photo by: Rochelle Valverde/Journal-World

The Douglas County Commission discusses a proposed health order regarding masks at its meeting Wednesday, Aug. 18, 2021. From left are commissioners Shannon Reid, Shannon Portillo and Patrick Kelly.

After presiding over an angry crowd opposing the county’s new mask requirement for kids, Douglas County Commission Chair Shannon Portillo said Thursday that she was “heartbroken” about some of the crowd’s rhetoric but hopeful that the vast majority of the community believed in and would follow the health order.

The County Commission meeting stretched late into the evening Wednesday — past the Journal-World’s press time — and included four hours of public comment, which, before the commission moved to those waiting to comment online via Zoom, was dominated by a crowd of about 75 people at the Douglas County Courthouse, as the Journal-World reported. The largely maskless crowd almost exclusively opposed the health order, and some compared the mask requirements to the Holocaust, Japanese internment camps and the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.

Portillo wrote in a public Facebook post Thursday that as the granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor, those comments were especially jarring. Some commenters also used slogans such as “my body, my choice,” which is generally used to support abortion rights. Portillo said she’d gotten an “outpouring of support” from the community throughout the day Thursday and was grateful, but was appalled that white individuals opposed to masks framed a measure meant to protect the community as oppression.

“But I’m also so heartbroken that rhetoric around bodily autonomy, scientific integrity, and systemic oppression was appropriated to oppose a community health measure designed to protect our most vulnerable,” Portillo wrote in the post. “The freedom that our country strives for is a freedom for all people to have the opportunity to thrive, an opportunity that is predicated on safety. Our freedom is not always about avoiding individual inconvenience.”

The health order approved unanimously by the commission Wednesday requires children ages 2 to 12 to wear masks while in indoor public spaces, with several exceptions. After commissioners and health officers were heckled and repeatedly interrupted by the crowd that attended the meeting in person at the courthouse, they attempted to further explain their positions.

Douglas County’s health officer, Dr. Thomas Marcellino, said he had listened to everybody and understood their passion, concerns and respected their opinions. However, Marcellino said that the mask requirement was the best action to take as the community is in the midst of a surge of COVID-19 cases fueled by the more contagious Delta variant. He said masks would help prevent transmission throughout the entire community and keep kids in school.

“This is a very difficult decision,” Marcellino said. “We don’t know what’s going to happen in the next month, so we have to try to make the best decision for our community, for our kids, for our schools.”

Deputy Public Health Officer Dr. Jen Schrimsher said that especially with rules that allow only three feet of separation between students, masks would help prevent repeated outbreaks in schools and more transmission throughout the community. She also said there had already been instances where parents weren’t honest about their kids testing positive or being exposed to a positive case at home, and that masks would help increase safety for kids and their families, school faculty and staff, and the community at large.

“These tools are not siloed from the rest of the community,” Schrimsher said. “We’re all on this huge interconnected spectrum, and I think the more places we can affect change by stopping as much as we can, then we should work to do that.”

Though all but a few of 50 people who spoke in person at the courthouse opposed the mask requirement, once the commission moved to those participating in the meeting online via Zoom, the majority said they supported the mask requirement. The few people who did speak in favor of masks in person at the courthouse were at times interrupted, and some people who later spoke online said they had been at the courthouse but left because they felt uncomfortable.

Portillo began her comments Wednesday by saying she had gotten a lot of emails ahead of the discussion and that opinions were mixed and included a lot of people who were supportive of the mask requirement. Portillo, who continued to be interrupted and jeered by some in the crowd at times as she spoke, said she’d also heard from parents in Baldwin City who said their kids had been bullied for wearing a mask and others who said they were scared to come to the meeting and speak in favor of masks.

“I am not surprised that people chose to email us instead of speaking up in public because of the potential backlash to speaking up in a public space, and I think it’s incredibly important that we move forward with the best science that we have,” Portillo said.

“Show us the science,” someone in the crowd interrupted.

“If there is that many people they could outnumber us,” another said.

Commission Vice Chair Shannon Reid also said that the feedback she’d gotten had been across the spectrum and that she’d also heard concerns from people about bullying based on previous interactions at public meetings. Reid said the information known so far about the Delta variant and its differences from the original COVID strains — Reid was interrupted by yelling at this point, with one person in the crowd also creating noise by stomping their feet on the wood floor of the courthouse — gave leaders valid reasons to take measures to mitigate harm.

Reid also noted the mask requirement did not call for enforcement mechanisms such as ticketing or detainment. Speaking to comments from some people in the crowd that compared mask requirements to the treatment of Jewish people during the Holocaust and other forms of oppression, Reid said a mask mandate to mitigate risk of an infectious disease was incomparable.

“When we compare that to Nazi Germany, to internment camps of Japanese-Americans in our country, those are false equivalencies,” Reid said, meanwhile being interrupted by a woman calling out “it started somewhere” and a man saying “untrue” and “that’s your opinion.”

Commissioner Patrick Kelly began his comments by saying that the commission had listened to what the crowd had to say without interrupting them, and that he would provide his response only if the crowd allowed him to speak.

“I will provide my opinion and my response only to the point that I am not interrupted or shouted over,” Kelly said.

Kelly said he was happy to hear that some in the crowd had remained healthy through the pandemic, but that he wanted to pause for a minute and recognize that many people have loved ones currently suffering from COVID-19. Kelly went on to say that the ideas being talked about were big ones, such as authority versus freedom, what science says and the changing nature of truth.

Kelly, who also works for the Lawrence public school district, said he understood that masks could present some challenges for children, but that he was weighing that against the possibility of school outbreaks and the interruption of learning. He said outbreaks could lead to students having to quarantine and isolate for 10 days, causing them to miss school and valuable classroom instruction with their teachers.

“For me, I’m an educator, I’m a teacher, I know what it’s like to have kids in schools, I value kids in schools,” Kelly said. “And I know especially for our most vulnerable kids, they need to be in schools. And I’m very concerned that if we do not use all the mitigation powers at our disposal, that our students will be quarantined and isolated.”

Following Kelly’s comments, the commission voted unanimously to approve the health order. After the vote, some in the crowd yelled “we will not comply” and that the commissioners would be “voted out.” One woman said that she had brought her kids with her to give them a lesson on how government worked, and that she had been disappointed.

“Did you witness that?” one man said as he left the courthouse. “That is them taking our country and our rights.”

The Lawrence school district already had a mask requirement, but the Baldwin City and Eudora school districts were not requiring masks before the order went into effect Thursday. Some parents said Wednesday that if the health order passed they would be taking their children out of school. The Journal-World has reached out to the Baldwin City and Eudora school districts to see how many parents had done so, and will update this story with that information once it becomes available.