent Jason Kennedy, and to initiate a search for his replacement. 

Rather than burden the reader with the copious notes I took regarding Peg Mathis (recently retired as Newaygo superintendent, newly hired as Ludington's interim) and Ron Veldman (current interim at Fruitport, ready to pass the baton to Mr. Kennedy and hired as the district's construction coordinator this evening), I will link you to the COLDNews coverage and offer to answer any questions that you may have that Jeff Kiessel in his article didn't cover.  

Instead let me focus on my small part in this meeting and some of my observations.  The agenda mentioned nothing about wearing masks to this meeting being required.  But as I got to the administration office where this took place, they had a box of masks and a sign inferring it was mandatory for those attending the meeting that night to wear a mask. 

The biggest annoyance I have experienced over the last couple years is making a speech while wearing a mask.  I didn't want to pick a fight, but I didn't want to wear a mask, especially when the point of my comment was why masks shouldn't be mandated in school.  I compromised.  I looped the mask loops on my ears, but used it as a hair net on the back of my head. 

I walked into the boardroom and saw about a couple of dozen people evenly divided between officials and non-officials, many distinguished throughout the community and beyond, but I saw nary a mouth and only one nose, the big honker I sported on my bare mug.  This would be a condition that would last throughout the hour-long plus board meeting. 

During the course of the craziness that is the ongoing pandemic, I have sensed few things more disheartening than going to Meijers', Wal-mart, or any other place where more than a score of people would gather and not seeing any faces.  I admit that I not only missed what I knew was pretty faces with smiles on them at these stores, but also the ugly faces with frowns on them that one would normally see at in-person council meetings. 

I can only imagine how a young child feels when they go to school and spend the whole day without seeing a face, without uncovering their face, except for a brief time during lunch.  I imagine it must be pretty lousy, especially after a summer where faces were all over the place.  Why would they not feel they and there peers are being punished?  

Not only was I the only one there not to wear a mask properly, I was the only one to make a public comment.  I was hopeful that others would add an extra voice this evening to mine, like 26 others did at the last meeting, 25 of those urging the board to choose parental choice.  The brave students, teachers, and parents who stood up at the last meeting should not be forgotten, and so I can only hope that my comment reminded the four who voted to mandate masks that the general public is still behind their right to choose how they handle their child's health.

XLFD:  "I'm here to wish Superintendent Kennedy good luck in his new venture since he has shown he already is skillful at administration during his too-brief time here at Ludington.  But I'm also here to encourage the board to continually reconsider their decision to mandate masks based on an arbitrary metric.  I appeal primarily to Dr. Autrey and the scholarship of the three others who voted for the mask mandate policy, encouraging each of you to critically look at the literature being supplied to you by the health department and honestly decide whether that literature rises to the level of valid science and statistics when it comes to putting muzzles on kids for seven hours a day.

I guarantee you will find a definite lack of scientific rigor, a healthy dose of misleading statistics, and inconclusive conclusions littered with the words:  "may" "might" or "could".  This is scientific opinion, and some of these studies and reports seem to be shooting the arrow into the wall and painting a bull's-eye around it afterwards.  There are numerous, more rigorous, scientific studies and statistics that show the opposite of what these cherry-picked scientific propaganda pieces seem to indicate.  

Rather than provide them to you and have them remain unlooked at in your in-boxes, I will provide some as I come before you pleading for the well-being of our kids, where you have to listen to me out of common courtesy.  The first study published by four doctors and scientists in the New England Journal of Medicine on January 6 was titled “Open Schools, Covid-19 and Child and Teacher Morbidity in Sweden”.  It notes:

“Despite Sweden’s having kept schools and preschools open, researchers have found a low incidence of severe Covid-19 among schoolchildren and children of preschool age during the pandemic…No child with Covid-19 died…Among the 1,951,905 million children who were 1 to 16 years of age, 15 children had Covid-19 and were admitted to an ICU, which is equal to 1 child in 130,000.”

“When it comes to teachers, the study showed that ‘fewer than 20 schoolteachers in Sweden received intensive care for Covid-19 up until June 30, 2020 (20 per 103,596 schoolteachers, which is equal to 19 per 100,000). As compared with other occupations (excluding health care workers), this corresponded to sex- and age-adjusted relative risks of 0.43 among schoolteachers."

In Sweden, slightly larger than Michigan in population, they had schools open without any mandatory mitigation measures and the results were startling and unexpected:  no Covid-19 deaths among the 2 million kids, and the 104,000 school teachers had a Covid-19 death rate less than half of other occupations.  

How do you look at those statistics amongst such a huge population and ignore it?"  [END]

And even though they did not address the issue, even though the COLDNews reporter once again ignored the community's voices, the comment is part of the record, and should give the four anti-face board members additional notice that the issue will not disappear with their deaf vote to mandate masks on our schoolchildren and their teachers.

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