Believe it or not, the law was put forth by Virginia State Senator Chap Peterson, a Democrat from the Fairfax area with two kids in public school. Despite the efforts of several liberal school boards around the state to fight Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s executive order giving parents the right to opt-out of a mask mandate, it seems this move by the Virginia legislature will kill those resistance efforts once and for all.
The schools maintained that masks were needed for student safety, a blatant lie that flies in the face of actual science on the topic. With several Democrats joining every Republican state senator on the issue, the dumping of school masks in the Old Dominion has become a bipartisan issue.
Peterson had threatened for weeks that if schools don’t respect the governor’s order, he would cross the aisle and vote with state GOP senators to nuke any semblance of control rogue school boards they had to continue inflicting masks mandates on kids.
Today, he did it, as this tweet from a few hours ago shows:
Overwhelming support in the Senate today for Senator Chap Petersen's Amendment to my in person instruction bill, SB 739, creating a parental opt-out from local school mask mandates.
We've seen CT, DE, & NJ announce plans to remove mandates for K-12 schools, let's go Virginia! pic.twitter.com/nk4XHvF0dF— Siobhan Dunnavant (@Dunnavant4VA) February 8, 2022
Peterson had sent a letter to the superintendent of Fairfax County Public Schools outlining why the mask nonsense needed to end, and what he was prepared to do about it as a state senator and a father of two high school students:
State senators voted 29-9 Tuesday to advance legislation to make masks optional at schools.
The legislation would be in line with Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s executive order, which has been the subject of several lawsuits.
“I don’t think the policy has been working. I think it’s irrelevant, and I think we need to get rid of it and move on,” Sen. Chap Petersen (D-Fairfax) said about universal mask mandates.
Petersen made it clear he plans to end the policy of universal masking at schools in a letter he wrote to the Superintendent of Fairfax County Public Schools.
“As a parent, I’ve had enough,” Petersen wrote in the letter. Click here to read the full letter.
In the letter, Petersen questioned the effectiveness of universal masking and whether the policy is popular.
“I just felt like the whole thing was going in the wrong direction, so I responded respectfully to the school superintendent, and obviously we’re advancing our legislation in the Senate,” he said.
The one person winning big in all this is newly elected Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin. For weeks he’s been crucified by liberals around the state for his alleged disregard for student safety. Today, with Democrats joining the effort to unmask children in schools, Youngkin looks like the leader and the only adult in the room, next to Chap Peterson, of course.
Excellent point, and one which isn’t going unnoticed thanks to Youngkin sticking to his guns on masks and parental rights:
https://twitter.com/ZaidJilani/status/1491226399855693824
The legislative process will be slow but Peterson suggested that the legislation could advance the rest of the way through the process and be enacted around March 1 if things go as planned. The Virginia House of Delegates is controlled heavily by Republicans so with the Democrat-controlled state Senate signing on, the bill is basically a done deal.
It seemed evident from the start that these rogue districts trying to impose the “mask forever” standard would lose by either the courts or the legislature. At this rate, it looks like it’s a race to see which branch of state government asserts parental rights on the mask opt-out first.
