The Fort Worth Independent School District and the mask-choice parents have settled their dispute. In the settlement, FWISD agreed to ensure that every mask mandate allowed for parents to opt out of the mandate by a declaration similar to the process used by the State of Texas to opt out of vaccines, which explicitly allows exemption for conscience. No notary or doctor's note will be needed for an exemption.
The significance of this settlement is that its terms inherently recognize that parents are the authorities for the decisions concerning the care of their children, rather than the school district.
Every parent with a child in Fort Worth ISD should be thankful for the bravery of our four plaintiffs, whose children suffered the anger of petulant teachers who ironically acted like children as they mistreated their students with unreasonable mask zealotry. For those who still don't know, teachers were leading children in the chant of "Mask, mask, mask your face" to the tune of "Row, row, row your boat", and even while the district was prohibited from required masking, many teachers were requiring their classes to mask up before they could go to recess or proceed on some enjoyable task.
It is no exaggeration to say that Marxism is alive and well in most educational institutions. School board trustees who are supposed to be governing bodies for their districts are too often mere minions for a superintendent, exercising zero independent judgment. And teachers who just want to teach children how to read are forced to be political pawns while the district's performance over time resembles the curve described by y=-x2 as x increases (the shape is left as exercise for the reader).
But as Mr. Pope taught us, hope springs eternal, and we can hope that this settlement is a model for other settlements with districts who acted even worse. Remember Dallas ISD, which erected a plexiglass cabin in a school library to imprison non-mask wearing children until a mother complained that the structure did not meet fire code. But we can all take a victory lap as the science becomes more obvious every day regarding masking and forced vaccination, and district trustees admit that perhaps they were a bit too aggressive as they try to reduce the damage done to public school education during the COVID era.
As a reminder, Sweden did not close its schools, did not have a mask mandate, and had zero deaths for children in a nation of 1.8 million, and their teacher cases per capita was the same as nearby Norway, which closed its schools. We've known that the masking of children is useless for more than a year, but political ideology can be blinding.
The price of the school closure was not only damaged education, but increased mental illness, abuse, and childhood suicide. We will never fully recover from this mismanagement - the best we can do is ensure it does not happen again and restrain the tiny tyrants who have enjoyed exploiting the emergency to expand their powers without restraint.
Martin Luther King, Jr. said once, "Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable... Every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering, and struggle; the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals." And as King's namesake stated 500 years ago, "Here I stand - I can do nothing otherwise."
Today we say thank you to our plaintiffs who stood up, and in so doing, helped right a wrong, and push back on the leviathan state of education. And here's your call to action - parents, stand up for your children! You CAN make a difference.