On Friday, Overland Park, Kansas-based company Krucial Staffing announced that CEO Brian Cleary would be stepping down. The company provides emergency health care staffing. Cleary’s ties to anti-mask group Mask Choice 4 Kids are very close; Cleary’s 19-year-old son founded the group. Krucial Staffing is making a ton of money during the global pandemic, unfortunately, as anti-vaxx areas of the country have seen surges in COVID-19 cases and, naturally, health care worker shortages.

The Kansas City Star reports that Krucial Staffing officials had accepted Cleary’s resignation and further distanced themselves from Cleary, writing, “Obviously being in the health care staffing business, we understand the importance of masks in hospitals and any medical setting. As a company, we work to ensure that all our health care personnel have the best protective equipment to keep them safe in their working environment.” 

Tana Goertz

The Star reports that Jacob Cleary, Brian’s son, “relinquished his supposed leadership role with Mask Choice 4 Kids” just hours after the newspaper contacted Krucial Staffing to ask about their CEO’s relationship to the organization. The key purpose of Mask Choice 4 Kids, of course,  is to get students to protest mask mandates in schools by uncovering their faces in protest during class.

Jacob Clearly posted a video on Sept. 7, handing over his organization’s leadership to Tana Goertz. If that name is familiar to you, maybe it is because she is the former The Apprentice TV show contestant and MAGA-supporter, Tana Goertz.

According to the Shawnee Mission Post, the Mask Choice 4 Kids group on Facebook is labeled a “youth organization.” While 19-year-old Cleary definitely seemed like a “youth,” Ms. Geortz seems like something else. Over the Labor Day weekend, the Mission Post reported that thousands of “Mask Choice 4 Kids” signs appeared illegally “on major roadways and intersections in northern Johnson County.” Because they were illegally posted, it seems citizens who actually live in the county removed them—which is legal to do.

The only word from the former CEO has been a social media post he made last Sunday.

“Follow us on social media, we are going to be having a rally outside of the next board meeting” on Monday, saying that he expected up to 1,000 people to attend. The Blue Valley district requires everyone to wear masks in school buildings.

Brian Cleary was interviewed on KSHB41 local news about the delta variant surge in COVID cases in July. At the time, his business was getting to see a surge in staffing opportunities. He told the news that "If 2020 was a house on fire, this may be just kind of the garage on fire, so nothing of that level yet, and I hope we don’t get there.” Of course, mask mandates and other safety measures like that might stomp out that fire too fast, leading to less staffing business for the Kansas-based company.

Krucial Staffing did not provide any information on whether or not Cleary would continue to maintain an ownership stake in the company.