West Cook News

Village of Oak Park Department of Public Health Director Theresa D. Chapple-McGruder is canceling her daughter’s birthday party amid COVID-19 fears. 

“We should all be master pivoters by now," Chapple-McGruder said in a tweet. "March brought us a month relief from the pandemic. I was hopeful for longer. So I planned a birthday party for my daughter. She's never had one, and I was excited for her first. However, circumstances have changed. So we will pivot.” 

Chapple-McGruder appears to be a firm believer in masking indefinitely. She backed Philadelphia's masking rules, which have reintroduced a practice that had been long dropped in other parts of the country. 

She also lobbied for schools to be shuttered again in January, while others protested around the state to have masking and other COVID-19 restrictions lifted, according to West Cook News. At the time, Chapple-McGruder stated that Oak Park will not adopt the amended "isolation/quarantine" instructions issued by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control. Given that Philadelphia's metric is its own, this appears to be the case.

Throughout the pandemic in Oak Park, the public health director has been divisive. She made the decision to eliminate all extracurricular activities at Oak Park and River Forest High Schools last autumn. Chapple-McGruder was roundly chastised by school parents, who claimed her judgment was not founded on science or logic, West Cook News reported.

State Sen. Darren Bailey (R-Xenia) reacted to Chapple-McGruder's tweet saying she "is a poster child for medical tyranny in Illinois." He added that "she isn’t a doctor but rather political activist pushing to achieve her own Marxist political goals by force upon Oak Park citizens. One of them: Making us all more dependent upon government by keeping schools and our economy closed forever. That’s what Theresa Chapple wants— to control you with the threat that if you don’t follow her dictates, you will get sick and die."