Support of masks and vaccines

I support the governor’s directive for schools to require masks while indoors for both students and staff as well as wearing masks in any indoor spaces as we experience another surge in local Covid cases. I applaud the school board’s decision to move the mitigation plan to phase 2 to begin the school year.

As a recently retired School Nurse and Lead Nurse for our schools, I can assure you that our nurses, administrators, and staff worked extremely hard last year to provide a safe environment in which children can learn. We spent many evenings and weekends doing contact tracing of any known positive cases and their contacts. Those hours will increase as more cases arise.

We taught proper infection control measures. We beefed up teachers’ confidence in basic first aid and supported their assessment skills with routine student symptoms in order to keep the clinic as clean as possible for the safety of students with chronic conditions.

We educated and reminded all staff and children of proper mask-wearing, showing that the way air and germs get into our lungs is through both our nose and mouth as they are connected in the back of our throat.

I spent every week since Covid closed our schools in March 2020 on Zoom calls with the VDOE’s School Health Services Specialist and the VDH’s School Health Nurse Consultant. During the spring, the calls became less frequent as we were seeing the light at the end of this ordeal. Zoom conferences with the Virginia AAP that included experts in all specialties of children’s care who said it would be a very rare case of a child with any physical condition in which wearing a mask would be detrimental to their health.

I want you to understand that we were well-informed and not making this up as we went along.

There is a vocal minority that has said they do not believe in the disease, do not believe they can be asymptomatic spreaders of the disease and do not believe they will get sick and/or die.

In the meantime, there are many in our community who have listened to the science and done everything we’ve been asked to do to keep our families AND our community safe, even those who refuse to keep US safe.

Sadly, some local businesses no longer require masks in the midst of this surge, so I will protect my unvaccinated daughter by once again staying home. She is excited to be going to public school for the first time this year. We will be watching to see if the vocal group sways the School Board’s well-thought-out mitigation plan, negating all efforts to stop this pandemic in our area. We will immediately pull her out of school if their agenda dictates decisions affecting our community’s children.

Front Royal/Warren County could have been well beyond this now if all had pulled together for the good of our community.

Kathleen Crettier
Warren County