Students defy school mask mandate in Inland Empire

Some Inland Empire parents and students, fed up with the statewide mandate requiring students to wear masks indoors, have been protesting on campus  — and in some cases refusing to don face coverings — for nearly a week.

Hundreds of Inland students — including those at Norco Intermediate School, Bonita High School and Chino Hills High School — have not attended indoor classes since Friday, Feb. 4, because they’ve refused to wear masks in classrooms.

Many parents have allowed this, arguing that face coverings are ineffective or dangerous for kids. They said mask-less students defying the rule are being asked to sit outside to complete school work.

While Califorina’s indoor-mask rule is set to expire next week, state public health requirements for K-12 schools require universal face coverings indoors.

School protests began soon after photos surfaced of a mask-less Gov. Gavin Newsom at the Jan. 30 NFC Championship football game in Inglewood.

One of the largest continuing protests is at Norco Intermediate School, where mask-less students have been asked to sit outside in groups spread across campus to do school work, students and parents said. Students sit in common areas such as the picnic tables and are supervised by staff, they said.

In a Tuesday, Feb. 8, statement, the Corona-Norco Unified School District said the protests began Friday, when about 200 students across the district demonstrated.

“Students were supervised outdoors and given the opportunity to complete work,” the statement said. “While we celebrate our students’ initiative in expressing their freedom of speech, that freedom does not extend to boycotting classes or disrupting instructional time, as we have a responsibility to ensure that we maintain an orderly environment for learning.”

District spokesperson Brittany Ritzi Foust said by email that the majority of district students participating are from Norco Intermediate and Highland Elementary School. Other schools with mask-less students include Sierra Vista, Ronald Reagan and Norco elementary schools and Norco and Santiago high schools.

Corona-Norco schools ask parents to pick up students not wearing masks, but if they decline, the students stay on campus, “working independently on their classwork, however, they are not receiving direct instruction,” Foust said. “We know that the best place for our students to learn is in a classroom environment with a teacher, alongside their peers. There is no doubt these students are missing out on valuable instruction time and can have a negative impact on their learning.”

These students are being marked with unexcused absences, which don’t “require teachers to provide missed work,” Foust said.

Student-led protests at Norco Intermediate continued all this week and are planned for Friday, Feb. 11, parents and students said. The number of participating students is not known but has gone up and down.

It was not clear Thursday whether the other Corona-Norco schools — including Highland, which reported over 75 students participating in Friday’s protest — would continue the demonstration.

Some parents and students are concerned about this week’s hot and windy weather conditions.

Joe Rogers, whose son Levi attends Norco Intermediate, said Thursday that students were “rounded up like cattle, sitting outside in the 90-degree heat.” Rogers said he pulled his son out of school Thursday, upset that he and classmates were being marked “truant,” which refers to students who miss classes without an excused absence.

“The kids are not ‘sitting out’ of class. They’re not complying with the mask mandate, which is illegal,” Rogers said. “They show up to school and are told they can’t come in. They’re sitting out there in the hot weather, being lectured most of the day, not learning … this whole thing is a charade.”

Eighth-grader Levi Rogers, 13, took part in all the demonstrations. He said teachers “don’t give us anything to work on. It’s very hot and windy outside, and we’re being lectured on the choices we make, but they choose what we get to do, like going to the bathroom, or who we sit with.”

District spokesperson Evita Tapia-Gonzalez confirmed by email Thursday that students “refusing to attend class due to masking requirements are being marked truant, as they are unwilling to attend class.”

Some Norco Intermediate students and parents said no real supervision or outdoor learning is occurring.

“There’s a grassy area out back, and we were just laying there the whole day,” said 12-year-old Brandon Smith, a seventh grader. “We ordered food from our phones.”

Smith said many friends are participating, and he plans to protest “as long as I can before I get expelled. I’ll take a suspension. If they’re suspending every single kid that’s doing it, the school will be empty.”

Valerie Smith, Brandon’s mother, supported her son’s choice and called masks “nothing but a face decoration.”

“Why are we still masking our children? They have such a low risk (of getting COVID-19), but people die of the flu. It’s just something we have to live with,” Smith, a Norco resident, said. “We compiled in the beginning when there were so many unknowns. Now, we’re just done. Enough is enough.”

Similar student-led protests of the mask mandate were reported at Chino Hills High School and Bonita High School in La Verne.

A Wednesday, Feb. 9, statement from Chino Valley Unified School District spokesperson Andi Johnson said officials respect students’ opinions, but “cannot ignore federal, state and local directives that govern school operations.” It too is providing an “outdoor learning environment” with supervision for these students.

Bonita High School saw “a small number of students protest” the mask rules on Friday, according to a Feb. 9 statement from Bonita Unified School District spokesperson Margaret McDonald. Similarly, students were given assignments to complete while being supervised, she wrote.

Neither district responded to inquiries Thursday, Feb. 10, on how many students were involved or whether the protests continued.