Shoes Placed Outside Middletown School In Vaccine Mandate Protest

MIDDLETOWN, NJ — On Sunday night, a group of Middletown parents and their children left hundreds of pairs of shoes outside Middletown High School North, to protest what they fear will be eventual childhood coronavirus vaccine requirements from the state, as California has put in place.

So far, California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) is the only governor in the nation to require all schoolchildren show proof of a coronavirus vaccine to attend school. In late October, just before the election, Gov. Phil Murphy said he has "zero expectation" he’ll require kids' COVID vaccines should he be re-elected to a second term.

A spokeswoman for the governor did not respond when asked about the parents' shoe protest. Gov. Murphy lives in Middletown.

Up to 500 pairs of children's shoes were left outside High School North, many accompanied by handwritten notes from Middletown schoolchildren reading things like "Mommy makes my medical decisions" and "Don't make me leave school."

However, some of the moms said late Sunday night two adult men and a woman were seen removing the shoes from school grounds. This has not been confirmed by Middletown Police. The shoes have not been recovered.

Cara Segall, one of the Middletown moms who participated Sunday night, said she fears a children's vaccine mandate is right around the corner in New Jersey.

"I know there is no mandate yet, but it's coming," she said. "They've mandated other vaccines; why wouldn't they mandate this one? They will slip it into a bill and we'll again have to be scrounging in Trenton fighting this. Our children will have to get two COVID shots a year forever if we don't fight this now."

"Where there is risk, there should be choice," said another Middletown mom, Edie Nicosia, who said she already pulled her two daughters out of school because neither could tolerate daily mask wearing. "All of us mama bears that have been fighting Murphy’s unconstitutional mandates for a very long time realize that vaccine mandates are a possibility."

"There are no long-term safety studies. My kids are not guinea pigs; they are not post-market research," she added. "We are paying some of the highest taxes in the country and we are no longer able to use the public school system."

The CDC says that COVID-19 vaccines have undergone – and will continue to undergo – the most intensive safety monitoring in U.S. history, and recommends that all Americans be vaccinated.

Both mothers pointed to heart inflammation that has been reported in teen boys and young adults after vaccination, which the CDC is currently monitoring. However, the CDC says the risk of heart inflammation is rare, and the risk of a child being seriously sickened by coronavirus far outweigh the potential risks of having a bad reaction to the vaccine.

Sunday night's protest was organized by New Jersey for Medical Freedom, a group against vaccine mandates. Segall said she signed up right away to participate when she saw the protest circulating on Facebook. She even volunteered her house as a drop-off point where parents could leave shoes.

She said Middletown school superintendent Mary Ellen Walker told the parents Sunday night they were committing vandalism; Walker did not return a request for comment.

Segall protested on the Statehouse steps two years ago when some New Jersey lawmakers tried to remove the religious exemption that parents use to not vaccinate their children, or put them on a slower vaccine schedule. In a very narrow vote, that proposal passed the Assembly, but failed to get enough votes in the state Senate. That was in January 2020. The state Legislature said they would "revisit" the topic and again try to remove the exemption, but then COVID struck in March of that year.

Segall stressed that she is not an "anti vaxxer."

"Regular childhood vaccines have been studied for years," she said. "They've been around a lot longer. But this shot is new technology that has never been injected into humans. There are so many things we don't know about them. People don't realize, or don't want to realize, they are part of a big medical experiment."

"We're not comfortable with the new COVID vaccines; we're actually more comfortable with our children getting COVID," she added. Get great local news: https://patch.com/subscribe

Those who participated in Sunday night's protest did get some push-back on social media, where other Middletown parents pointed out they chose to do the shoe drop on the first night of Hanukkah and that it was in poor taste, and a reference to children killed in the Holocaust.

Segall, who is Jewish, said she is deeply offended by the criticism.

"I am Jewish. My husband is Jewish. Our son had his bar mitzvah; my grandmother's entire family was killed in the Holocaust," she said, emotion in her voice. "Sunday night was the night we chose because it worked. We wanted to do this last week, but there was the Homecoming dance and then Thanksgiving. This could have been done on Yom Kippur, Rosh Hashanah, any of those. It never crossed my mind or my husband's mind that this — or we — would be considered anti-Semitic. That's a very serious accusation and one that I am not going to put up with."

Similar"shoe drop" protests are currently happening at schools all over the country, to represent the number of children whose parents say they will pull them out of public school if COVID vaccines are mandated. Shoes were dropped outside more than 50 schools on Long Island last week, according to local news reports. A spokesman for NJ for Medical Freedom said her group has upcoming shoe-drop protests planned at dozens more New Jersey schools.

Early on in the pandemic, a collection of nurses left their shoes outside Congress, to protest the lack of personal protective equipment.

Both Segall and Nicosia said they were disappointed the shoes were stolen, because after the protest they were going to be donated to a non-profit in Newark that provides clothing to the homeless.

Be the first to know. Sign up to get Patch emails: https://patch.com/subscribe Contact this Patch reporter: Carly.baldwin@patch.com