Whoever coined the phrase “parents know best” has obviously never been to Polk County, Iowa. The county, which is located just about 5 miles from Des Moines, is home to the Ankeny Community School District, a public school district with a number of parents who are so aggressively anti-mask that they’d rather see their kids get a terrible education, if not forgo one entirely, than have them to wear a light piece of cloth across their faces for a few hours each day—a measure that could very well protect these same kids’ health and lives.
As Daily Beast reports, anti-mask parents across the country have been coming up with all sorts of creative ways to get their point across to teachers and school administrators, including the trio of dads in Tucson, Arizona, who attempted to zip-tie their kids’ principal for enforcing in-school mask mandates, per CDC guidelines, so that kids across America don’t start dying in record numbers. But these Iowa parents think that hitting their school district’s checkbook is the better tack. As Pilar Melendez writes for Daily Beast:
The Iowa Department of Education takes a certified enrollment count on Oct. 1 to determine how much funding each district is allotted for the following year, a spokesperson told The Daily Beast. So if a student leaves the district—even temporarily—before the count this Friday, they may not be tallied for the award of funding for the next school year.
That means if students whose parents are enraged by mask mandates come back after the count, the school could be forced to make do with less—all to appease parents who refuse to accept experts’ consensus about how to avoid death and disaster in the classroom.
Yes, you read that correctly: In order to get a school district to comply with their illogical demands, these parents want to ensure not only that their children’s schools are as dangerous a breeding ground for a deadly virus that has already killed nearly 700,000 Americans—but that the school district is basically bankrupted in the process.
“It’s absolute insanity to try to defund the schools and then enroll your kid back into the school the next day,” one local (and actually sane) mom told Daily Beast, but would only speak on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retribution from her fellow parents.
“Nothing surprises me anymore,” she added—a statement that could very well replace “In God We Trust” on our currency these days.
(Via Daily Beast)