This Security Guard Enforced a School District’s Mask Mandate. He Ended Up Facing a Criminal Charge.

Jill Joy pointed her cellphone camera at the security guards gathered near the doors to the middle school auditorium, where the Webster Central School District Board of Education meeting was about to start. Panning the scene for her livestream viewers that cold evening in February 2022, she noted, “They’ve brought in extra security. Say ‘Hi,’ you fucking tools.”

Joy was among a group of parents in suburban Rochester, New York, who’d dubbed themselves ROC for Educational Freedom. Two years earlier, in 2020, they’d created a Facebook group to organize against what they perceived as “drastic” and “deranged” COVID-19 safety measures in suburban Monroe County school districts. Then in the summer of 2021, Joy landed in a local news story when she stood before the Webster school board cupping her hand over her young daughter’s mouth to mimic a mask. “If you saw this, you would see that this is abuse and you would stop it,” she’d declared.