A parent is suing the Waukesha School District (WSD) and school board in Wisconsin after her son tested positive for COVID-19.
The parent, Shannon Jensen, says in her lawsuit that WSD stopped requiring students to wear masks and ended “many other COVID-19 mitigation measures.” Jensen had her son wear masks to school, but her oldest, who attends Rose Glen Elementary School, still caught the virus.
Jensen in her lawsuit says that another student came to school with COVID-19 symptoms on September 16 and 17 but was sent home on the 17th. Jensen’s son was seated next to the sick student, who was not wearing a mask. Two days after the sick student was sent home, Jensen’s son developed COVID-19 symptoms, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
Jensen then pulled all three of her sons from school and quarantined them at home, which resulted in her two younger sons also testing positive for the virus, according to her lawsuit. All three boys then had to miss school and extracurricular activities.
“In a statement provided in the lawsuit, Jensen said she got delayed notifications from the district informing her that children in her oldest son’s class tested positive for the virus and later learned through another parent with a child in her oldest son’s class that four children had tested positive. She also learned the district had no thresholds for when the class would be quarantined and that no contact tracing was being done. Instead the district was ‘just blanket informing parents when a child in the school had tested positive, usually several days earlier,’” the Journal Sentinel reported.
Jensen’s lawsuit is being paid for by the Minocqua Brewing Company Super PAC, which was started by brewery owner Kirk Bangstad who has publicly blasted former President Donald Trump and his handling of the coronavirus pandemic. The website for the brewery says Bangstad started the Super PAC “to remove Republican federal and state elected officials who perpetuated the election lies that caused the Insurrection of Jan. 6, 2021, and whose downplaying of the seriousness of Covid-19 caused so many unnecessary deaths in our country.”
Jensen demands in her lawsuit that the WSD follow the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines, which are not legal mandates. Children are also less susceptible to serious complications from catching COVID-19. A total of 520 children have died due to COVID-19 throughout the entire pandemic. More than 700,000 people are categorized as having died due to COVID-19 in the death throughout the pandemic, making children a small fraction and the age group with the lowest risk of serious complications.
In August, New York Magazine’s Intelligencer reported that the science behind masking kids at school “remains uncertain.”
“Distancing, hybrid models, classroom barriers, HEPA filters, and, most notably, requiring student masking were each found to not have a statistically significant benefit. In other words, these measures could not be said to be effective,” the magazine wrote about a landmark study of COVID infections in U.S. schools.