Unmasked and Unafraid: "I want to get involved and bring change to the community.”
A Lake County teenager is on the front lines of choice movement and speaks his truth on masking and the COVID-19 vaccine
(Photo Credit: Chicago Tribune)
Every morning, Calen Shackleford makes the two-mile drive from his home in suburban Gurnee, Illinois to Warren Township High School’s Almond Campus.
Just like thousands of other students and faculty members on any given weekday, the high school junior gets out of his car and walks to the school’s main entrance on Almond Rd. in Gurnee.
But once Calen walks through the front doors of the school there is one noticeable difference about the 17-year-old compared to his classmates.
He’s maskless. And he remains maskless throughout the school day.
The first two weeks of school, Calen could see the looks. The skeptical squinting of the eyes, the sudden turns in his direction of curious heads.
All of the collective non-verbal expressions added up to a mass inquisitive cross-examination, the question on the top of each interrogate’s mind - who is that kid and why is his face not muzzled like mine?
“They would give me weird looks because I’m not wearing a mask,” Shackleford said. “The school is so big I could run into a different teacher every day and they don’t even know.”
What they didn’t know, and many still don’t, is that Shackleford, along with his twin brother, Caleb, are the lone maskless students on a campus of 2,400 students.
The reason Calen and Caleb aren’t required to muzzle their faces like the rest of their peers, by way of Governor Pritzker’s August 4 Executive Order, is a medical exemption granted by the school district.
Mercedes Shackleford, Calen and Caleb’s mother and a nurse, said she did not want to disclose how the family received the exemption. In July, she and her husband, Calen and Caleb’s father, met with District 121 superintendent Dr. John Ahlgrim. In that meeting the Shackleford’s were adamant in how their sons would enter the building the first day of school in mid-August.
“We made it very clear to him that there was going to be no complying (with mask mandate) in August,” Mercedes said.
Mercedes and her husband presented Ahlgrim with data “and packets and more packets of science-based research.”
She said Ahlgrim was open-minded during the meeting but did fall back on the “‘well I’m not an expert and I don’t have all the information’ stuff. I said well, ‘let’s not say you don’t have the information anymore because we are giving it to you.’”
By the time the school year started, Mercedes got the exemption for Calen and Caleb.
“I have to give credit where credit is due. They have been very good to my sons.”
It had been almost a year since the onset of what was widely described then as the “coronavirus pandemic” when Calen Shackleford had an awakening.
A sophomore at Warren in February 2021, taking classes through a computer most days, Calen had to find a way to get out of the house. He decided to get a job.
“We were wearing masks morning until evening,” Calen said.
By happenstance, he walked into a local small business one day. He felt comfortable with the employees and decided to apply. He got the job but had to wear a mask while working.
Spring allergy season soon hit. The masks were more miserable than ever.
“If you had a runny nose and you’re wearing a mask and it’s just absolutely disgusting,” Calen said. “I knew then, ‘I don’t want to wear one. What can I do?’”
Calen spoke to a sympathetic co-worker who told him of a group of people that felt like he did. They called themselves “Parents For Lake County” had regular meetings and brought in speakers. He was invited to attend.
By April, Calen decided to go to a meeting.
“I’m like, ‘this is not right.’ Someone has to do something. Sitting back and complaining about it is not going to work,” Calen said. “I want to get involved and bring change to the community.”
Before March 2020, sightings of public mask-wearing was mostly reserved for YouTube clips of Asians wandering the streets of Tokyo or Beijing. The pollution, we believed.
Asian culture made it polite to wear masks when people “were sick, to protect others. One was expected to wear them, and it was considered extremely selfish not to” according to a 2020 article in Psychology Today.
The SARS outbreak in 2002-03 gave the Asian population a preventative viral excuse for face muzzling, although one not based in science:
It became commonplace to wear masks to protect oneself from germs, not just to protect others. By 2010, mask-wearing had become extremely common, even stylish, in Asia.
That psyche, a combination of fear and fashion, was never adopted here in the United State during SARS. Maybe it was due to the fact SARS never became that widespread here twenty years ago. If it had, would Americans have become conditioned to the donning of surgical masks and N95’s, SARS serving as a communicable primer for the onset of Covid?
One would have to analyze the political climate two decades ago to offer any true examination. Because most likely, science then would have taken a backseat to regulation and mandates, just as it is today in the Age of Covid.
Pushback on governmental overreach, filtering downstream into local municipalities and school districts, would have to start at the grassroots level, in coffee shops and library meeting rooms in small towns across the United States.
That’s the environment - to respectfully question authority, to hold those in positions of power accountable - Mercedes Shackleford and her husband foster and encourage in their household today. Mercedes didn’t know it would take a pandemic for one of twin sons, Calen, to absorb the message enough to act.
“He’s really grown in maturity the past year, year and a half and certainly being put through these unusual circumstances with which we were all life, has I guess propelled him into the more active in standing up for what he believes in,” Mercedes said. “He’s willing to put himself out there and take some heat. It’s pretty incredible to see.”
When Calen told her about the group his co-worker mentioned, “Parents For Lake County Kids,” Mercedes decided she wanted to go herself.
When she listened to the speakers talk about the damage public health mandates were doing to the country, about how freedoms were being diminished, those discussions continued at home. Calen started to ask questions and engage more with the group.
