Help me compose a letter to our school board

[Terabith]

The state of Virginia decided today to leave the question of whether or not to require masking up to individual districts, except on school buses, which are public transportation.  They do tend to be fairly responsive to community feedback, but I strongly suspect they are going to decide not to require masks.  Here is the letter I have composed so far.  Help me edit it to make it better, please?  What else should I include?  What should I remove?  

I am writing to let you know that I am the parent of a student at XXX High School, and I am very much hoping you will require masks during the upcoming school year.  The percentage of adults in X City vaccinated is less than 50%; the percentage of teens who are vaccinated is staggeringly lower.  Elementary students are currently not old enough to qualify for vaccinations.  Pandemic mitigation works best in a layered approach, with a variety of protections stacked.  The Pfizer vaccine, the only one licensed currently for anyone under 18, is only about 65% effective against the Delta variant, and Delta plus and Lambda potentially have more spike protein differences, which indicate the vaccine is likely to be less protective against those strains than the original version of covid.  Delta is also radically more contagious than the original strain of covid; activities which were low risk for transmission last year are likely to be significantly less safe this year.  Kids, families, and American society desperately need kids to be in school five days a week, and it, rightly, should be a highly prioritized goal, but current numbers forecast that with current vaccination levels and the contagiousness of new variants, that hospital overwhelm is possible.  Frankly, it will be impossible to run schools in person if enough teachers and adult workers are infected with covid, which is a genuine possibility even if 100% of them were vaccinated.  Universal masking is an essential part of safely opening schools, keeping down community spread of covid, and models caring for our neighbors.  The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends everyone in schools should be masked.  Universal masking is far, far easier to enforce than keeping track of who is vaccinated, and unmasked, unvaccinated persons in a pandemic is frankly reckless.  It lessens the likelihood of bullying or prejudice against people who do or do not choose to mask.  Please, please do the right thing.  My daughter desperately needs to attend school in person this year, and I don't know if I can safely send her without a masking requirement.  Given the high R naught level of the Delta variant, masking is not the near miraculous panacea of prevention that it has been in previous months, but it, along with the vaccine, would make it safe enough that I would not feel that I was being reckless in permitting her to attend.  

[Katy]

I would make it much shorter.  That block of text is overwhelming to me and I agree with you.

“As a parent of a student at ________ High School I am hoping you require masks for the following reasons:”  then bullet point the rest, preferably no more than 3 points that are 1-2 lines long.

 

[Innisfree]

Good luck. I hope they show sense and require masks.

[prairiewindmomma]

It will be difficult to enforce masks for unvaccinated students only, and yet clearly unvaccinated students should be masked. 
 

I would make the letter much shorter and aim for strong points. Likely the board has all of the info about covid already, it’s the decision about what to do and how much parents will tolerate that is the issue at hand.

[AmandaVT]

I like it - I agree with Katy and Prairiewindmomma though, shorten it up and add bullet points to make your points stand out. Also, depending on where you live, you may be writing well above the average reading level of your community school board and you might want to use easier to understand language. 

[Farrar]

I think you could keep the length, but only if you structure it differently. Think about how traditional newspaper stories are set up. The whole story is in the first paragraph very succinctly. Then subsequent paragraphs elaborate on aspects of it. It doesn't build to an argument like a persuasive paper. It lays out the whole thing with increasing detail several times over.

Whether you do it as bullet points or restructure it or shorten it, you definitely need to break it up out of one big block of text.

It's well laid out and argued overall. And, obviously, many of us agree with you strongly.