With the release of the take-home COVID-19 tests issued to every student in the county, the number of COVID-19 cases has steadily plateaued. From the time period where only one school was below the COVID-19 threshold limit (5%), most schools are now well under 1%. The stress that MCPS has put on student safety in the past couple of weeks with the new reporting system is one of the many factors involved in bringing down the cases. This leaves the question, what about advocacy in MCPS?
No more than two weeks ago, students were taking to their fields, parks, and front of schools to get their issues across to their schools. Student-organized walkouts helped bring this issue to the forefront of MCPS advocacy. The recent decline in cases has caused these walkouts to decline in rapid succession. With no news of walkouts recently, many are led to believe in a unanimous consensus on how MCPS is dealing with these issues. Recently, MCPS announced the repeal of the mask mandate in all schools around the country. This issue was a controversial topic for many days, yet the advocacy was still stagnant. There were no significant protest-like attempts in response to decisions made by MCPS as there were previously.
Many were accepting of MCPS’s new “On or Off, It is Just Me” policy, released March 8th, 2022, which formally took down the mask mandate. There was more advocacy for this policy than against it. Unfortunately, Hannah O’ Looney, student member of the MCPS board, was on the receiving end from social media. After expressing her feelings against the mask mandate being lifted, a series of negative Twitter comments flooded her inbox.
This type of advocacy is found all over social media, not just Twitter. This includes the once popular @mcpsstudentwalkout2022 Instagram account, which gained over 1,000 followers in one week. Though this account has been shut down for the last weeks, the influence it had on organizing walkouts around the county was seen everywhere.
With all said and done, advocacy in MCPS in regards to COVID-19 mandates has slowly decreased in the past weeks. Whether this can be attributed to a growing support for the decisions made by the board, or a general indifference to the policies released, the impacts still resonate with us today. The influential walkouts and social media outcries have shown that MCPS staff and students want change.
Written by Daniel Mathew of Poolesville High School.
Photo by Naima Goffney of Richard Montgomery High School