“He hears conversations and my husband and I talk openly with the group. I think being around it has made an impact,” Mercedes said.
Said Calen: “Seeing this overwhelming group of people who were like, ‘hey this isn’t right either’ and knowing I had their support is what really led me to be like, ‘OK, let’s enact change’ because it’s very hard to do by yourself. But knowing I have this group I was like ‘OK let’s demonstrate and see what we can do.’”
The demonstrations started in the summer. In front of the Lake County Health Department. At Gurnee Days, the town’s annual festival. At Warren Township High School, on the day the school sponsored a vaccination clinic.
With each sign made rejecting the voodoo science served up by the medical establishment, Calen felt more emboldened to speak his rapidly developing truth, how universal masking is wrong and how it’s not wise to trust the government’s motives in regards to the vaccine and the speed of its production and distribution.
“When I was little I did get vaccines. So I’m not anti-vax. I’m anti whatever this (COVID-19) vaccine is,” Calen said. “It’s newer technology and I’m against this one. To just throw a blanket statement out and say you are (anti-science), I don’t think that’s fair.”
According to the Illinois State Board of Education, medical exemptions for defying the school mask mandate can be granted when:
Individuals who have a condition or medical contraindication (e.g., difficulty breathing) that prevents them from wearing a face mask are required to provide documentation from the individual’s health care provider.
But getting that documentation and approval has been hard to come by.
“It’s not easy to get a medical exemption. Very few doctors feel comfortable writing for this,” said a Lake County parent who’s husband is a physician. "They’re searching for doctors that are willing to step up and write exemptions and they are becoming so popular that they are not taking new patients.
“They are really hard to find.”
One of the lucky parents who found a physician who would write an exemption, it was not a slam-dunk decision for Mercedes or her husband to actually put it to practice.
When the exemption approval came through, she didn’t sleep for a few nights before school started. “It’s not easy when kids stare and ask ‘hey where’s your mask’ and teachers that will literally chase them down the hall,” she said.
She sat Calen and Caleb down and asked them if they were sure they wanted to go to school maskless, to stand out, to open themselves up to scrutiny and ridicule.
“I gave the boys an option. You do not have to do this, I said, I can get you out of it and if you don’t want to take the heat, I completely respect you,” she said. “They both looked at me and said, ‘no we’re doing this.’”
We’ve all said this or words like it many times over these past 18 months.
When in a discussion with a friend, co-worker or family member about Covid.
“It’s all over the map. The inconsistencies in enforcement are ridiculous.”
Calen sees it at Warren every day.
One teacher will insist on masks over the nose. Others are lax.
“It’s very much teacher-dependent. I have teachers that are on top of the kids like it’s nobody’s business and others who don’t feel like having the confrontation,” Calen said.
He looks forward to lunch period, third period, when his classmates are allowed to remove the masks. But one daily inconsistency drives him crazy.
“It just feels normal to be able to look across the cafeteria to a whole bunch of faces and smilies,” Calen said of his lunch period. “But let’s say a student has to stand up from their table to throw away their trash in the trash can, 20 feet away. If they stand up without a mask they are going to get yelled at from across the cafeteria. A security guard will come running towards them. But they can sit down next to a group of students and not wear a mask? The logic for me, it pains me to watch it happen.
“To see the lack of common sense there, it hurts me.”
Calen subverts his natural human reaction to say something to the security guard (“do you know how absurd this is!”) but he doesn’t want to make waves with administrators. “I’m already on their radar. I don’t want to cause more trouble,” he said.
(Calen said Warren Township High School has been gracious about the waiver. For the most part, school officials respect the exemption and leave him alone.)
His friends don’t bug him too much about the masking. And Calen avoids bringing it up. He prefers to be a normal teenager that way and not have conversations get too heavy.
“I've been asked, ‘how did you get, you know, so lucky’ and then other friends are like ‘big deal.’ My friends that lean a little bit more left are like ‘he doesn't wear a mask big deal.’ They've never asked me, but they also don't complain about it too much,” Calen said. “I've heard a comment like, ‘it’s so hot in here why can’t I just pull my mask down’ but some students are, like, ‘you are lucky.’ So it's kind of like an even mix right now.”
He has encouraged acts of civil disobedience amongst his friends, one time leading a small maskless group into a local grocery store in violation of the mandate. They know Calen to be against masking and questioning of the vaccine, but not totally aware of the other life their friend lives - that of an activist for change.
This Saturday, the first one in October, the group is planning another demonstration somewhere in Lake County. They will make signs, share stories and answer questions from strangers about the efficacy of masking and the vaccine.
Unless he gets called into work, Calen plans to be there. Where else would he be, other than on the front lines doing the work necessary to advance forward a movement he believes to be the most important of his young life.
“There was times, like in the beginning of the school year, when I was like, I’d come home from school and I would say ‘mom, it would just be so much easier to put masks on because then I wouldn't feel like this.’ When I first started, there was a lot of pressure. I don’t feel that way anymore," Calen said. “I think the upcoming elections are really important and it’s just going to continue unless we try and get (Pritzker) out of office.
“But for right now, the most you can do is just tell people, ‘hey, you know, if you don't like what's going on, don't sit and complain.’ Do something about it.”
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Good job Mercedes’, Calen, and Calen!!!!! We’re with you all the way!!!!👍👍👍
100% behind you. To bad the media lacks your courage and won’t question the absurdness and hypocrisy