NewCanaanite.com recently received the following letter(s) to the editor. Please send letters to editor@newcanaanite.com for publication here.
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Friends and neighbors –
I just finished watching the recording of last [Thursday] night’s local “anti-mask”-alooza.
Wow.
Sad to say, the decades-old mutually supportive partnership between parents and teachers in New Canaan has apparently devolved very quickly into the same highly politicized “us vs. them” COVID battlefield that you are seeing repeated every night on the national news.
Angry, poisonous diatribes. Screaming, finger-pointing, armchair scientists and conspiracy theorists, and the occasional not-so veiled physical threat. 99% of all of this venom coming from the self-identified “anti-maskers”. It’s all there online. Take a look for yourselves.
News Flash: NOT A SINGLE PARENT IN NEW CANAAN, OF ANY PARTY, wants masks on their kids in school for 1 day longer than absolutely necessary, and the science and national transmission trends seem to indicate that we may indeed be reaching the end of such requirements, at least in the Northeast.
The current NC administration and teachers and state health authorities have done about as good a job serving and protecting our children as any school district in the entire nation, as far as I can tell. A truly outstanding, unprecedented job, in fact.
Their decades of expertise, hands-on experience, and overriding concern for always putting our children over political BS got us this far over the past two years. I know many, many friends with kids in schools elsewhere who have not had it nearly this good.
People who are not teachers, administrators or state health authorities need to calm down, listen to actual experts, debate actual facts and data, and to ultimately let the LOCAL professionals who got us this far take us over the finish line in the coming months as well, applying the same thoughtful, informed and unbiased approach that they have applied throughout the pandemic.
I, like every other parent in town, fully hope and expect that our kids will be out of masks in the coming months, but it will NOT be because of your threats or screams or insults or ultimatums.
It will happen because of the continued excellence, dedication and professionalism of New Canaan’s teachers, health officials and administrators, so, please, just let them do their job.
John and Jen Paterson
Hi John and Jen – thanks for writing this letter. I was there on Thursday night and spoke, perhaps not eloquently, but here is my challenge with where we stand on the Covid mitigation efforts in CT. When you look at the State dataset (which is very good overall by the way) https://data.ct.gov/stories/s/COVID-19-data/wa3g-tfvc/ you see a few trends including:
1) Vaccination rates vary tremendously between towns/cities – vaccination has proven to be incredibly effective at protecting people from the worst outcomes of Covid (which is why we closed schools in the first place) and an area we as a community should take pride, and also understand areas that still need improvement (age 65+ for boosters and age 5-11 year old’s for initial doses, which is very relevant re schools).
2) If you looked at school closure in 2020-21 the variation was enormous (unfortunately the correlation between school closure and lower income pre-Covid and lower vaccination rates now is pretty high i.e. the most at risk were/are hurt the most). CT State data shows school closure / virtual education has a strong negative impact on the kids in those districts – part of the reason you see New Canaan kids doing better than kids in other districts, which were open less.
The reason this is relevant is we have a state mandate which essentially treats all districts the same, yet we are tremendously different – one size does not fit all and some districts / cities need much more help than others. If we had to get all school districts last year to agree when and how to reopen, we can be sure that New Canaan schools would not have been open as much as they were. Local control and trust combined with parent – teacher / staff – student engagement and collective responsibility allowed this to be very successful. Those same features of New Canaan (trust and cooperation) can be applied to local Covid mitigation policies.
As for masks in particular, part of the challenge is masks have become incredibly politicized. The issue of who is masking, and who is not results in enormous judgement and heated exchange reflective of what we saw Thursday (lets be clear both political sides engage in this). This societal strife is caustic and for me I question is the efficacy of cloth masking of kids all day really worth it, when you look at all the side effects and other effective mitigation things that can be done?
We need a very clear data driven plan to get out of this that everybody can easily understand, and transparently relate to. I have put forward the Massachusetts 80% vax rate by school (we could combine the district rate and booster portion on top if we need to) as an option, and I am very open to other ideas. As of now I do not see any real and transparent plan to get us off universal and unending school masking.
This comes from a father with a 3rd grader who had his last non-masked full school year when he was in Kindergarten, my 1st grader who has never been to grade school without a mask, and my just turned 4 year old who has to mask up whenever he goes to PreK. This all is taking place when many adults are going about their lives pretty normally, and no universal mask mandate exists for them.
This post fully captured everything I’ve been feeling. Thank you for being brave enough to speak up amidst the nasty-ness we’re all seeing. I fully trust Dr. Luizzi and his team to make the right decisions at the right time, based on science.
Thank you for writing this. Thursday was such a new low for this town and yes at the end of the day, science is moving towards unmasking, which is what we all want. Sadly we will most likely lose Dr. Luizzi over the hate in this town.
Losing our superintendent of schools, the best by all counts in the State, would be like cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face…hopefully we will not sink to this level.
Would you stay if you were him?
I would stay in a perhaps vain attempt to bring some sense of understanding and civility to this wonderful community.