Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, made me an offer over drinks. If I sent her a proposal to end school masks, she would take it to the CDC. First, she wanted one tweet. I did not yet know what she would do with it.
On Marathon Sunday 2021, I sat across from Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, at an outdoor table on Columbus Avenue. We met at The Milling Room, an Upper West Side restaurant that closed last December. I wanted her help to take masks off children.
My younger daughter drew two yellow faces for Randi. The first wears a dark mask above the words "this is what I dont want." The second smiles above the words "this is what I do want." She was seven, and the mask made her miserable. I brought the drawing to the table.
How I got Randi Weingarten to meet me
In fall 2021, New York still made every public school child wear a mask indoors. I had fought for over a year to open schools. That fall I launched a campaign that challenged adults to #MaskLikeAKid for one day, the way children did five days a week.
On September 30, 2021, Randi's union co-hosted a panel on masks in schools with Open Schools USA, a parent group. Dr. Jay Bhattacharya and Dr. Tracy Beth Høeg questioned the evidence for masking children.
Open Schools USA founder Michelle Walker and Erich Hartmann, who co-founded Open Schools Westchester, told me how: Randi listened to parents, so I should message her on Twitter. I did, and she wrote back. Before she agreed to meet, she checked me out with Open Schools USA. They vouched for me and told her I wasn't crazy.
Randi arrived fresh from a political loss. She had shared the stage at the final event of Terry McAuliffe's campaign for Virginia governor, and he had just lost to Glenn Youngkin. A Fox News column later argued that her appearance “might well have cost him the election.”
The week the press caught Randi Weingarten without a mask
Just before we met, Randi went to San Juan for SOMOS, the yearly conference where New York's political class gathers in Puerto Rico. Governor Kathy Hochul and Mayor-elect Eric Adams attended too. Puerto Rico required masks in all indoor spaces. A parent posted photos of Randi sitting maskless on a panel beside New York City Schools Chancellor Meisha Porter, and Fox News picked up the story.
Randi answered on Twitter that she wears a mask “most of the time indoors”. In another reply, she blamed a room “larger than a classroom” and an audio system that “was bad,” and said, “I wore my mask the rest of the conference.” Our children had the same trouble hearing in every classroom, and nobody let them take their masks off.
When Randi called to set our meeting, she suggested we sit outside. The press had just caught her without a mask, she said. As I remember it, she gave me one more reason for San Juan: she was a white woman in a room of people of color who had all removed their masks, and she felt she should do the same.
An hour on Columbus Avenue
We talked a little over an hour over drinks, and the conversation stayed friendly. I ordered an herbal gin and tonic. I gave Randi the gifts my daughter made for her: a card in rainbow Pride colors and a loom bracelet. She accepted them graciously. Then a woman walking past handed Randi a necklace that celebrated the COVID vaccine, like the “vaccinated” necklace Governor Hochul said she wore “all the time.” Randi took that, too.
I told Randi I learned English in a classroom by watching faces, and my daughter's classmates could not see each other's faces at all. Then I showed her the drawing.
The ask: "Bring me a proposal"
By then, the New York Post had reported that Randi's union lobbied the CDC on its February 2021 school reopening guidance. The emails showed the agency took some of the union's language nearly word for word. Randi had a line to the CDC that no parent had.
So I made my ask. I told her she had influence at the CDC and I did not, and I asked her to use it to unmask our children.
Her answer gave me hope. If I sent her a proposal, she said, she would pass it to the CDC and see what they could do. Then she asked for one thing: when I got home, she wanted me to tweet that we had met and were building bridges. She would share it to show America that parents and unions could work together for children.
The tweet we wrote
I went home unsure. I did not want to polish Randi's image, and I badly wanted her promise to be true. I called Dr. Tracy Beth Høeg, a physician and epidemiologist whose work on children and COVID I trusted, and asked her to help me write the proposal. She said yes right away. With a few other people, we wrote the tweet.
Randi reposted it and replied the same day: “Looking forward to more listening and talking.. we have to work together to help our kids.”
Dr. Tracy Beth Høeg answered Randi in public
That evening, Tracy Beth Høeg, MD, PhD wrote to Randi in public. She warned that metrics for an off-ramp assume masks do something good for children, and the evidence did not show that. She ended with one line: “So we should just make masking optional.”
She also caught a problem that would emerge in the longer term. If you plan an off-ramp, you accept that the masks did something good in the first place.
What Randi Weingarten did with my tweet
“Maybe it’s vaccines for kids helping us get to an off ramp for masks and getting to a new normal.” Randi Weingarten, November 9, 2021
In public that week, Randi sounded different than she did to me. That same Sunday, she tweeted that she looked forward “to the day we end masks in school,” and she agreed with Mayor-elect Adams that it “must be done with the science.”
Two days later, she moved the goalposts. She wrote, “Maybe it’s vaccines for kids helping us get to an off ramp for masks and getting to a new normal.” She took my word, off-ramp, and tied it to vaccines for children. I answered on Twitter: “Randi, we know kids don't "need" vaccines to help us remove masks- we just take them off!”
New York City kept its school mask mandate for four more months. It ended for students on March 7, 2022. The city kept masks on its two- to four-year-olds even longer.
Randi tied the end of masks to vaccines for children. By August 2022, a vaccine rule kept 374,705 New York City students out of Public School Athletic League sports and other "high-risk" after-school activities, because they did not have two doses of the COVID-19 vaccine. We told that story in this video.
What came out later
The rest came out over the next two years. At an April 2023 House hearing, the subcommittee learned that Randi had a direct phone line to the CDC director. In June 2023, Director Rochelle Walensky told Congress she believed Randi had both her official and personal cell numbers, and she confirmed the two exchanged texts. You can see that hearing in our film 15 DAYS.
I went through those emails line by line in our series The Closed Classroom.
Looking back, I believe Randi wanted the tweet more than the proposal.
She also held far more power over our children's masks than most of us knew.
How Restore Childhood began
That conversation changed how I saw my role in all of this advocacy. For almost two years, officials told families to trust the experts and wait. Randi's answer showed me that waiting would never end the masks or restore our children.
I left that table sure that our work had to speak to parents directly, not to officials and bureacrats who kept asking us to wait.
So we created the Urgency of Normal to end school masking, and we took it straight to parents. Tracy and I organized it together. Restore Childhood began there: with one conversation, one drawing, and the belief that parents with evidence can move a room.
Our most-watched video, The Mask Will Come Off... Tomorrow?, has more than 35,000 views.
Five years later, I still think about the drawing on that table. My daughter knew what she wanted without reading a single study. She needed adults to bring her message, with the evidence, to the people in charge. A parent's voice has real weight, and when we come with evidence, nobody in the room has more right to speak for our children.
The same fight goes on today over what schools teach children about their bodies and their country. Restore Childhood builds tools for that fight, like our Gender Toolkit, so families walk into every meeting prepared.
Did you fight for open schools and against the child madnates? Tell me your story in the comments.
No one is coming to save our kids but us. Watch 15 DAYS and support our work.
This was such a good piece! And it sheds an interesting light on how crassly political the decision-making about our children was. I'm guessing the Teachers Union and/or the Dept of Ed had a deal with the CDC or big Pharma to do these ridiculous, unscientific things. Thank you so much for battling the evil and the nonsense that harmed our kids!