Eight-year-old Bobby Campbell wanted more than anything to go back to school in person this year. But he’s acutely aware of the importance of masks in reducing COVID’s spread, as his second grade science project last year showed.

“He doesn’t understand why it isn’t happening at schools,” his mother Carmen Campbell, a physician in Plano, Texas, says. Governor Greg Abbott banned mask mandates in all public spaces, including schools, by executive order in May, but some school districts have defied his order. Bobby, who’s also participating in Moderna’s vaccine trial, and his friends recorded a video to appeal to the school board to similarly defy the order and require masks.

As children’s hospitalizations for COVID have hit an