Pandemic highlights dependence on schools

Should schools stay open during this winter of unprecedented plague?

Just now, everyone seems to agree, schools are the safest place for our kids. Last year, with 417 mass school shootings, some might have argued this point. But the pandemic has changed everything. The question is, why? Why are so many American children not safe in their own homes, neighborhoods, communities?

Why are more than 10 percent of New York households lacking food to feed their children? Why are nearly 20 percent of New York’s children subject to child abuse? And so many uninsured?

I was a public school educator for over 30 years. All told, I spent some 80 percent of my life in the confines of a school building. I love school. I’m not writing to condemn the idea of public education. Though I do think this pandemic creates a perfect opportunity to make it right, better, good for all kids, or at least for more kids than it serves now.

It’s also an opportunity to open our eyes and hearts to the fact that any community in which it is safer to send children to school than to let them stay home is not doing its job as a community. After the birth of my grandson, whom I’ve yet to meet because of contagion concerns and travel restrictions, I sent my son and daughter-in-law a card that quoted the old trope, “It takes a village to raise a child.” Inside, it turned this wisdom sidewise for the chuckle: “But no one ever tells you where that village is, or how to get there.” It’s funny. But it shouldn’t be. If we were a country that cared about its children, we’d be busy building villages like that. Places where kids were safe in or out of school.

So many people right now are yearning for their world to return to “normal.”

Maybe one of the lessons of pandemic is to teach us that normal wasn’t working. That trundling kids off to school to keep them safer isn’t safe enough. I’m proud that schools stepped in to feed, shelter, counsel, care for kids who couldn’t find care elsewhere. But why, in a nation of riches so unevenly distributed, do we allow so small a chance for our smallest members to seek safe, happy lives? Even in good times, school days end, summer vacation comes, kids graduate into places we are now admitting are not safe for them. During the spring shutdown 7,000 American kids were lost, misplaced, unheard from.

We might think about fixing this. Before the next pandemic.