North Cook News

Critics have been lining up seeking the removal of Park Ridge-Niles School District 64 school board president Denise Pearl in light of several decisions – including those during the pandemic – many are opining, are anti-parent and anti-student. 

Informed Parents of 64 (IPOD64) noted Pearl is “not recommended” for re-election. 

“Denise Pearl is running on the promise of ‘communication’ and ‘collaboration,’ yet her actions as a board member do not reflect that as she has been unwilling to communicate and collaborate with a substantial portion of the community,” IPOD64 said in a blog post. “She regularly fails to respond to community members who write emails, and regularly casts votes that do not reflect citizen emails or public comments.” 

One area of grave concern is Pearl’s lack of local leadership during the pandemic. IPOD64 noted Pearl voted to 'keep masks on our children at the February 7, 2022 meeting, after the JCAR ruling deemed that masking mandates were not enforceable.” 

Pearl also voted to not lift a social distancing mandate and was the only board member to vote against removing negative covid test requirements. She also voted to treat vaccinated students differently from the unvaccinated.

Pearl is being challenged by Bryan Mercado, a real estate broker at The Mercado Property Group at Re/max Properties Northwest. Mercado was an advocate to remove Covid restrictions and previously spoke against the district’s poor handling of COVID mitigations and supported getting the mitigations lifted and getting our kids back to normalcy. 

"We have a covid problem and we don’t have solutions to this problem. We have miscommunication, not only between District 64 staff and the written protocol that's on the District 64 website," he said during one of the board's meetings.

Mercado told North Cook News the community has suffered under Pearl’s reign and she is trying to cover it up by adopting his campaign platform. 

“The candidate I'm running against didn't know who I was, which is indicative of her only living in Park Ridge for seven years, and three of those years have been Covid years,” Mercado told North Cook News. “So if we really want to call a spade a spade, she's only really been out and about in the district and meeting people for four years.”

He drew the line between his credentials and the incumbent's qualifications. 

“I've lived in the community for over 40 years. I was born, I was raised and, and went through schools in Park Ridge and she's asked multiple people, who am I? She had no idea who I was and what I am hearing now she's parroting everything that I've been saying for months on this campaign. And the biggest thing that she's doing is she's campaigning against herself.”

While Pearl and other politicians have neglected to examine whether their Covid policies had any effect, studies have increasingly found the state as a whole suffered higher mortality rates by keeping people in lockdown and away from their normal lives. A Burbio study found Illinois had one of the worst records in reopening schools in a timely fashion during the pandemic. By June of 2021, those numbers were much starker as Illinois was an outlier with many more schools closed than almost any others state.

Despite continued closures, Illinois’ mortality rate was higher during the pandemic than Florida’s and lockdown states on average suffered higher mortality rates. 

“There is no clear pattern in which states had high and low mortality, although we note one major study from Rand Corporation researchers found that lockdowns increased all-cause mortality to a statistically significant extent,” a National Bureau of Economic Research study reads. “Whether or not political leaders can be considered responsible for mortality outcomes is therefore unclear, although advocates of a ‘focused protection’ strategy have suggested that sheltering the high-risk could reduce overall mortality - an approach adopted by Florida.”

Although there have been researches noting the complete ineffectiveness of masking, advocates such as Pearl have steadfastly refused to acknowledge their policies were incorrect. Tom Jefferson, a senior associate tutor at the University of Oxford, is the lead author of the Cochrane review, which is an update from a 2020 finding by his group. The meta-analysis inspected 78 studies involving 610,872 participants and looked at such items as “Medical/surgical masks compared to no masks,” "N95/P2 respirators compared to medical/surgical masks,” and “hand hygiene compared to control.”

“There is just no evidence that (masks) make any difference. Full stop. My job, our job as a review team, was to look at the evidence, we have done that. Not just for masks. We looked at hand washing, sterilization, goggles etcetera…” Jefferson told Maryanne Demasi.

Jefferson said the group’s initial review was held back and delayed to November 2020 but by that point politicians like Pritzker had already decided on mandating the practice.

“In early 2020, when the pandemic was ramping up, we had just updated our Cochrane review ready to publish…but Cochrane held it up for 7 months before it was finally published in November 2020,” he said. “Those 7 months were crucial. During that time, it was when policy about masks was being formed. Our review was important, and it should have been out there.”

When asked what have caused the delay, Jefferson told Demasi, “For some unknown reason, Cochrane decided it needed an “extra” peer review.  And then they forced us to insert unnecessary text phrases in the review like 'this review doesn't contain any covid-19 trials,' when it was obvious to anyone reading the study that the cut-off date was January 2020.” He added that “During those 7 months, other researchers at Cochrane produced some unacceptable pieces of work, using unacceptable studies, that gave the ‘right answer.’” 

Demasi asked Jefferson if he thinks Cochrane was playing a political game to which the latter responded: “That I cannot say, but it was 7 months that just happened to coincide with the time when all the craziness began, when academics and politicians started jumping up and down about masks. We call them 'strident campaigners.' They are activists, not scientists.”