Last week, I reported that California Governor Gavin Newsom was among the many state politicians who were slammed for going maskless at an NFL playoff game, incidents which were captured in photographs taken with former Laker Earvin “Magic” Johnson.
The hypocritical behavior, coupled with the fact that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention basically came out and called cloth masks ineffective, and the revolt of the Canadian truckers against covid restrictions inspired hundreds of students at one California high school to arrive maskless.
Hundreds of students in Oakdale were banned from class for not wearing their masks.The students say they were following Gov. Gavin Newsom’s example after photos showed him maskless at the NFC Championship Game over the weekend.The students were bare-faced and packed into the Oakdale High School gym. Freshman Nolan Harris was one of them.“By the end of the day, there was about a hundred kids in there,” he said.Throughout Oakdale Unified’s seven campuses, more than a hundred other students ditched their masks, too, in protest of Newsom’s mask mandate.
The students posted some of their demonstration onto social media.
According to an Instagram post by the user let_them_breathe, students through the district are refusing to wear masks.”High schoolers have been sent to the gym and filled it with more unmasked students on their way,” letthem_breathe wrote in a tweet.In the video, students can be seen sitting in folding chairs, spread through the gym.
It turns out, they were not such much “banned from class” as barricaded inside lunchrooms.
Maskless students in California said they were ‘barricaded’ inside their school’s gym with lunch tables propped against the door and temperatures turned down as they protested Gov. Gavin Newsom’s mask mandate.A photo from one of the students at the Oakdale Joint Unified School District captioned, ‘Locking us in,’ shows the tables blocking the doors from the inside on Thursday. School staffers could be seen standing by on the outside.The students claimed staff members turned down the thermostat to ‘freeze them out,’ according to Reopen California Schools and that it was only turned up when police arrived and they were allowed out.However, Oakland Police said the temperatures were not low. A school officer had responded to the situation, and deemed it not a police matter.A follow-up video on Reopen California School shows the maskless students marching in the streets on their way to the district headquarters in an apparent planned ‘protest’ as people in the streets cheered, ‘Let’s go, Oakdale.’
Being barricaded in a room is a significant life safety issue. In fact, the breech in fire safety protocol is enough that if I had an child at the Oakdale school, I would be contacting attorneys and arranging for a campaign for the school board.
I can only hope that like the “Freedom Convoy” these brave students act as an inspiration to others.
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