Tennessee’s public education system has been the focus of Republican attacks for some time now. With a raging pandemic, economic uncertainty, and a Democratic Party offering up proactive legislation to help ameliorate working peoples’ lives, GOP officials have set to turning schools into battlegrounds. This is because while conservatives believe every fetal cell inside of a woman’s uterus is sacred, the moment that child is born they consider them to most likely be criminals here to steal capitalism away from the donor class. To this end, the Republican Party has moved to stop Tennessee schools from teaching about African American history or people of color in general. They have also kicked this political football into the public health sphere.

Piggybacking on anti-vaxxer parents’ rights to endanger other people’s children, conservatives in the state have fought vociferously against mask mandates in schools. A little less than two weeks ago, as the delta variant of the COVID-19 virus increased its spread across the country, the Williamson County school board in Tennessee decided to pass a mask mandate for the upcoming start of the school year. This came as Tennessee released data showing that in the first two weeks of August, almost 14,000 children were making up almost 25% of Tennessee’s new cases of COVID-19. Still, parents screamed and threatened board members and had to be herded off by local law enforcement as they hurled real threats like “We know where you live” at the board members who were voting to save their children from them.

In the end, only elementary-age students were mandated to wear masks. Guess what’s happening in Williamson County, Tennessee, as of Aug. 19, 2021? School’s closed. 

On Friday, Fairview Middle School in Williamson County will be closed. Williamson County Board of Education member Rick Wimberly tweeted that “Fairview Middle to be closed tomorrow because of COVID cases (187 of 560 students, 23 of 77 faculty). We’ll have to use one of ten weather days for them and no remote learning can be offered because of new State requirements.”

These numbers are quite a bit higher than they were just a few days ago when Williamson County Schools updated their data. The Tennessean reports that new numbers are to be released on Friday—a new decision as they had planned on only releasing numbers on Tuesdays.* This comes on the same day that WSMV, a Nashville NBC affiliate reported that Williamson County has had “3,500 mask exemptions for religious or medical reasons have been filed.” That number is reportedly set to increase as Gov. Bill Lee signed an executive order on Monday allowing parents to just opt out of mask mandates.

Not every parent in Tennessee represents this failure of public health policy. There are many in the Volunteer State who believe, even on a rudimentary level, that the cognitive dissonance it takes to defend sexist dress codes for schools while blathering on about how wearing a mask hurts their child’s freedom is an untenable position. And sadly, like the rest of anti-mask and anti-vaccine activism, this battle is not isolated to Tennessee. From Florida to Kentucky to Texas, school boards and conservative governors are pushing truly dangerous public health positions. The sheer illegal overreach on the part of people like Gov. Greg Abbott has been keeping the shine off the veneer of sanity in the upcoming school year.

And just because there is a very vocal group of death-panel-like conservative operatives sowing the seeds of dissent with loud and violent rhetoric, the majority of Americans in all walks of life do not agree at all with these terrible public health positions. 

Here’s a reminder of the group of parents who read a thing somewhere and heard a thing about the Constitution at some point, and have decided they know a thing or two about public health and safety. They’re protesting school board members who are trying to vote to protect their children.

And here is the dialectic response to a community of anti-science parents.

And a reminder of how much these communities actually value their children’s education and the people that make their children’s education possible.

*New data has not yet been released as of the writing of this story.