[This pertains to a current discussion in the Caledonia Community Schools district in Michigan. Readers who live elsewhere will no doubt be able to grasp the issues.]
March 9, 2025
To members of the school board:
You are considering a draft policy on masking and a proposal to put a constitutional law firm on retainer. I urge you to reject both proposals.
As of April 2024, the COVID-19 virus had killed 1.2 million people in the United States.[1] For Michigan, the death toll to date is forty-six thousand.[2] Those death tolls would certainly have been higher if effective means of limiting the spread of the disease had not been undertaken, and they certainly would have been lower if compliance with public-health advice had been higher.
In spring 2020, actions taken by Governor Whitmer were praised or criticized according to the political orientation of those doing the responding. Opponents of the governor prevailed in a Supreme Court case: the court found that some of her orders were in violation of the non-delegation clause of the Michigan state constitution. This was an important finding. The courts, state and federal, do well to prevent the takeover of legislative powers from legislators by chief executives, even when legislators hand those powers over willingly. But the court did not find that the epidemic was not a serious threat, or that masking requirements were unconstitutional, or that they were unwise. Masking requirements remained in place because they were supported by other, constitutional means, including but not limited to MIOSHA rules.[3]
A study by researchers at Imperial College London and Oxford University found that Governor Whitmer’s closures of businesses, schools, and restaurants in spring 2020 had a significant effect in limiting the numbers of infections and deaths. Before her orders, each person infected with COVID was infecting on average 3.5 other people. Her orders reduced that rate from 3.5 to 1. The number of deaths prevented by that successful reduction in rate of spread in those early months, prior to the availability of any vaccination, is probably in the tens of thousands.[4]
The following year, the University of Michigan School of Public Health estimated that social distancing and other measures, including masking, prevented 109,000 cases and potentially saved 1,960 to 2,800 lives during the 2020 holiday season. Among Midwestern states during that period, Michigan had the most active government response to COVID and the lowest case count; Indiana had the least active government response and the hightest case count.[5]
Masking was (and is) controversial for good reasons. It is inconvenient and uncomfortable. Face coverings hinder communication by muffling speech and hiding facial expression. Being told by someone else that you must stay home, or that you must mask in public feels like—and is—a restriction on very basic human freedoms: the freedoms to be in public places, and to be seen. And a small minority of the population should not wear masks because doing so would harm their health.
Furthermore, rumors and reports have circulated to the effect that masking was not really an effective measure in the control of COVID. But those rumors and reports (including a 2023 study known as the Cochrane study) have been false or flawed. Flawed and falsified studies continue to circulate because they are backed by certain political forces. In May 2024, the American Society for Microbiology published in its journal, Clinical Microbiology Reviews, a review of evidence from over 100 published reviews and primary studies. This study finds that masks, if correctly and consistently worn, reduce the spread of diseases, that N95 and K95 masks are better than surgical masks and cloth masks, and that mask mandates are “effective in reducing community spread of respiratory pathogens.” It also finds that “masks are important sociocultural symbols” and that “non-adherence to masking is sometimes linked to political and ideological beliefs and to widely circulated mis- or disinformation.”[6]
Here in Caledonia we are quite familiar with the sociocultural and political symbolism associated with masking. It would be impossible to ignore those connotations, and foolish to try. But I submit to you, members of this school board, that you have a choice to make.
On the one hand, you could choose to play up the political and sociocultural symbolism of masking. If you do this—either by taking an anti-masking stand or by taking a pro-masking stand—you will be using the symbol of the mask as a deliberate instrument for exacerbating political divisions. You will be promoting division and strife without taking account of the health and safety of the students in this district and their families. I will call this the way of strife.
On the other hand, you could acknowledge the political divisiveness of masking, and make every effort to avoid triggering knee-jerk responses to the mask-as-symbol, either from the right or from the left, while persistently and firmly redirecting your own attention, and the attention of the members of the Caledonia public, to epidemiological realities, and to the fact that the health and safety of our students depends on making the best possible decisions, following not political trends but scientific data. I will call this the way of health.
The two measures proposed to you represent the way of strife.
One of the proposed measures is a resolution attempting to arrogate to this school board the authority to make decisions about public health which it is not competent to make, decisions that might very well involve the school district in legal liabilities which it should not risk. The proposed policy in itself might well be subject to legal challenges, and harms suffered by students as a result of the implementation of this policy in the course of some future epidemic might make the school district subject to lawsuits for damages.
