PHOENIX, Arizona (LifeSiteNews) – A Jesuit high school is facing backlash from hundreds of parents after clamping down with what are being described as “discriminatory” and “coercive” policies in an effort to pressure students to get vaccinated.
Brophy College Preparatory, an all-boys Jesuit high school in Phoenix, Arizona, has mandated that its students either receive the COVID-19 shot or be subjected to testing twice weekly and special quarantine requirements, while refraining from school overnight retreats. The school did not announce its new policy until after tuition was withdrawn for the new school year.
Steven Smith, director of Catholics for Preservation of Life, calls the measures “coercion and strong-arm tactics.” He noted to LifeSiteNews that boys who don’t receive the jab are “essentially ban[ned]” from “extra-curricular activities that give vitality and meaning to their high school experience.”
Even though the vaccinated students will come into contact with unvaccinated students during overnight field trips, such as tournaments, students not jabbed against COVID-19 are prohibited from attending these outings. This includes trips to the school’s retreat campus, where “Kairos” and “Magis” retreats are held, as well as team and club retreats and father-son retreats.
“So if your team is going to an out-of-city match or tournament or game, you will not be able to travel with your team, despite the fact that you’ve worked so hard to make it to where you are, even if you’re the number one player,” Dr. Ann Andonyan told LifeSiteNews.
Andonyan is a board-certified emergency physician with over 20 years’ experience, who has been taking care of COVID patients for the last 18 months at a “designated COVID hospital.” She is a member of a core group of parents who have been engaged in efforts to have the school relax its coercive policies and replace them with fair and consistent ones.
One Brophy parent, Jeff Burch, told LifeSiteNews that the policy is “discriminating” against kids because of “their own personal medical decisions.” His own son, who has an autoimmune condition, could be at high risk of injury from the jab.
Brophy has not publicly issued any caution that there is no available safety data on the COVID-19 jab’s effects on people with certain health conditions, such as weakened immune systems and autoimmune disease. Nor has the school issued any statements accepting liability for possible injury to students that could result from the COVID-19 shot.
School disruptions for the unvaccinated
It is not just the school’s banning unvaccinated students from retreats that lead Burch and Andonyan to describe its policies as discriminatory.
The unvaccinated must also submit to COVID-19 tests twice weekly. Brophy now offers rapid tests for these students, who must wait in a line with a wait time of up to 25 minutes long, Andonyan revealed. The students must come early in the morning or use their lunch time accordingly. She added that missing class to be tested will be marked as an unexcused absence.
The unvaccinated teens are also subjected to schooling disruptions dependent upon the result of their COVID test. If the students test positive for the virus, or come into “close contact” with someone confirmed to have tested positive, including a household member, they must quarantine at home for ten days.
“It’s a big concern for most of these kids because most of these kids are high achieving, academic, accelerated, they’re taking multiple AP classes. If you’re missing class it’s very hard to keep up and do well and keep your grades up if you’re not in class and listening to lectures and participating,” said Andonyan.
The vaccinated, on the other hand, are not required to quarantine if they come into close contact with someone who tests positive for COVID.
The school maintains that “Available data and guidance clearly and consistently show that unvaccinated individuals are at greater risk of symptomatic infection, severe illness, and for transmitting the infection to others.”
This is, Andonyan said, “Despite the fact that the CDC has said that viral loads in vaccinated and unvaccinated people and risk of transmission of the virus from vaccinated and unvaccinated people is the same.”
The CDC has indeed recently admitted that vaccinated people can “transmit the virus,” citing the finding that there is “no significant difference in the viral load” between the vaccinated and unvaccinated.
On August 24, Reuters reported “rising breakthrough infections” among the fully vaccinated. The CDC itself published data in late July revealing that about three-fourths of people infected in a Massachusetts COVID-19 outbreak were fully vaccinated.
Brophy ignores vaccine risks
The school has continued to insist that its policy is based on “science,” as Brophy president Adria Renke and principal Bob Ryan claimed in an opinion piece for azcentral.
In fact, they go so far as to declare, “we will not be bullied to accept a list of demands that are untethered to real science or rational thought.”
However, not once in this piece did Adria Renke and Bob Ryan cite a piece of data justifying their policies, let alone name a specific reason for them, other than that they are “purpose-driven and practical,” and that “CDC guidelines state vaccinated students do not have to quarantine if exposed to COVID-19.”
Nor did they refute any of the many points made during an online presentation by the Truth for Health Foundation for Brophy parents on the risks of the COVID-19 jab that explains the overwhelming resiliency of children in the face of the virus.
According to the panel of renowned medical and scientific experts, assembled for the purpose of equipping parents to make informed decisions about COVID-19 vaccination, children have virtually zero risk of dying from COVID-19, but do have significant risk of bodily harm from the jab.
Renowned Texas cardiologist and internist Dr. Peter McCullough pointed out that myocarditis, or heart inflammation, due to the jab had already affected “thousands” of children.
