On Tuesday hundreds of students from a California high school walked out of class in protest of their district’s ongoing mask mandate.
Videos of the event at Oak Ridge High School have gone viral on Twitter.
Jennifer Yoder, a parent at the school in El Dorado Hills, told Fox News that she and other parents sent their children to school without masks Tuesday. She is also an administrator of the Facebook page “Eldorado Hills Republicans”.
“This was a homegrown thing between the parents and then the kids working together to get everyone on board,” she said to Fox News. Students that showed up maskless to class were dismissed.
“It just kept growing and growing. And then they eventually just got up and left those classrooms and ran outside and started their protest,” Yoder added.
Tuesday afternoon, the El Dorado Union High School District sent a notification letter to parents saying its masking enforcement protocols would be changing.
“The enforcement of masking will be done by educating students and asking them to mask but no further actions of exclusion from class will be taken,” it said. “Moving forward students will not be physically removed from the classroom or receive a discipline consequence to prevent further exclusionary learning loss”.
The district claimed it was “bound by policy set by Sacramento and the California Department of Public Health,’ according to Fox News.
Gov. Gavin Newsom recently delayed the decision to lift California’s school mask mandate despite other Democratic governors around the country dropping their mandates.
Starting Tuesday, masks are no longer required in most indoor settings, however, students and teachers will have to wait.
California Health and Human Services Secretary Dr. Mark Ghaly said Monday that the state’s schools aren’t ready to make masks optional.