Prairie State Wire

Republican candidate for governor Paul Schimpf views Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s new mask mandate as just the latest example of him abusing his powers.

“This is an issue I've been concerned about really for the past five years,” Schimpf told Prairie State Wire. “You know, when I was a state senator, one of the things that my fellow senators got tired of me saying during Senate debates was that we, the Illinois Senate, are not and should not be a 59-member school board. All those policy decisions ought to be made by local school board members that are accessible to parents and accountable to parents.”

Flexing his executive power muscle, the governor recently imposed a statewide masking mandate on all public and private school students. The mandate also applies to all teachers and other staffers.

Schimpf sees the move as being all wrong in terms of what’s in the best interest of the state.

“The genius of our system, of controlling our education, is that it's parents acting through their locally elected school board members who they know they can interact with and hold accountable,” he said. “Those are the ones that are making our education decisions. You know, the governor acting through the state board of education has really usurped control of education away from parents and local school boards.”

Schimpf isn’t the only one blasting the governor over what they see as his iron-fisted way of doing things.

"It's always fear and confusion,” Wirepoints President Ted Dabrowski said in a Cities929.com interview shortly after Pritzker formalized his latest mandate.

“There's a lot of information that the public needs in order to start operating normally because we're a year and a half into this,” he said. “We've got to start getting back to some normalcy. And the way they present the data doesn't allow us to really understand or trust them. A lot of people don't trust what's coming out of the officials, you know, either at the CDC or at the local level."

While the governor continues to defend his actions as part of his plan to keep residents safe, pointing to how the Centers for Disease Control is now also recommending universal indoor masking for all teachers, staff, students and visitors to K-12 schools regardless of vaccination status, critics like Dabrowski view it as just the latest instance of the governor acting like a dictator.

"School districts, they can be making their own decisions about whether to open or not based on local COVID conditions, what the public wants,” Dabrowski said. “But instead, we've got another edict coming down from the governor, and that just doesn't make sense anymore. We've had 10 deaths under the age of 17 in Illinois, and most of those kids had had some serious health issues. So for the normal, healthy kid ... it's more risky to send your kids out on his bicycle or to the lake than it is to fear COVID at this point."

In-person learning is slated to resume at school across the state over the next several weeks.