The proposer of this measure, probably knowing that it is likely to provoke litigation, at the same time proposes putting a “constitutional law firm” on retainer. I’m sure members of this board know what “retainer” means. For members of the public who may not, it means this: it means that the district should agree to pay a fixed amount every year to a “constitutional law firm.” More crudely, you could say it means putting them on the dole. The law firm in question is no doubt Kallman Legal of Lansing. Maybe Kallman wrote the documents before you. You will recall the controversial decision of the Ottawa County board of supervisers to put the Kallman Law Firm on a retainer several years ago, and you may know how much money that arrangement cost the people Ottawa County before it crashed.[7]
As a taxpayer in the Caledonia Schools district whose children graduated from Caledonia High School, I gladly pay money every year to support the education of my neighbors’ children, and would gladly pay even more. I do not support the diversion of even one cent from the education of our children to the support of a radical, activist, out-of-district law firm that lines its own pockets by dividing communities and undermining public schools.
I probably need not point out to you that what you decide regarding masks cannot change what was done between 2020 and now in response to COVID. It may, however, affect what happens if an avian flu epidemic strikes in 2025 or 2026. The 1918 avian flu epidemic killed at least 50 million people around the world. You are no doubt aware of the measles cases in Texas. Maybe you have heard of the hanta virus that killed the wife of Gene Hackman, and of the latest hemmorhagic fever outbreaks in Africa. Anything can happen. The question is not whether there will be another epidemic, but when, and how deadly.
So I suggest to you, members of the school board, that since you are responsible for the education of Caledonia’s students, and for their well-being while they are in school, it is your responsibility to reject both of the measures before you. Do not let yourselves be divided by political allegiances that are not directly relevant to the work of educating our students. Do not let yourselves be distracted by the waving of partisan-political banners, whether the image on those banners is a mask or some other sociocultural symbol.
Do not choose the way of strife, deliberately taking a course that will provoke legal challenges and at the same time wasting our money on lawyering up to fight those challenges.
Reject the way of strife. Choose the way of health.
Do the work of supporting public education in Caledonia, and leave public-health policy to those who are qualified and empowered to do that work.
It is possible, with the advantage of several years of distance, to discern ways in which government responses to COVID-19 could have been better. Inevitably, there were mistakes and missteps, both in substance and in style, both by public-health experts and by their right-wing political opponents, from highest levels of the federal government down to the local level. Can we put all that behind us and move ahead responsibly and charitably?
Public-health educators and officials are well aware of both the successes and the failures in the response to COVID-19. A front-page story in the March 9 Detroit Free Press covers the lessons learned; I recommend that you all read that story.[8] Government responses to the COVID-19 epidemic saved countless lives. Perhaps government responses to the next epidemic will be even better.
To the questions before you this week: Making preemptive public-health decisions beyond the actual or legal competency of this board, and lawyering up to defend them, are not good ways of preparing this district to respond well to the next epidemic.
James Ernest
Caledonia
[1] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/.
[2] State health department officials gave the Detroit Free Press this number last week. See https://freep-mi.newsmemory.com/?publink=08579c9e9_134f8e9.
[3] https://www.littler.com/publication-press/publication/fractured-opinion-michigan-supreme-court-strikes-down-governors;
[4] https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/local/detroit-city/2020/06/12/study-whitmer-stay-home-orders-saved-perhaps-tens-thousands-lives/5342143002/
[5] https://sph.umich.edu/news/2021posts/strict-public-health-measures-during-holiday-likely-saved-lives-in-michigan.html
[6] https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/cmr.00124-23
[7] https://www.hollandsentinel.com/story/news/politics/state/2024/04/11/judge-tosses-kallman-lawsuit-challenging-voter-approved-law-changes/73288797007/; https://www.hollandsentinel.com/story/news/politics/state/2023/11/01/kallman-legal-group-adds-donald-trump-to-list-of-republican-clients/71405779007/; https://www.hollandsentinel.com/story/news/politics/county/2025/02/25/ottawa-county-board-terminates-agreement-with-kallman-legal-group/80218850007/.
[8] https://freep-mi.newsmemory.com/?publink=08579c9e9_134f8e9
Verba Sparsa 
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