This petition is so that the Hollister School Board will vote at the next board meeting to remove the mask mandate from the students and staff of the Hollister School District.

The current quarantine policy is - no quarantine necessary if masked. Missouri school districts, including Hollister, are requiring children to wear face masks all day despite little to no efficacy of cloth masks and a negligible COVID spread among children. Consequently, wearing masks have been shown to cause numerous negative effects to a child's health and mental and social development.

The State of Missouri has never had a mask mandate and the City of Hollister never supported such an ordinance requiring wearing masks.

We ask our elected school board and administrators to review the outdated quarantine policy which was implemented last fall before the Hollister population had access to the Covid-19 vaccine and ask them to change the policy making masks optional for all students in our district.

We hope the Hollister School Board will consider the following:

• Per the CDC, cloth & surgical masks are not effective against the spread of viruses

• A study of 6,000 people showed no statistically significant aid in preventing the spread of COVID-19 by wearing a mask

• Daylong mask wearing, as opposed to the short onetime use in clinical settings, contributes to the spread of bacteria and pathogens, increased headaches, renal damage, decreased cognitive motor execution, increased cardiac load, decrease in immune cell motility and increased anxiety and depression.

• Masks for children have no benefits and can be dangerous

• A study of 12 million adults shows adults in contact with children are at a lower risk of death from COVID-19 than those who are not in close contact with children

• Clinical trials show a high risk of infections from moisture retention in masks

• COVID-19 is 6x less deadly than the flu was in 2019 and we do not mandate masks to mitigate flu spread which is significantly more contagious among children

• When masked, it is difficult for children to read emotional signals: It is not until kids are about 14 years old that they reach adult skill levels in recognizing faces. These issues may be especially true for children with autism spectrum disorder, who have particular difficulties reading non-verbal cues

Ultimately, we conclude the the Hollister School Board should make a motion to remove the mandatory mask mandate and the quarantine of healthy students in the Hollister School District, a preventative measure with little to no efficacy, as masks pose a higher potential threat to our children's well being than the actual COVID-19 virus itself.

Let our children breathe fresh air!