Elmhurst Teacher: End 'Inappropriate' Questions For Students

ELMHURST, IL — It's rare for teachers or other school employees to speak during public input at school board meetings, perhaps because they fear for their jobs. On Wednesday, though, an Elmhurst teacher did speak out.

At a school board meeting, Ingrid Palmer-Ruddle, a Churchville Middle School teacher, spoke in favor of making masks and vaccines optional for students.

"I think it's interesting that many people here are asking for masks to be required while also taking off their masks to speak, yet if that was the case, I would be required to speak all day to my students with a mask while pregnant and exhausted, which I really don't enjoy," she said to applause.

Last year, she said, many of her students were told to quarantine because they had close contact with those testing positive for the coronavirus. Yet she said they were completely fine and feeling completely disengaged from their learning while at home.

She concluded her remarks by saying, "I ask the district to provide guidance about ending the conversations about students' medical information and asking questions of them that are inappropriate," Palmer-Ruddle said.

She did not give any examples of such questions.

Later in the meeting, board member Jim Collins noted Palmer-Ruddle's point about the conversations.

"We need to end teachers having conversations with kids in school about medical decisions," he said. "Those medical decisions are between the student and their parents and the family and their family physician, period."

Patch could find no public statement about masks from the Elmhurst Teachers Council, the union that represents local teachers. The union appears to have minimized its presence on Facebook, where it frequently criticized District 205's administration on pandemic issues in summer 2020.

Last school year, the union filed a complaint with the state educational labor board, alleging the district did not comply with its own requirements for in-person learning when it decided to reopen in January. The labor board sided with the district.