Sharply Rebuking More McDonald Falsehoods, School Board Says No Mask-Rule Changes This Year

Unlike last week, when no one on the board or the administration addressed McDonald’s claims, this time fellow-board members pushed back sharply and unequivocally, as did Superintendent Cathy Mittelstadt and her point man on pandemic management in schools, David Bossardet: existing precautions will remain in place at least until the end of the current school year, they said. 

“Where we are right now as a school district is I think where we need to be,” Mittelstadt said. “Moving forward, over the summer and into next year, I think there’s some unknown factors that we can continue to explore.” That means masking and social distancing measures will remain in effect, as will the district’s three learning models–in-person, remote-live, allowing students to follow class live from from, and a virtual option. The district adopted those measures to balance out its campuses, enabling in-person teaching while allowing for social distancing. 

Bossardet was equally direct. ”My personal recommendation is we do not change anything at this point,” he said. “As far as August, July or into next winter, I don’t feel comfortable speaking on when we should revisit this. It’s revisited constantly. I do have conversations daily with numerous members from the Health Department. I do know the CDC updates, their guidelines.” Bossardet is in close, often daily contact with Bob Snyder, the director of the health department, who together with Dr. Stephen Bickel, the medical director at the Flagler and Volusia Health Departments, have been the architects of Flagler’s covid response. Their recommendations, enacted through mask mandates in three cities and school-safety measures, have kept Flagler at the bottom of the state’s 67 counties with least number of infections by population. 

Other than saying he respected all opinions, School Board Chairman Trevor Tucker did not take a position during the meeting. But he told FlaglerLive Tuesday evening: “I will keep whatever the health department recommends. As of now that is no change. The only way I would change is if Health Department recommends changes to current procedures.”




With that, he in effect joined Board members Cheryl Massaro and Colleen Conklin, who said they did not favor changing course. McDonald did. Board member Jill Woolbright was non-committal. 

“I believe in the science,” Massaro said. “I believe in our health department here in Flagler County, and I will support their efforts in whatever way that I can. It’s as simple as that.”

“This is now the second meeting where you’ve brought masks up,” Conklin told McDonald. “I don’t think for us not to show whether there is a consensus there to have a vote on this topic or not is important. For me personally, I’m not seeing anything that would make me feel comfortable at this point in time, removing the masks right now. For the start of next school year? I certainly hope the conversation is different. I certainly hope we are not in the same place that we are. I can’t imagine that we will be. But for right now, to change our policy or adopted procedures that are in place, I think it would just create as many parents that may be excited about that, I think there would be a great number that would be very concerned about the health and welfare of their children, and in addition to that, the staff. So I think for the remainder of the school year, to move forward, as far as I’m concerned, unless something dramatically changes, I’m just one board member. I don’t see a position changing there.” 

They spoke on the day when President Biden vowed that the nation would have enough vaccines for all American adults by the end of May. But having the supply in hand isn’t the same as having it administered. Current projections see 90 percent of Americans who want a vaccine vaccinated by next Thanksgiving. Community or herd immunity is considered to be around 70 percent, a proportion expected to be reached nationally by late August. Flagler County’s vaccination rate has been running ahead of the nation’s so far. 

Tuesday’s school board workshop begun with a handful of members of the public addressing the board in terms McDonald would echo–against restrictions. One of the speakers again addressed the board at the tail end of the meeting, before board members’ comments, setting the table for McDonald. The parent spoke of the “harassment” her children have experienced over times when they’d not be wearing masks (like McDonald, she considers wearing a mask a “detriment” to one’s health) and that pandemic rules have been “elevated to such a high morality that we don’t consider the cost of what those rules are doing, especially to our children.” She then made a specious analogy, comparing how how easily subservient children can be to rules to how they can be abused or trafficked. 

Neither the speakers nor McDonald would mention the death toll from the disease so far: 515,000 Americans, over 30,000 in Florida and 92 in Flagler, making it the fourth leading cause of death in the county, when compared to 2019 figures. 




McDonald then took up the charge, seemingly without hint of irony: “We’re not looking at the science that’s out there,” she said, before speaking of book-banning and referring to Nazi Germany in a specious analogy of her own. (The publisher of Dr. Seuss books has decided to stop reprinting just a few of the famous children’s author’s titles because of their racially insensitive or racist content. McDonald, mischaracterizing the issue, spoke in general terms of book banning.) 

“That is something that’s being chipped away at little by little, by corporations, by media, by publishers, and by social media people,  just because it’s not their version of what truth is,” she said. “Just to wait for somebody else to tell us oh the light is green now, we can go, is not being intellectually engaged and honest. We’re decision-makers for 13,000 students, several thousand staff, and we’re a voice for an educated perspective. So let’s present that to the public and let’s be open to information and open to exploring information and getting with our partners in the county and seeing what actually fits now, now that we’ve been in this covid fog for over a year.”

The district has been doing just that, with engagement and intellectual honesty, in frequent contact with the health department. After Bossardet spoke, McDonald’s gentle-toned virulence took on the CDC and the National Institutes of Health–two of the world’s foremost bastions of science–to discredit their claims about the covid vaccine (“they’re not vaccines, it’s a shot, it’s gene therapy,” she said, falsely). McDonald has no background in science, medicine, epidemiology, public health or public administration. She asserted, against a mountain of evidence to the contrary, that “none of the masks that we have, none of the cloths that we have have ever had scientific research and studies done to see their effectiveness.” 

