The mother of a 10-year-old Franklin Square student is suing the school district and the state, saying in court documents that the child suffers from severe asthma and anxiety and should not be required to wear a mask in school.
The suit, filed Tuesday in the U.S. District Court in the Eastern District, does not identify the child, who is called “Sarah Doe” in the legal papers and lists her mother, Jane Doe, as the plaintiff on her behalf.
The action asks for injunctive relief so that the child can safely return to school this fall. It alleges the state’s school mask mandate is unconstitutional and violates the child’s due process rights and names the district and state Health Commissioner Howard A. Zucker as defendants.
The court documents said the child’s pediatrician certified that it was unsafe for her to wear a mask all day at school and wrote a medical exemption, but the district officially denied the exemption on Friday.
“This denial violates Sarah’s fundamental rights. Sarah and her family have constitutionally protected rights to a medical exemption from a state regulation that can cause Sarah harm,” the court document said.
On Aug. 24, the day she was sworn in, Gov. Kathy Hochul said she would mandate masks for students, staff and visitors to all New York K-12 schools. She said the mandate was necessary to help control the spread of the highly-contagious delta variant of the coronavirus, which has caused a surge in COVID-19-related cases, hospitalizations and deaths.
Three days later, the state Health Department put a mandate in place for universal masking inside school buildings. Infectious disease experts praised Hochul’s move, saying it will help keep kids safe.
Guidance issued last week to districts from the state health department says that “people with medical or developmental conditions that prevent them from wearing a mask may be exempted from mask requirements, as documented by a medical provider.”
Neither Franklin Square school officials nor the state Health Department could immediately be reached for comment Wednesday.
According to the paperwork, the child has had severe respiratory challenges since birth and has ended up in the emergency room due to severe asthma attacks. She is also prone to anxiety, exacerbated by her struggles to breathe when wearing a mask.
The court papers say the student faced numerous challenges last year as a fifth-grade student when she was masked in school.
She had to start carrying her asthma pump to school and she began needing to administer it to herself more and more frequently as her breathing became increasingly difficult due to mask use, according to the court douments.
“Until last year, Sarah had gotten all A’s and was a model student. Her grades began slipping and she was frequently asked to go to the principal’s office for pulling down her mask to try to breathe. … Sarah’s anxiety became crippling,” the court documents state.
Before the start of school, her mother submitted a medical exemption from Sarah’s pediatrician, but that was denied based on a recommendation from the district’s doctor who, according to the court papers, “based this decision on review of the CDC website which makes generalized representations about asthma and face masks.”
Her mother had submitted a physician’s exemption as well last spring but that too was denied after a review by the school’s doctor, the court papers said.
The court documents also questioned the use of masks against the spread of COVID-19.
“Plaintiff does not consent to allow her daughter to be forced to use this experimental device, especially as it would be against the medical advice of her child’s treating physician,” the court paper read. The child “has a protected Fourteenth Amendment right to life, and to protect her daughter’s life, secured by the Due Process Clause of the United States Constitution, which includes the right to refuse non-consensual administration of any objectionable medical product, and/or to be free from the forced administration of medical procedures and devices that Plaintiff reasonably believes may cause her daughter harm.”