Truth for Health Foundation founder Dr. Lee Vliet also noted that the lipid nanoparticles that surround the mRNA technology in the shots “have been known to cause inflammatory damage to ovaries and testes since at least 2012,” impacting human fertility and hormones, and therefore “all aspects of our health.”
Some are defending Brophy’s policy by arguing that compliance is ultimately a matter of free choice. One man wrote on the Brophy Facebook page, “None of your kids are required to attend Brophy. If you don’t share the values, find another place that does. Both you and Brophy will be better off for it.”
However, by the time Brophy announced their new policy, parents had already paid their tuition, and other comparable schools were full.
Burch elaborated, “When the policy was announced, families had already committed to Brophy. We had either declined other schools or the other schools that were viable options were too full and no longer accepting students. We really had no options.”
800 parents, alumni push back
In the interest of protecting their children’s health, a considerable number of parents are resisting the pressure to have their children jabbed, and some have banded together to try to dialogue with the school in an effort to convince them to revise their policies, according to Andonyan. She says there are “hundreds of like-minded parents,” and that they have garnered massive support in an effort to engage with the school.
During the span of one day, 800 people, including parents, alumni, and 19 Arizona state legislators, signed a letter requesting that the school revise its policy to allow for appropriate exemptions, and, among other requests, to make the policy consistent so that, for example, the unvaccinated would be allowed to participate in overnight activities with a negative COVID-19 test, just as they are allowed to participate in school with a negative COVID-19 test.
The letter revealed that “the families of at least 100 students are actively considering withdrawing over these serious issues,” in addition to other students who had already been withdrawn. The school has not yet responded to the letter.
Far from acknowledging any risk associated with the shot, Brophy has refused to engage in dialogue altogether, and has even attempted to suppress the expression of concerns over the mandate. Andonyan revealed that the school has removed all posts on its Facebook page expressing concerns over its COVID policies, and it has even blocked some parents entirely from their page.
The school does not issue policy exemptions for students who cannot receive the shot for health reasons, and it has not issued any cautions that some students may be more at risk of injury from the shot than others. Instead, “All students are encouraged to be vaccinated,” as the FAQs on its return-to-school policy reads.
The lack of medical exemptions was clarified by Jeff Burch, the father of a student with an auto-immune disorder. Burch tried to confirm that his son’s options were “being treated like a second-class citizen, or get the shot.”
According to Burch, after speaking with school administration and describing the concerns and requesting a medical exception, “The answer was basically that there would be no medical exceptions made.”
The school insisted that they had given the students “options,” but Burch told LifeSiteNews, in reference to the options:
“The options that were given were clearly designed to influence students to get vaccinated and the school has repeated publicly on multiple occasions that the hope was the students would get vaccinated,” he said, referring to Principal Bob Ryan’s public admission that his policy has “pushed” some parents “over the line” to have their children jabbed. “So the options that were given are not equal options.”
“What concerns us as a family is the health of my son and the possibility of an adverse reaction to the shot. It is clear that there is no evidence to show how this shot would affect my son. There is no science at all in his case. So, if there is no scientific evidence but there is clear risk, why would we give him the shot? Why would a school with no information at all about his case have an opinion and recommend the shot? The response from the school so far is that options have been provided. And again we are back at the option that discriminates against kids that are not vaccinated and will be excluding students from certain activities.”
The testimony of one anonymous Brophy mother adds weight to the assertions of Burch, Andonyan, and Smith that the school is employing “coercion” and “strong arm” tactics. She explained in an audio recording posted on the “Concerned Parents of Brophy” Facebook page that her son “has become withdrawn” and “is struggling with peer pressure to get the shot.”
She continued, “My son is really pretty stressed, wondering if at any moment he will be notified he has to quarantine and try to figure out how he will learn from home with no instruction, during one of his most challenging academic years preparing for college.”
She added that she recently found her son “distraught” because he couldn’t apply to lead one of the school retreats, since only the vaccinated students are eligible for such retreats.
“He’s struggling with the idea that implies, are the vaccinated more religious or spiritual than the unvaccinated?”
Far from it, according to one Jesuit priest known to LifeSiteNews, who has described the school’s COVID policies as “showing a cowardice,” and contrary to the Jesuit spirituality.
Dr. Mark McDonald, who is board certified in children and adult psychiatry, advised Brophy parents during a panel discussion, “You will not win this battle simply by information. Because you are not fighting an informational enemy. You need to fight it with force. What I mean is, you need to organize, you need to go and make your voices heard in a powerful way at your local schools and your school boards. And you need to demand — not argue, but demand — that the masks and the vaccines stop,” he continued.
“And if you are not successful, you need to pull your children out of school and you need to do it now. If all Americans yanked their kids from school, that would put an end to this. No more medical exemptions, no more religious exemptions that will buy you two or three weeks, but eventually they’re going to come for you. You need to pull your children out of school, and you need to do it as a group.”