Perhaps the BEST B1G Forum anywhere, here at College Football Fan Site, CFB51!!!

Let's bet a dollar on who they're voting for in November.

I'm not saying you're wrong here, but I'm going to highlight the important phrasing.
When we're dealing with the sheer volume of 50 million students and 3.5 million teachers, even a minor or infinitesimal risk still yields dead kids and dead teachers.

I'm not going to say a teacher's life is worth more than any other profession's, but I will point out the reasonable expectation of choosing certain careers is different.  A person going into medicine/nursing/EMT work knows they're going to be exposed to this sort of thing, or at least the reasonable possibility of it.  Police officers know, going in, that their job will be more dangerous than average, dealing with criminals and guns and such.

Teachers never signed up for all the school shootings that happened, despite probably nearly 100% of them willing to take a bullet for their students.  We didn't choose this profession thinking we'd be thrown into buildings full of contagious people (exaggeration, I know) against our will.  But that's not even it - much like the sacrificial attitude in an active shooter situation, teachers are, by and large, an extremely empathetic population.  It's not even about us, it's about the small % of young deaths that will become inevitable.  It's about kids bringing the virus home and their parents or grandparents dying. 

We simply don't want to be a part of that.  And we've got normal-citizen-filled school boards making these decisions, influenced by (in some places) no-mask-for-me communities.  Hell, an Orange Co., CA school board voted to start back school with no masks or preventative measures.  It's insanity.  They're guaranteeing SOME child deaths, teacher deaths, and family deaths.  Dead people who wouldn't be dead, otherwise.

This couldn't be less relevant.  The message is the thing.

I'm not going to say a teacher's life is worth more than any other profession's, but I will point out the reasonable expectation of choosing certain careers is different.  A person going into medicine/nursing/EMT work knows they're going to be exposed to this sort of thing, or at least the reasonable possibility of it.  Police officers know, going in, that their job will be more dangerous than average, dealing with criminals and guns and such.

Teachers never signed up for all the school shootings that happened, despite probably nearly 100% of them willing to take a bullet for their students.  We didn't choose this profession thinking we'd be thrown into buildings full of contagious people (exaggeration, I know) against our will.  But that's not even it - much like the sacrificial attitude in an active shooter situation, teachers are, by and large, an extremely empathetic population.  It's not even about us, it's about the small % of young deaths that will become inevitable.  It's about kids bringing the virus home and their parents or grandparents dying. 

We simply don't want to be a part of that.  And we've got normal-citizen-filled school boards making these decisions, influenced by (in some places) no-mask-for-me communities.  Hell, an Orange Co., CA school board voted to start back school with no masks or preventative measures.  It's insanity.  They're guaranteeing SOME child deaths, teacher deaths, and family deaths.  Dead people who wouldn't be dead, otherwise.

The science supports mask wearing. As stated, on the individual level the degree to which it protects you is unknown, but as it relates to societal spread a small improvement in individual risk can create big differences to spread of the virus.

That said, the issue at argument wasn't about the science, it was about enforceability of mask mandates. Can they and will they be enforced?

I agree with OAM on that one that whether they're being actively enforced is mostly immaterial. A mandate gives the message that something isn't optional, and thus it "flips the script" for societal pressure. If you call mask-wearing a choice, then I (as a mask wearer) can't exert social pressure on you for not wearing one. If you call it a mandate for public health, then it's a lot easier for mask wearing to become the default behavior and those who refuse get branded by society as malcontents, or people unwilling to do something to keep the rest of us safe, etc.

Here in CA Newsom created a statewide mask mandate a few weeks back when the cases started spiking. There were no penalties associated with it. Some localities (like Orange County) said their sheriffs were too busy to waste their time enforcing it. And nearly immediately, despite this, mask compliance went visibly up everywhere I looked in OC.

Whether anyone actually gets fined for not wearing a mask is less important than the messaging that it's required and not optional.

Yes the message is much more important than the reality, the science, etc.