SEMINOLE COUNTY, Fla. — Dozens of parents in Seminole County were outside the School Board Building during Tuesday's meeting to protest the district's mandate for all students and staff to wear masks.

“Our kids are not super spreaders as they want us to believe,” said Abraham Lopez during the protest outside the school board building.

A couple dozen parents from Seminole and Volusia County parents, none of whom were wearing masks, held signs outside the office calling for the district to end the indefinite mask mandate the district put in place last month.

Seminole County Public Schools and other districts in Central Florida have continued mask mandates following recommendations from local medical experts.

“You have denied the rights of parents, disregarded the recommendations of our pediatricians,” said parent Amanda Hutwelker.

They dispute local and national medical experts who recommend wearing masks in schools.

But pediatric pulmonologist Dr. Akenyemi Ajayi says the science on this is clear.

“And if both of you are wearing a mask, the risk (of transmission) goes down to about 1.5%,” Ajayi said.

He says making masks optional in schools would ultimately lead to more school spread.

“If your idea is, ‘I don’t want my child to wear a mask in school,' then invariably it means your child is going to spend their whole school year at home because they’re going to get sent home every week,” Ajayi said.

But Hutwelker says the district is ignoring children with special needs.

“No, I’m not against masks, I am against removing parental rights, and one size fits all mandates,” she said.

Hutwelker says her son has a sensory processing disorder that makes it difficult for him to wear a mask.

She says despite getting a medical exemption from her pediatrician, the school district said her child would have to wear a mask regardless.

The district offered to help train her son how to wear a mask, but Hutwelker said that would have been too painful for him, and decided to pull him out of the public school system and put him in a private school.

“Tags feel like razor blades to his skin, he doesn’t care about peer pressure, that would be torture, I had no option,” Hutwelker said.

At one point the board went into a recess because they said parents were disrupting the meeting by cheering loudly after some public comments.

The board declined to address the parents' concerns after the meeting, but school board chair Karen Almond told us they have no plans to change the mandate at this time.

Ajayi said that even though we’ve seen that kids overall appear to be more resilient to the virus, they may have vulnerable family members they could be spreading it to.

But these parents say they won’t stop fighting until the school board changes the policy.