Former state senator: COVID vaccine mandate for kids would be ‘assault on parental rights’

The Seattle Public Schools board has expressed interest in pushing for a COVID-19 vaccine mandate for all kids who are eligible once the vaccine gets full approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

Some have stated that they believe this would be a disturbing position for the school district to take, and Mark Miloscia is one of them. He’s a former state senator and currently runs the Family Policy Institute of Washington.

“I was horrified,” Miloscia told the Jason Rantz Show when asked about his reaction to the district putting this to a vote. “This is another absolute assault on parental rights.”

The school district’s board was expected to take up a resolution earlier in November that would ask the state to add the COVID shot to the list of immunizations required for public school students. As KIRO 7 TV reports, if the board passed the measure, it would send a request to the state.

The board decided to push the vote back, and could potentially revisit it again on Nov. 17.

Miloscia believes if the COVID vaccine was mandated for school children in Washington, many parents would pull their kids out of public schools.

“There’s a lot of religious and personal reasons for not taking this vaccine,” he said. “And a lot of folks do not trust the authorities — the public health departments, all the way up to Biden and what’s going on at the federal level. So when you see people quitting their jobs and moving because of vaccine mandates at work, we’re going to see the same sort of thing here in schools.”

“What happens when a school district, 10% of the students leave? Or their parents pull them out? I mean, it’s going to cause disruptions, like you will not believe how big it will be,” he added.

If Gov. Inslee were to mandate vaccinations for children in Washington in the near future, Miloscia says it would be a use of his emergency powers.

“This is a power grab by Governor Inslee, which he should not be doing at all,” Miloscia said. “… Science doesn’t back him, common sense doesn’t back him, the death rate doesn’t back him. But he’s going to do this and he’s going to push children out of the public schools. It’s another reason to abandon the public schools.”

“Nobody wants to see our public school system crash and burn,” Miloscia clarified, “but that will happen if he does this.”

The state Superintendent for Public Instruction, Chris Reykdal, has previously stated that he would not push for a COVID vaccine mandate for students until there is full federal approval, not just an emergency use authorization, for the vaccine for kids. That means it goes through a federal panel, and then goes through a process in each of the 50 states by the state boards of health.

He also made it clear that such a mandate will not be a district decision.

“What I have continued to tell the governor and public health officials — and I’ve been very public about — is this needs to go through the process that it would go through for any kid vaccine requirement,” Reykdal told KIRO Radio in October.

“We have lots of vaccines that are required of our students in the state,” he noted. “And we’ve been doing it for decades with really high compliance by parents, or they have an exemption process.”

Nearly 90% of Washington’s public school employees vaccinated against COVID

At this time, all K-12 public, private, and charter school teachers and staff statewide are required to be vaccinated against COVID-19 — with limited exceptions for medical or religious reasons.

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