Local fight over COVID-19 school closures is symptom of failures in the other Washington
There’s good cause for frustration.
There are ample reasons for exhaustion and anger.
As we head into month seven of the coronavirus pandemic, it should come as no surprise that patience and occasionally perspective are wearing thin. Since the early days of 2020, we’ve been forced to reconfigure our lives, often at great financial and psychological cost.
We’ve lost jobs. We’ve lost loved ones. We’ve missed birthdays and our families. We’ve watched as cases have continued to spike, while nearly every momentary cause for hope — and a return to some semblance of normal — seems to be met with a whiplash crash back to earth.
It’s been hard, and it’s been long. People are tired and rightfully exasperated.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the tension that’s simmering between local parents and the public health agencies working to contain the spread of COVID-19, like the Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department.
Most recently, as The News Tribune and Gateway have detailed, this has taken us across the Narrows to the Peninsula School District, where the school board and many local parents have publicly clashed with county health department director Dr. Anthony Chen.
Understandably, parents want their kids in schools, with valid reasons
Chen and the health department are trying to make the best decisions possible — for all of us — largely on the fly and largely in uncharted territory.
Cue the friction, frayed emotions and heated words.
If there’s one clear sign of just how badly we’ve botched COVID-19 — beyond the climbing death toll — it can be found in sad, distracting battles like these.
A recent News Tribune editorial urged cooler heads to prevail in the Peninsula district, which is sound advice that hopefully will be heeded. Luckily, it also appears as though a new screening and testing pilot program targeted at rural schools provides an avenue for the district’s leaders and parents to get what they want. That’s a positive development, even if it hasn’t immediately restored relations.
But as we head into the long, cold winter, here are two things to keep in mind:
This will not be the last time parents and communities spar with public health authorities over the closure of schools. This week it was Peninsula. Next week it will be somewhere else. Despite what you might have heard on Fox News, the virus isn’t disappearing anytime soon.
Meanwhile, we should all remember that the various sides in these battles — from parents and school board members to teachers and public health experts — aren’t actually adversaries, even if it soothes our COVID-19 cognitive dissonance to view them this way.
Rather, they’ve been pitted against one another because we’ve utterly failed as a nation to adequately respond to the pandemic.
Simply put, Chen is not the enemy. Parents and school board members aren’t the problem. Teachers and staff reluctant to prematurely return to the classroom aren’t being selfish, and school districts flailing to adjust in real-time aren’t revealing their callous ineptitude.
We’re in this spot because we blew it, from the highest office in the land to Memorial Day cookouts, and making sense of it is a lot to ask of anyone, especially a parent stretched thin.
Before the pandemic struck — and beyond the all-important task of educating our children — the way open public schools served as the glue that held our routines and way of life together likely was underappreciated.
Now, with school taken away from so many of us, it’s not surprising to see things falling apart, least of all our collective composure.
Of course, for those looking to assess blame, the lion’s share can be directed at the White House and the feeble federal “response” Republicans in the Senate have been agreeable to.
Donald Trump has now repeatedly shown himself to be ill-equipped and ill-intentioned, while bootstrap-fetishizing conservatives in the Senate have largely stuck to their trickle-down guns, reluctant to sign off on a new stimulus package that’s anywhere sufficient. (The alternative would be socialism, I suppose.)
The message?
Here’s $1,200 six months ago and a reminder from our unmasked president that all of this is no big deal. You got this!
From there, states, counties, cities, health departments and local school districts have been left to piece things together. Without support or a coherent plan from D.C., all of them have had to do what they can, which has been valiant if imperfect, and also a bit like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.
The uneven, makeshift approach naturally inspires skepticism. At its worst, it manifests in gun-toting, anti-mask rallies that only help the virus spread. More sympathetically, it’s enough to make even the most reasonable among us wonder, at least from time to time, what exactly the plan is.
Why can you get drunk in a bar but can’t send your kids to school? Why is my neighbor’s job essential but mine is not? How is this all supposed to work, and how is my family supposed to get by?
All of these are understandable questions for people to ask, though, unfortunately, the answers remain as unsatisfying as they are unflinching.
We did it to ourselves, through our votes and our actions.
It didn’t have to be this way, and we’d be wise to remember that squabbles between frustrated parents and public health officials are really a symptom of a much larger breakdown.
We had a chance to get this right.
Like other countries, we could have followed science, been aggressive with our public health response and collective in our resolve to stamp out the virus.
From the outset, the federal government could have provided the resources people needed to batten down the hatches instead of leaving us to fend of ourselves.
If we’d done these things, we could have prioritized education, and our children could be back in school.
Instead?
Well, you know the rest.
