Here in California, our children continue to navigate the most restrictive policies in the country, in many cases not even allowing them to remove their masks while outdoors at school. There are now calls ... to exchange their cloth masks for thicker, larger and tighter N95/KN95 masks. The World Health Organization does not recommend the routine masking of young children at all, let alone the proposition that tight-fitting respirators should be donned by children for multiple hours a day. Yet we have come to view this as appropriate and necessary in California, despite our high levels of protection from serious COVID-19 illness given widespread vaccine uptake. Our government leaders made an implicit promise that the vaccination of adults and children would be the conduit by which our society would return to pre-pandemic freedoms. Despite a highly successful vaccination campaign in the Bay Area, most COVID-19 restrictions have remained in place for two years and counting. And despite widespread access to vaccines, we continue to prioritize the prevention of COVID-19 transmission, even in the absence of severe illness, above most other health considerations. Last week, we began an online petition asking California officials to immediately shift our public dialogue toward defining a path for removing all remaining COVID-19 restrictions in public schools. Despite the pushback we have received, normalizing our school environment is not a radical concept.