About 100 people gathered Saturday near Gov. Phil Murphy’s Middletown Township home to protest new mask rules for students this fall.
The gathering followed Friday’s announcement that students in preschool through 12th grade, as well as teachers and visitors, must wear masks inside when the academic year begins.
“This is not an announcement that gives any of us or me personally any pleasure,” the governor said when he issued the mandate. “But as the school year approaches, and with the numbers rapidly increasing, it is the one that we need to make.”
Coronavirus hospitalizations are ticking up in the state and now exceed 630, although that total is nowhere near the thousands of people who were hospitalized daily at the height of the pandemic.
The new order has received mixed reaction from school superintendents and criticism from Republicans.
On Saturday, local police set up a penned in protest area on the governor’s street, but the crowd instead chose to stand around the corner on Navesink River Road so they would be visible to more traffic.
Protestors said masks should be a personal choice. Some described vaccines, which public health experts overwhelmingly support as safe, as “poison” and said the governor was a communist.
The crowd remained peaceful.
Protestors also stood Friday near the elementary school in East Brunswick where the governor made the announcement, with some shouting, “My child, my choice!”
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Aristide Economopoulos can be reached at aeconomopoulos@njadvancemedia.com and you can follow him on Twitter at @AristideNJAM and Instagram.
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