[News] Dad thrown out of school board meeting after refusing to wear mask

A father was thrown out of a school board meeting this week after he refused to wear a mask.

Dave Calus was not wearing a mask while sitting in a chair watching a presentation at a board of education meeting in Webster, New York, on Tuesday night, Feb 8, when a security guard approached him and asked him to put on a face covering.

Calus said he told the guard “Thank you,” but refused to cover up. The officer persisted, saying “No, you need to put your mask on right now.”

The security guard then dragged Calus’ chair towards the back of the room.

When Calus turned around to confront the security guard, the guard pushed him out of a back door, video posted to the Facebook page ROC for Educational Freedom Public Page shows.

“What are you doing?!” the woman filming the video yells. “What are you doing?! Holy crap. Holy crap.”

“That is assault. That is assault.” the woman says.

“Do you put your hands on our children, too?” another lady asks the guard.

The incident occurred one day before New York Gov. Kathy Hochul announced an end to indoor mask mandate for businesses, citing a 93 percent drop in COVID-19 cases.

Calus, a father of two, who has one son in high school and another in college, claims the incident was unprovoked.

Calus said on Kimberly’s Revolution podcast: “I went into the building without a mask on. I signed in and they said ‘you need to wear a mask.’ I said ‘thank you.’”

“I signed in, they handed me a mask – I did not put the mask on – and I put it in my pocket.”

Calus said the school board separated parents who refused to wear masks from the other abiding parents.

“They were segregating masked and unmasked parents,” he explained. “The unmasked parents were going to have to sit in a classroom with a video monitoring watching and listening to the board meeting.”

He said he was sitting for about 15 or 20 minutes before the guard approached him. He was not surprised that the guard confronted him, as he had heard him approach other maskless parents and ask them to cover their faces.

Callus had planned to address the school board about mask mandates, which he is against, before he was removed.

The Webster Police department said it is investigating the incident.