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‘Double standard’ hurts music

Recently, restrictions were relaxed to allow organized extra-curricular high risk sports to resume practices with the goal of participating in games and contests. It is also now permissible to have two spectators per player at home games.

I am an instrumental music teacher, and I am writing to call attention to the draconian restrictions that our New York State public school music programs are struggling under at this time.

Our students are required to remain 12 feet apart when playing or singing, yet, according to our state and local health departments, it is apparently not detrimental to anyone’s health to participate in basketball, wrestling, hockey, soccer, cheerleading, and now football, all without masks.

I have nothing against sports, but this is a double standard that cannot and should not be tolerated. It is demoralizing and infuriating to see the huge pictures in the media every day of students playing basketball, their faces inches away from each other, with no masks. Our music students deserve to be allowed the consideration of being able to play and sing 6 feet apart. It’s been done successfully and safely in many other states. Now is the time to change the restriction to 6 feet.

Currently, it is permissible for student athletes to tackle each other, touch each other, breathe heavily on each other, spit on each other, sweat on each other, and travel to other schools.

Music students are only asking to be able to sit 6 feet apart and play or sing, in their own schools. Now is the time to change the restriction to 6 feet. Each day that passes, our music students lose their community, one of the things that keep many of them engaged in school. Our students are also the future of our culture, the culture of our very humanity, and I fear that culture is in danger of fading under the spectre of a sports driven society.

Please, someone do something and change the restriction, and please change it now. Don’t let our music students lose even more than they already have.

Helen Ihasz is a music teacher at Westfield Academy and Central Schools and is a Fredonia resident.

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