If you have an opinion about whether children should attend in-person school prior to widespread vaccination against COVID-19, chances are you’ve already been vilified by someone, somewhere.
The most extreme rhetoric likens those in favor of reopening to murderers willing to expose teachers and children to the coronavirus to selfishly make their lives as parents easier, or to ensure their kid loses no ground in the quest to attend an Ivy League college.
People who oppose reopening are portrayed as letting their fear run wild in the face of reason. There’s a special brand of scorn reserved for educators who want to delay their return to the classroom. They’re seen as lazy and entitled, even if they were praised as underpaid heroes prior to the pandemic.
These caricatures have turned the school reopening debate into a bitter public argument that pits people with common interests — ensuring children have access to education and public health services provided at school — against each other in ways that will be hard to repair.
As a parent desperately waiting for my child’s elementary school to reopen, I am deeply worried that she won’t see the inside of a classroom for a year-and-a-half if her district fails to resume in-person teaching prior to this fall. I have seen her district’s union and some of its teachers post inflammatory Facebook comments about why parents want schools to reopen — and what they’re willing to sacrifice to make that happen.
It makes me want to scream: My goal isn’t to get my child into Harvard one day, or to thoughtlessly endanger the lives of teachers and students. Rather, I’m exhausted from simultaneously parenting, working, and teaching, and I just want her to learn in an in-person school environment that’s safe for everyone.
At the same time, I hear educators and staff who’ve been burned by their school and district before. They look back at a trail of broken promises about classroom size and supplies and wonder how this will be any different, at a time when betrayal could cost them their lives. I’m also listening to Black, Latino, and Indigenous parents who feel invisible in the push to reopen schools. Their communities have suffered disproportionately and many of them see in-person education as one more fuse connected to a bomb that could go off in their lives at any point, or for a second or third time.
I’m still struggling to reconcile my own hopes for a safe, springtime reopening and scientific guidelines that suggest such a scenario is possible with legitimate fears about the safety and well-being of students and teachers, particularly those who live and work in high-risk communities. What I’ve learned is that flexible, empathetic reflection is key to participating in this debate.
Who do you trust?
At some point in the past few months I realized that I never really doubted whether my child would be safe back at school with the proper precautions. I fully trust the school administrators and teachers. By coincidence, she’d be learning in a brand-new building, so I had few concerns about issues like ventilation and hot water.
This, of course, is in sharp contrast to students who learn in decrepit buildings deemed unsafe for the pandemic. I foolishly believed districts across the country would spend the better part of a year identifying similar concerns at every school site and would ensure that all teachers could open windows, provide hand-washing stations, and offer soap and paper towels, among other safety measures. Now I find that naïveté embarrassing. I can also admit that such reflexive trust is a privilege that only some parents enjoy.
When the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention surveyed 858 parents of school-age children about whether schools should reopen in fall 2020, it found that white respondents were far more likely to agree than Black and Hispanic parents. Nearly two-thirds of white parents said that schools should reopen whereas only 46 percent and 50 percent of Black and Hispanic respondents, respectively, felt the same way. (I am both Mexican-American and white, but have not experienced the same risks and inequities as many Hispanic parents have during the pandemic.)
The CDC suspected that Black and Hispanic parents worried more about their child’s risk for infection, a fear born of the disproportionate impact the pandemic has had on their families. Though it’s rare for children to die of COVID-19, the mortality rate for Native American, Alaska Native, Black, and Hispanic kids and teenagers is several times higher than for white children.
Many parents of color have little trust in their school’s ability to keep their child safe.
Many parents of color also have little trust in their school’s ability to keep their child safe. This week, the New York Times offered a glimpse into that trust gap with a story about Black parents reticent to send their children into a classroom.
“For generations, these public schools have failed us and prepared us for prison, and now it’s like they’re preparing us to pass away,” Sarah Carpenter, the executive director of a parent advocacy organization in Memphis, told the Times. “We know that our kids have lost a lot, but we’d rather our kids to be out of school than dead.”
