PTSD — post-traumatic stress disorder — is an equal opportunity tormenter. Even what might be termed a mild case still torments. Everyone is neurotic, but that’s because our parents were neurotic. But each generation continues the process. It’s part of the human condition. Then you add on some extra trauma.
My add-on PTSD is called survivor’s guilt. I spent 16 months in Southeast Asia, but I was at a base in Thailand, where we only got attacked twice. But 58,000 of my peers never came home outside of a body bag. I survived; they didn’t. I’m guilty of surviving. Such is the nature of survivor guilt.
But I put myself in a position for such an emotional reaction. I enlisted during ‘Nam. I don’t think anyone enlisted to be scared out of their collective minds for two years over a virus especially when that fear is dumped on kids.
COVID has been one thing, but heavy-handed government response is another. How many businesses were shut down by a governor’s decree? How many never reopened? How many people were put out of work? How many people died because they were afraid to see a doctor and put off necessary treatment? And how many school-aged kids will be able to shake off what they’ve had to deal with these last two years?
We hear that teen suicide has increased. Even without seeing numbers, I can verify that. I know two families, both in Chester County and with two teenage girls. In both families, the eldest daughter has tried to commit suicide. One overdosed on Prozac in school. And one of the mothers works with a man whose teenage daughter did take her own life.
Teenagers are being scarred. And what of the younger kids? They might not be trying to kill themselves, but they are having their cages rattled big time.
During the Feb. 14 Unionville-Chadds Ford School Board work session, two dozen people spoke, most of them parents with their own horror stories about what the mask mandates have done to their kids. Some kids, parents said, have been bullied by faculty and staff for not wearing masks properly. Kids are having difficulty breathing, and others get light-headed. They’re having learning and developmental issues by not being able to see teachers’ and classmates’ faces.
One girl developed a facial tic from wearing a mask, and a boy who came down with a nosebleed in school was forced to wear his blood-soaked mask for the rest of the day in school and on the bus on the way home. There was another story of a young girl who lost her first tooth while in class but was so afraid to remove her mask to take the tooth out of her mouth that she swallowed the tooth instead.
A woman in the West Chester Area School District said her son had COVID, but, when he was allowed back in school, he was forbidden from talking about his experience with classmates. Why? Because according to the mom, “It wasn’t so bad.” And he wasn’t allowed to say that. And this is supposedly a school that teaches we have freedom of speech in the United States. Unless that speech is something the government doesn’t want you to say or have others hear.
Think this authoritarian approach – with its forced social distancing and mask mandates — hasn’t led to kids developing their own type of PTSD?
And the forced masking has continued despite a Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruling in December (the Corman case) that said even the state Health Department has no legal authority to force masking in schools. So how do the school districts get away with continuing the mandates?
That’s basically the question asked by another parent, Chad Williams of Birmingham Township. Williams did not speak at the Feb. 14 meeting but said in a one-on-one conversation that he has repeatedly asked School Board President Jeff Hellrung and Superintendent John Sanville where the district gets the legal authority for required masking. He said he has never gotten an answer.
Chadds Ford Live queried Hellrung about this in an email. He replied, saying he did respond to Williams, “but indirectly, through another person.”
He further said, in his response to Chadds Ford Live, “Section 5-510 of the Pennsylvania School Code provides "(t)he board of school directors in any school district may adopt and enforce such reasonable rules and regulations as it may deem necessary and proper, regarding the management of its school affairs ..." 24 Pa. Stat. Ann. 5-510. This provision has been found to permit school districts wide authority to create rules and regulations related to student and staff conduct during the school day, especially with respect to maintaining order and safety in schools.”
He also said that “nearly all” of the state's 500 school districts have followed the recommendations of federal, state, and local health departments, and that U-CFSD doesn’t want to go mask optional too soon.
If school boards have the authority, then board members must deal with the difference between legality and morality. And if they don’t have the legal authority, they are just wrong at best.
Some parents, like Chad Williams, think the mandate is akin to child abuse. Others, of course, think that masks should be mandatory until officialdom signals an all-clear or a greater drop in cases.
Are the parents who want masks to be optional in the majority? Or are those parents who think masks should remain mandatory the majority? No doubt, school board members are dealing with their own blossoming PTSD. Here’s to post-traumatic stress disorder, something we all have in common.
About Rich Schwartzman
Rich Schwartzman has been reporting on events in the greater Chadds Ford area since September 2001 when he became the founding editor of The Chadds Ford Post. In April 2009 he became managing editor of ChaddsFordLive. He is also an award-winning photographer.
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