During pandemic, high school sports trumps classroom learning

As a parent of a disabled child and a longtime advocate for the welfare of children, I’ve grown accustomed to an education and political system that too often fails to live up to its responsibilities for serving the most vulnerable. But that didn’t prepare me for the catastrophic failure that has occurred over the past year.

Even after evidence grew that schools could operate safely during the pandemic with proper mitigation measures, there continued to be no urgency by educational leaders and teachers unions at the local and state levels to get our most vulnerable children back to school.

Districts maintained there could be no resumption of inperson learning until “memorandums of understanding” were reached with their labor unions. No such bureaucratic hurdles, however, stalled the resumption of high school sports. As coaches rallied at the state Capitol to “let them play,” there was no similar effort by educators to let disabled children learn. They were abandoned.

We are now seeing the irony of putting sports ahead of classroom education. New coronavirus outbreaks involving young people “are related to youth sports and extracurricular activities,” Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said last week.

When schools first shut down last spring because of COVID-19, it immediately became clear that many disabled and disadvantaged children, through no fault of their own, were suffering academically, emotionally and socially from remote learning. Yet, as the closures dragged on, there seemed to be absolutely no interest in finding alternatives for teenage students like mine. They were left to suffer in physical isolation for more than a year.

I spoke multiple times at my school district’s board meetings in Martinez about the urgency of this situation and the great harm that was being done to these students who were not receiving legally required special education services. While I agreed with the need for caution in reopening our schools until the science on doing so safely became clear, I also believed there were viable alternatives for students left behind by distance learning.

But there was no will to pursue them.

When it became clear that many schools would not reopen in the fall following last spring’s shutdown, I advocated repeatedly to my school board for the option of outdoor learning, which was used effectively during the 1918 pandemic and was being pushed by education advocates across the country. While high school athletes were allowed to train outdoors last summer, no such accommodations were made for disabled high school students. Even oneon-one counseling sessions for emotional health were not permitted in person.

The notion that close-contact sports are less risky for transmitting COVID-19 than socially distanced, masked classrooms is, to put it mildly, ludicrous, but that is precisely the message our school system and state officials sent by allowing these activities to resume before classroom instruction. Or is it simply that our society deems organized school sports more important than special education services?

When the pandemic ends, we will again hear arguments that the problems plaguing public education and the disadvantaged can be solved with more funding. The experience of the pandemic has convinced me of what I long suspected: These problems, particularly as they relate to the most vulnerable students, extend far beyond a lack of money.

They are also the result of a lack of accountability, empathy, imagination and creativity — plus the arrogance by those who control the system. The fault for failing the most vulnerable children will always lie with someone other than themselves.