There was a bit of drama at the Preston County Board of Education meeting at the beginning of the week (which is, unfortunately, becoming the norm nationwide).
The Preston BOE heard from Rodney Zinn — a frequent attendee of the board meetings lately, often to protest mask wearing in schools — whose son had been removed from class at Preston High for refusing to wear a mask. Zinn rejected requests to pick up his son, so the teenager sat in the school’s office all day.
At the BOE meeting, Zinn proclaimed: “Is that the school we’re going to run now? That what we’re doing now? We’re gonna kick kids out, not gonna give them an education … [when] they don’t conform to your rules and your laws?”
Congratulations to Mr. Zinn. He and his son now know what it’s like to be a young woman who got dress-coded in school.
The parallel to dress code violations that have long removed young women from class is an easy one to make. However, there is a very, very important difference between these two situations.
A young woman wearing spaghetti straps, or shorts that are deemed arbitrarily too short or exposing “too much” skin is not a threat to anyone’s health or safety. (And we absolutely will not abide any arguments holding young women responsible for “distracting” the males at school.)
On the other hand, refusing to wear a mask — a simple face covering that has been shown to slow and reduce the spread of airborne contagions — in a public space during a pandemic that has killed more than 714,000 Americans and 4.8 million people worldwide is a threat to the health and safety of everyone else.
There is one other key difference between these scenarios: Dress codes are enforced largely to the detriment of young women, singling them out and interfering with their education because of subjective modesty policies. Young women and girls of all grades can be pulled out of class and made to wait in the office until a change of clothes can be dropped off, forced to wear a stranger’s clothes from the lost and found box or even removed from school for the day because of failure to comply.
Talk to any woman who has attended school in the last 20 years, and she will more than likely have a story about her school day being interrupted because of a supposed dress-code violation. Her male counterparts are unlikely to have similar stories.
However, the enforcement of in-school mask mandates is far more evenly applied. It helps that the criteria is more objective: You’re either wearing the mask, or you aren’t.
And since Zinn’s son refused to wear a mask, as required by school policy, it is only right that he be removed from class for the safety of his peers. If Mr. Zinn — and like-minded parents — are so adamant that their child not have to wear a face covering during school, then they always have the option to homeschool until the pandemic is over.
Of course, with continued refusal to wear masks and vaccinate, it may be a while before we see the end of COVID-19.
