The idea that reopening schools can be left to individual school boards is criminal neglect. No school board in America is qualified or capable of making that decision, and no board exists that won’t fold the first time they’re facing a meeting full of angry parents. There have to be nationwide rules—not guidelines, but rules—governing both the extent to which schools can open, and the precautions they must take. To do anything else isn’t just inviting disaster, it’s ensuring it.
Political leaders, from the White House to state houses, keep insisting that individual school districts need “discretion” or “flexibility” to determine whether and how their schools should open. This is the exact opposite of what they need. They need restrictions, regulations, rules, laws that must be followed at threat of losing federal funds and being held accountable. School boards must be able to say “we can’t” and point to mandated restrictions. Otherwise, schools will reopen when they should not, will not follow recommendations for student or staff safety, and will make decisions that please vocal elements of the community, even when it means putting children at risk.
The idea that children are ineffective vectors of COVID-19 is a theory, one that is untested by any kind of randomized data. Even nations like Japan, which has escaped the worst ravages of the pandemic despite what has been described as “doing everything wrong,” did one thing absolutely right—they closed the schools. Everything we have learned about the spread of COVID-19 since January shows that the disease is most easily transmitted though long exposure of groups in an indoor setting. Which is the unavoidable condition of schools. Texas alone has recorded hundreds of cases among children enrolled in daycare.
It’s entirely possible that children are less likely to acquire COVID-19. However, it’s also likely that children cannot be expected to maintain social distancing guidelines, negating this advantage. There have been hot spots around the world identified as being associated with child care facilities. Even if this kind of event turns out to be rare, and if children acquire the disease at a reduced rate, and their odds of a poor outcome are greatly reduced, how many dead children is an acceptable figure? Is it in the thousands, or merely the hundreds? While we’re calculating, how many kids disabled for life by lung damage or heart damage or brain damage is the right price? How many kids deprived of a parent or grandparents?
Of course it’s not possible to make schools a perfectly safe place, no place is. It’s also not practical to have a single switch, a yes or no decision that mandates every school be absolutely shuttered or open without restrictions.
What is possible is a set of national standards that mandate schools be closed under certain conditions. Those guidelines can also describe situations in which schools can be partially opened. Conditions in which restrictions can be relaxed.
Districts in which the active cases can be numbered on one hand, and where there is adequate testing and case management, genuinely should be ready to open almost “as normal.” Other districts may need to be absolutely closed—and everything in between. But none of those decisions should be left to local school boards bartered by misinformation, personal pressure, and mixed messages.
The federal government has utterly failed its response to the pandemic from the outset. It’s failing in its response now. But a failure to provide strong, definitive, and consistent rules by which the nation’s schools face COVID-19 will be an unforgivable act, one that will linger for generations.