By DAN SMITH
The Anchorage School District should officially rescind its mandatory vaccine-or-test policy for volunteers and coaches.
In the fall, the school district required volunteer chaperones to show proof of Covid-19 vaccination.
As of Dec. 1, ASD has only expressed their preference to require chaperones be vaccinated. In its revised policy, the district says it will accept a negative test for the virus 48 hours prior to performing the duties of a chaperone.
Chaperones are not ASD employees. Rather they are members of the general public volunteering specifically to drive students to and from a field trip and monitor the students while on the trip.
The only way a member of the general public might learn of the Covid-specific policy is if he or she has volunteered to be a chaperone for a field trip or are a coach whose team travels. If a volunteer chaperone is to be accepted, s/he must present the required information to the coordinating teacher who must follow the ASD rules and policy.
A typical chaperone document request from last fall reads as follows:
“If you plan on chaperoning for the field trip, have all appropriate paperwork to hand into the office for approval. Please provide a copy of your insurance, driver’s license, registration and vaccination card.”
There was no mention of a testing option. There was no mention of natural immunity as an alternate form of compliance.
From a public records request in November for the official ASD Volunteer Policy, a copy was obtained weeks later. The version of the ASD policy that was released to this writer indicated it was revised Dec. 1, 2021. A copy is pictured below.
A follow-up request was made on Dec. 7 for a copy of the volunteer policy that predated the Dec. 1 version, but so far nothing has been received from the school district. We are left to wonder what was changed.
This policy is not publicly available but exists squirreled away in the district’s internal Healthcare Services Department. Who is responsible for this mandate policy and when will they be fired?
Interestingly, an ASD chaperone could have any other contagious disease and meet the qualifications for being a chaperone as long as they possess and show a vaccine passport. Do you have meningitis, HIV, leprosy or tuberculosis? What about influenza? These are not questions of the district’s inquisition. As long as you present your Covid vaccine passport or negative test result for the district to copy and place in their files, you are good to go.
What is the purpose of a vaccine passport? Regardless of purpose, the end result is the same: It is medical discrimination for a segment of the population.
It is uncertain where ASD found the inspiration for singling out the chaperone volunteers and imposing the mandate. What is certain is that many forms of tyranny and encroachment of one’s privileged medical information come in the form of “health and safety” arguments and for the alleged well-being of the children.
Another certainty is that tyrants and abusers push and harm until they find resistance from those they oppress. It’s kind of a test to see how much they can get away with. So what better arena to test than the volunteer chaperones who are unrepresented, unorganized and just want to go on a field trip with their children?
ASD coaches and sponsors are also subject to a Covid vaccine mandate. The policy that was updated Aug. 20, 2021 and still current as of October states that for domestic U.S. travel, out of the district and out of state, coaches and sponsors must be fully vaccinated. A decision as to whether or not approval of international travel will be allowed is expected this month.
Recent decisions by Denmark, the UK, and Germany to drop their Covid vaccine passport requirements should influence this decision. The Associated Press reported on Jan. 19 that British Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced masks will no longer be required in public places and Covid-19 passports will be dropped.
The British government is no longer advising people to work from home, and compulsory face masks will be scrapped in secondary school classrooms starting Thursday. Mandatory Covid-19 passes will not be needed to gain entry to large-scale events beginning Jan. 27. Face masks will no longer be legally required anywhere in England as of that day.
“We will trust the judgment of the British people and no longer criminalize anyone who chooses not to wear one,” Prime Minister Johnson said.
Since many nations are now allowing their citizens to freely associate, maybe the Anchorage School District should give it a try.
In the U.S. it has been necessary for the people to pursue legal action against the oppressive tendencies of the current government. On Jan. 13, the United States Supreme Court stayed the vaccination and testing requirement brought on by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and the Biden Administration. Following that decision, OSHA withdrew the Vaccination and Testing Emergency Temporary Standard.
If ASD was clinging to hope that misguided OSHA workplace vaccine mandates would reinforce their position, it will need to let that weak grasp on those flimsy bits of straw completely loose now.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Rochelle Walensky, “What COVID vaccines can’t do anymore is prevent the transmission of the virus.” This statement was made back in early August on CNN. This begs the question, why are we still calling this injection a vaccine in the ASD Health Services Department? The follow-up question would be, where does natural immunity factor into ASD policy? Specifically, why is there absolutely no consideration given to natural immunity, when the CDC itself has finally acknowledged the superiority of natural immunity over so called Covid vaccinations?
A study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released on Jan. 20 shows that those who have recovered from Covid-19 have more protection against infection than those who have only been vaccinated.
The indirect but accurate answer to some of the questions above might be that ASD has no business whatsoever intruding into the health information of teachers, students, staff, coaches, volunteers or anyone for that matter.
