To The Wolves

Why putting school administrators in charge of public health decisions is not great

I had a plan for this week's newsletter, but this ended up being quite a week for those of us whose job it is to pay attention to what New York state government is doing (or not doing), so I have some different, more urgent, things I need to say. 

On Thursday (remarkably NOT at 4 p.m. on a Friday, which I still find kind of amazing), the New York State Department of Health made a somewhat shocking announcement. After weeks and months of issuing detailed, granular, color-coded guidance under which K-12 schools needed to operate during the COVID-19 pandemic, the DOH decided to simply say "Nah" when it comes to the 2021-22 school year and let schools figure it out for themselves. 

The full statement from the DOH was short enough that I can quote it in full here. I am still chewing on each and every word of it in a sort of glazed-over disbelief: 

"With the end of the state disaster emergency on June 25, 2021, school districts are reestablished as the controlling entity for schools. Schools and school districts should develop plans to open in-person in the fall as safely as possible, and I recommend following guidance from the CDC and local health departments."

Here's the thing: I trust local school leaders to make lots of local decisions for their schools, their students and their employees. On balance, I think it's appropriate that teachers and schools have a lot of latitude to choose their curriculum, their teaching methods and lots of other things about how kids are educated. But. But! Even after what feels like 18,000 months of COVID protocols, it's asking a whole hell of a lot to tell education officials to become experts in how to safely and reasonably prevent the transmission of a highly contagious variant of a novel virus among a population with mixed vaccination status and rapidly changing local infection rates. I got tired just typing that damn sentence. So that's one thing I'm really mad about. And I don't mean like, Oh, the poor school superintendents, they have it so hard. I'm not asking you to feel sorry for them. I am, however, suggesting that their particular professional expertise may not have prepared them adequately for this particular challenge. And that's a problem. 

But the second thing I'm mad about is why this is happening. Now, I don't know why exactly the state decided that schools were all good to just go it alone, especially since a few days earlier they were like Oh the guidance is definitely coming. I could speculate, but who cares honestly. What I do know is that cases are rising again all across the state. While hospitalization rates remain fairly low, there are more people in the hospital with COVID-19 right now than there were a year ago — and those numbers have been going up as well. So what is it about this particular moment that would make the state Department of Health say We're good here, you guys got this? 

Sure, schools can prevent the spread of COVID within their walls. They absolutely can. The question is whether they will.

If you wanted to be optimistic about it, you could argue that this lack of guidance is at least partially because there is little data to suggest that COVID is being transmitted in schools. The idea being that schools know what to do, they've been doing it, and they just need to keep on doing it and they'll be fine. But, you know, I kind of think the reason COVID wasn't being transmitted in schools was because there were strict guidelines about mitigation. And I also think that if you take away those guidelines and tell schools to figure it out for themselves, they're not just going to be thinking about what's best for the public health of the community. They're also going to be thinking about the Facebook comments and the angry parents showing up at board meetings and the board member who never wears a mask and all the other pressures that are political in nature and have nothing to do with the health and well-being of kids. 

Even after what feels like 18,000 months of COVID protocols, it's asking a whole hell of a lot to tell education officials to become experts in how to safely and reasonably prevent the transmission of a highly contagious variant of a novel virus among a population with mixed vaccination status and rapidly changing local infection rates.

And that's why I don't feel really optimistic about any of this. Sure, schools can prevent the spread of COVID within their walls. They absolutely can. The question is whether they will. And when states like New York absolve themselves of any responsibility for answering that question, I have a problem with that.  

I was listening to the radio the other day, about the conundrum of sending unvaccinated young kids back to in-person school with no mandates or mixed messages about masks, and one of the commentators on the program sort of urged parents to 'get involved' and 'talk to your local school' about a mask mandate if there isn't one in place, and I just sort of cringed and groaned and shuddered all at once, because if we are making this the individual responsibility of individual parents, we have already failed. We simply cannot. It will not work.

I mean, I am all for individual parents speaking out and getting involved and fighting like hell for the things that are important to them. 100%. BUT. If we leave this particular issue up to parents — up to the parents who have the time and energy and resources and political capital to devote to advocating for their kids — the only possible outcome I can envision is one that deepens the huge, massive disparities that were already expanded during the pandemic. And that would be a disaster. It will be a disaster. 

My vision of government is that government is supposed to fill in those gaps. Government is supposed to commit time and energy and money to making sure that the people who don't have as much time and energy and money aren't getting left behind. That they aren't paying a massive price for their lack of privilege. We all know that's not how government works right now, because people with less privilege do pay a tremendous price. School districts with fewer resources are going to pay a tremendous price for this abdication of responsibility by the state. And while school superintendents and board members are going to feel the heat about it, it's our children who will really pay the price.