She then, falsely, if not recklessly, claimed that “the scientific studies that have been done over the year show that mask-wearing actually increases illness.” In East and Southeast Asia and Oceania, where mask-wearing is near-universal, the pandemic has been all but eradicated: South Korea had six new cases in the past 24 hours, Japan and China had none, Thailand, Hongkong, Vietnam and Singapore had a few dozens combined, New Zealand and Australia had 12 between them. Those societies have essentially returned to normal. Asians, Australians and New Zealanders have not shown a propensity to be more ill from wearing masks. 




McDonald falsely stated that healthy people were not quarantined during such pandemics as plagues. In fact, households known to have a plague victim were branded and locked from the outside in the London plague Daniel Defoe immortalized in his Journal of the Plague Year: “Some houses were, indeed, entirely locked up, the doors padlocked, the windows and doors having deal boards nailed over them…” But social distancing and masking protocols are of more recent vintage, masking starting with the flu pandemic of 1918. The CDC adopted social distancing as federal policy in the middle of the last decade, after George W. Bush became familiar with the science and pressed for its enactment.

As was the case last week, as has been the case every time she’s used her school board platform to disseminate misinformation, McDonald at no point cited evidence that could be verified against her claims. 

“I bring this up because there’s a wealth of real science, real documentation, real broad spectrum analysis of what masks do or don’t do,” McDonald said in the longest, accurate statement she made during her segment of the meeting. But that is not the science she is willing to rely on, opting instead for deceptive and spurious cobblings of de-contextualized facts in search for her predetermined conclusions. Her method above all contradicted her fundamental claim: that her fellow board members should study the issue from all sides, using solid data. 

She had received an email from a Volusia resident comparing covid cases in Volusia and Suwanee counties. The resident claimed Volusia has a mandatory face covering rule in schools while Suwanee’s rule is optional. “Their county has mask choice, ours has a mandate, and there is zero difference in cases per capita,” the resident claimed. McDonald forwarded the email to fellow-board members–one of many she forwards in a similar vein, not just to board members: Bickel and Snyder were on the receiving end of her salvos. 

As with McDonald’s other claims, she–and the person who’d emailed her–had wildly and selectively misread the numbers  by looking at gross rather than proportional figures. Suwanee, in fact, has the eighth-worst rate of infection among Florida’s 67 counties since the beginning of the pandemic, at 11,532 per 100,000 population. Volusia’s rate of 6,268 per 100,000 ranks it it 58th in comparison, a far, far healthier place. Suwanee has the fourth-worst rate of death per 100,000 population, at 299. Volusia, in comparison, is 51st out of 67 counties in that category. Flagler is 63rd in deaths, and 67th in overall infections, ranking it the state’s healthiest county in that regard. 

As Conklin also pointed out, Suwanee’s 20.4 percent infections rate among children is far higher than Volusia’s (13.1) or Flagler’s (15.6), or the state average of 14.5 percent. In fact, SAuwanee’s infection rate among children is exceeded by only three counties–Holmes, Liberty and Okeechobee, also counties where mask-wearing is generally more derided than not. 




“If Gov. DeSantis has made a voluntary mask state platform,” McDonald said, “I guess, we should kind of go along with that if we have limited number of serious explosions, I think we ought to consider that, especially in cases where they’re actively using their bodies out at recess.” 

McDonald also repeated the falsehood about covid deaths not being covid deaths. 

Massaro said crunching the Suwanee numbers reveals how McDonald is misinterpreting them. She said she did not want to be “lectured” and “strong-armed” and directly told McDonald to stop sending her emails: “I’m tired of getting emails that I don’t really want to get,” Massaro said. “I’ve asked before. I will ask now publicly. I don’t want these emails. I don’t believe in the same things that my colleague believes in. It’s just a waste of time and effort and I prefer not to have that from this point forward. That is my position. I’ve made it clear. I will abide by whatever Flagler Health Department deems is necessary to keep our children safe, safer, in my mind.”  She then referred to the loss of 500,000 Americans to the pandemic. 

A more reluctant Jill Woolbright said, “when something is said that goes against my beliefs, that I’m not here just for my beliefs, that I’m here for all students and all families, and I take that pretty seriously. It’s a juggling, it’s a balancing act, because we all have our core values and our core beliefs.” She said her interest was in bridging gaps. 

Colleen Conklin echoed Massaro’s words about masks and the Suwanee numbers, and reminded McDonald of the personal losses people have been experiencing through the pandemic. “We have lost a principal in this community,” Conklin said of the death of Flagler Palm Coast High School Principal Tom Russell to covid last year. “It hit the community hard, it hit FPC exceptionally hard, we’ve lost other folks to covid who are staff, who are family members of teachers and family members of students. I think to have a conversation today, if trying to gather consensus, I think the conversation around whether or not we move forward and keep masks or we don’t keep masks, I’m just not comfortable with not having masks right now.”

Mittelstadt, the superintendent still in her first year on the job, has steered clear of challenging board members publicly and usually speaks in language almost painfully modulated in metaphor and centrism, wherever that middle point is between board members’ positions. Tuesday was different. She left no doubt about her role as advocate for employees and students. 

“It’s paramount that creating a safe educational environment for day to day operations is my number one goal for every single student and for all of our employees,” Mittelstadt said. “That’s a huge lift that requires an amazing focus by all of the employees, and we worked very hard this summer to develop a return-to-school plan that would ensure we created the safest environment possible. And we expected and willed our families to understand, we need you to be responsible in doing your part to make sure we can get our school district open for in-person learning or remote-live learning or the virtual component.”