What gives us hope? Unwinding the Covid communist tourniquet which has been placed over our mouths and noses has begun. People are no longer gulping the Covid KoolAid. Unfortunately some within our government agencies and our elected officials still sip from the Covid cup they have poured for themselves. It will take a long time to undo the damage but it is happening. We may not fully accomplish the job in my life time. The battle appears to be constant and unrelenting. With eradication of one bad policy at a time and sometimes with many mandates all at once like the UK, the liberties known by an older generation will be restored for the younger generation to enjoy and then defend for themselves.
For the older among us, communism was always something that seemed remote and distant. It was somewhere in Cuba or the Soviet Union and would never really be more than a few whacko nut jobs here, we thought. We let our guard down.
But there is hope and the thing that offers the most hope is the younger generation who are now in their late teens and mid-twenties. These are the ones that have had their last years of high school and first years out in the work world, the military and college disassembled the most. They have lived under the lies and suffered the consequences of undisguised communist tyranny. They are old enough to remember how it was before the communists took control. They are wise enough to see the destruction that communism creates. They really didn’t like it, and still don’t, not one bit of it.
Every little victory in the fight to reclaim our stolen liberties matters. ASD needs to publicly rescind all of its Covid vaccine mandates right now.
Dan Smith is a lifelong Alaskan and Anchorage resident who writes for Must Read Alaska.
Of course, the Los Anchorage School District should rescind ALL their ridiculous and draconian covidian mandates. “SHOULD”. And that is precisely why they will not do so.
Two items of interest here:
1) Are teachers and staff mandated to be vaccinated and show proof of vaccination? Since they spend all day with students and are responsible for a particular group of them, the same rules should apply.
2) So parents, who help out in the classroom do NOT need a vaccination even though they may spend the entire day in the building/classroom with students, but chaperones need vaccination? Seems very arbitrary.
AFH, haven’t you notice yet, EVERYTHING about the Covidian hysteria, and all the kneejerk and excessive overreactions from all of the Covidiots, is nothing if not arbitrary (and unscientific, irrational and nonsensical, to boot).
Until recently I have never heard of doctors referred to as ‘idiots’ in any form. It is doctors who are leading the way for the policies we have on Covid and its variants.
Thanks to doctors we don’t have to worry about polio, small pox, now chicken pox due to mass vaccinations among our public. No outrage or freedom nonsense, just doing our civic duty to our communities.
When I was in the Navy, we were lined up and nobody asked us if we wanted the shots, nobody even bothered to tell us what they were! We did our duty to our shipmates for the good of the whole.
Now however, a new breed of vocal, misinformed, easily duped people, thankfully in the minority as of yet, are shouting from the rooftops about their freedoms and rights. Many of whom in the group are exhibiting behavior dangerous to the public. Getting Covid then going right out in public to eat, drink and be merry while giving the rest of us the gift of their sickness.
Parroting the corporate media talking points and hysteria, and blindly defending establishment corruption and self-serving sociopathy.
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Chris, the medical establishment was corrupted and co-opted by corporate and fascist interests long before the Wuhan Virus came on the scene — it was all just made blatantly and undeniably obvious by the mass groupthink and servile pro-establishment conformism of many doctors over the past two years.
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Your blind faith in credentialism is as sad as it is irrational.
Quit politicizing public health. We wear the masks and clean our hands and stay away from one another to not get anyone else sick. The only way to defeat an epidemic is to make these things mandatory in public. Your arguments against mandatory mask wearing, vaccines and other public health promotions are not only ill thought, but selfish and goes against community decency.
You also mix up your misguided views on covid with Communism, and I suppose this includes Socialists. Many of our allies are Socialists, we have a growing Socialist party in the USA. Young people see citizens of other countries who are Socialist and see how they enjoy life. Better pay, better working hours, better medical care, education and more time with families.
Please stop confusing Socialism with Totalitarianism. Any system can be totalitarian, especially corporate based capitalism. Look at the right wing regimes we have bolstered in South America over the past few decades and ask their people if those were good times for them.
Chris, your mindless virtue-signaling regarding all the Covidian-hysteria mandates fly in the face of all the SCIENCE that you kneejerk conformists and lemmings love to talk about, but do not have an iota of understanding about. In fact, it is you Covidian cultists who are selfish, because as usual, you DEMAND that everyone else CONFORM to your choices, and OBEY those in authority without question or judgement.
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And yes, socialism is linked at the hip with totalitarianism, as both are just manifestations of profoundly regressive statism, the belief that government and not individuals should decide the individual’s fate and choices in life. As such, socialism is just as evil as any other form of pernicious statism, as it is based on coercion as the governing principle of society, rather than freedom of choice and voluntarism. Anyone advocating such a policy is my enemy, and the enemy of freedom, and simply evil.
Where is the Cowardly Lion (aka Governor Dunleavy) when we need him? Even Arizona Governor Doocey, a RINO by the way, issued an executive order banning mask mandates when he saw how fast the official Covid narrative was crumbling. So, while counties & cities in Arizona could still declare mask mandates they were unenforceable and therefore meaningless. Take a hint Governor & grow a set!
Dan Smith. Another MRA expert who does his own scientific research. God help us.
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