WATCH: School board meeting goes off the rails after woman tells everyone to rip off their face masks

A school board meeting in Florida went off the rails this week after an anti-mask activist took off her mask and encouraged everyone else in the room to do the same.

Local news station Fox 4 Now reports that anti-mask protesters were escorted out of the Collier County School Board meeting on Tuesday because they refused to comply with the board's face mask mandate intended to reduce the spread of the novel coronavirus, which so far has killed more than 525,000 Americans in the last year.

At the very start of the meeting a woman rose to speak and encouraged everyone in the room to remove their masks.

"Take your mask off and stand up for our children!" she shouted to applause from fellow anti-maskers.

This forced the board to immediately call a recess so that anti-maskers could be removed from the building. After the meeting resumed, public health experts delivered a presentation showing how much of a danger the novel coronavirus pandemic presents to students and faculty in Collier County.

Anti-maskers continued demonstrating outside the building and called for the board to end countywide mask mandates for students.

""What I'm asking the school board is simply to be reasonable," a protester named Dan Cook told Fox 4 Now. "Give children at public schools the choice."