When Cynthia Rivera’s 17-year-old son, a junior at El Dorado High School in Placentia, California, got a call to the principal’s office during his football practice, suspension was the last thing he expected. He was greeted by a panicked headmaster requiring that he not participate in football for 14 days because he had been exposed to COVID-19 in one of his classes.
Cynthia and her son were shocked. He had just tested negative earlier that week and was displaying no symptoms of COVID. Taking these two facts to the principal was not enough. He was operating under strict rules from above, and it did not matter that Cynthia’s son was healthy and did not actually have COVID. It was enough that he was in a classroom where a child contracted COVID, and he was less than 6 feet away from his classmate.
In the “offending” classroom, Cynthia and her son measured the distance between her son’s seat and the seat of the classmate with COVID and found it was just under 6 feet. According to measurements in other days and classrooms, it was virtually impossible to keep that 6-foot distance, and there were repeated violations ranging from 1 to 5 feet. Why should her son be penalized for the negligence of the school staff regarding proper spacing? Cynthia took this to the superintendent.
After repeated requests, this was the response Cynthia received from the school district’s assistant superintendent: “After review, it was determined that your son was a close contact to a Covid-19 positive student and the Health Services staff correctly followed the guidance from the Orange County Health Care Agency. As a result, the quarantine from extra curricular activities stands for the 14 day period. While I realize this is not the response you were hoping for, please understand that we make every effort to apply the guidance consistently regardless of whether a student is 2, 4, or 5 ½ feet from an infected individual.”
Since he was 5 years old, Cynthia, her son, and the entire family have dedicated their lives and time to her son’s football practices and games. Before this suspension due to COVID exposure, the family had never missed a practice or game. Her son is a rising star and a starter, and he wants to play in college and maybe professionally if the opportunity arises. But his odds are decreasing, as he happened to be in high school in 2020 and 2021, when children were locked up at home for over a year in the same of “safety.”
This has real-life consequences. The Rivera family had to seek therapy for their son, who was getting depressed. Thinking that things were back to normal, he returned to school and football practice; but in the middle of the season, he is now being yanked out. Cynthia told me, “The consequences are very severe for not being sure if there is even a threat. Missing two games for a junior is huge.”
Cynthia and her family represent a normal family that is being adversely affected by out-of-control paranoia. This paranoia over germs, fueled by myopic government mandates, is even causing people to overreact to seasonal allergies. One family in North Carolina complained that their son had pollen allergies and was sent home.
It is now a trend for overly paranoid school officials to bar students from going to school or attending extracurricular activities because it’s “better to be safe than sorry,” even if it completely disrupts a child’s learning or skill-building, as with Cynthia’s son’s football. Even worse, this standard is arbitrary, based on what some bureaucrat feels is safe.
Have we stopped to assess the balance of resuming our activities and employing overly harsh restrictions that are based on irrational paranoia and not on data, actual results, and science? It’s the children who end up suffering as they are treated like lepers for simply being in the same room as someone who had COVID. No wonder mental health is on the decline for our teenagers and young adults. The idiocy must stop if we really care about our children.
Marc Ang ([email protected]) is the president of the Chinese American Citizens Alliance in Orange County, a community organizer in Southern California, and the founder of Asian Industry B2B. His book Minority Retort will be released in late 2021.