This is the quote to remember if you’re advocating to reopen schools because you care about racial equity in education. For the parents of Black and brown children, equity right now may very well mean survival, not the chance to learn in a classroom.
It’s clear that many American parents are living in completely different realities shaped by their socioeconomic background and racial and ethnic identities. I would guess most of them resent the current situation. White parents who quit their jobs or reduced their hours to stay home, or who’ve seen major mental health issues emerge in their children and families in the last year, understandably want schools to reopen. Parents of color who want to keep their children safe and healthy understandably want them closed. Everyone deserves to be heard and taken seriously.
What about the science?
This process, however, gets more difficult when the conversation turns to scientific research on the safety of reopening. Now under the leadership of President Joe Biden, who has sworn to let science dictate the pandemic response and pledged to reopen schools in the first 100 days of his administration, the CDC has published research suggesting that COVID-19 transmission in schools is lower than community transmission, and doesn’t drive infections outside of the classroom.
Despite headlines last summer about schools reopening only to shutter days or weeks later because of infections, the emerging consensus is that it can be safe for children to attend school in-person with measures like social distancing, mask-wearing, and frequent testing. In an article published recently in the Journal of the American Medical Association, CDC scientists noted that studies in Mississippi, North Carolina, and Wisconsin found little evidence that COVID-19 spreads widely in schools. (Although, the scientists noted school athletic programs increase risk.) Parents who’ve participated in camps or pods without incident, including myself, see the possibility of classroom learning as more attainable than it appears to others.
Still, opponents are asking questions worth answering. Some wondered whether the CDC’s research, which included data from rural, predominantly white Wisconsin districts, accurately reflects the risk of re-opening schools across the country. There are questions about whether the contact tracing used in school transmission studies is robust enough to track an outbreak back to a classroom.
An Atlantic article published recently presented several studies to make the case for reopening but didn’t include a key paper published in the top journal Science that found children may be super spreaders. When I asked the author about this on Twitter, he cited a “preponderance of evidence” indicating that the risk to children remains low, and recommended a website run by pediatric medical professionals that rounds up literature on children and COVID-19, which also omitted the Science study from its main discussion on the subject.
Proponents of reopening who use science to support their argument need to prepare themselves for thoughtful questioning and skepticism. As the president of the Chicago Teachers Union, which is resisting calls to reopen, put it in a tweet Friday: “Ignoring certain questions and certain studies, while endlessly repeating others, does not prove your proposition or convince us.”
At the same time, skeptics should be similarly ready to acknowledge the powerful influence of confirmation bias. You should be just as interested in a study that supports reopening as you are in research that casts doubt on the safety of returning to school. Both sides can and should acknowledge that while we have considerable data and insight a year into the pandemic, there are also things we don’t know, including how new coronavirus strains may or may not affect children.
Try not to make it worse
In some corners of the internet, this debate has turned ugly, with people on both sides maligning each other’s intentions and motivations. That should be no surprise because the system has failed everyone: teachers, parents, and kids. Districts received little to no guidance or money from the Trump administration for returning safely. Instead, the former president threatened to cut funding if schools didn’t reopen on his timeline. Parents, most of them moms of diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds, quit their jobs to tend to their children. Teachers are afraid to be in their classrooms.
This is a crisis of trust, and there’s no clear way out of it. While empathy will not clear the path to reopening, whenever that might happen, it could make finding solutions easier.
If you fear for your children, consider that advocates of reopening are compelled not by a vicious disregard for them but because they’re worried about their kids’ well-being. If you believe children will be safe at school, don’t dismiss parents whose experiences lead them to feel otherwise.
The pandemic may have forced parents and teachers to turn against each other, but we should ask whether we want to see each other as caricatures or humans enduring what will likely be the hardest moments of their lives.