TEA creates an impossible choice for parents

I’ve been lucky.

Over the past six months, while we’ve seen 3.2 million confirmed cases and more than 136,000 deaths from COVID-19 in this country, my family and I have managed to stay healthy.

In the face of an unprecedented global pandemic that has disrupted and restricted our lives, I’ve tried to maintain my psychological equilibrium by focusing on the few things I can control, rather than the many that I can’t: namely, my own daily practices (social distancing, wearing protective masks) to keep myself and the people around me as safe as possible.

It’s only over the past few days that I’ve come to feel truly powerless, as my usual midsummer mix of excitement and nervousness about a coming school year has been replaced with anxiety and frustration.

My daughter, my only child, is 15 years old and soon will start her sophomore year in high school. She’s beginning to learn to drive and thinking about what she wants to do with her life.

Of course, she’s also having to think about COVID-19 and what it will mean for this coming school year.

There are no good choices. I hate the thought of my daughter spending the next school year isolated at home, unable to hang out with her friends and benefit from in-class instruction.

I want her to have a real high school experience, and I know that distance learning can simulate, but can’t replicate, the sense of being in a classroom with a teacher and other students. (The same way I know, from experience, that a Zoom interview can’t match the dynamic of a conversation between people who are in the same room.)

But I also dread the thought of students, teachers and other school employees being used in a massive lab experiment to determine how widely a killer, highly infectious virus will spread on a highly populated public-school campus.

While we know that the virus hasn’t affected kids as intensely as adults, as of Friday afternoon, there were 1,761 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Texas among people 19 and under, according to the Texas Department of State Health Services. Also, more than 1,300 people have contracted the virus at Texas child-care facilities.

There’s no room for politics in this issue for me. This is about the life of someone I love more than I can possibly articulate.

Of course, like everything else about COVID-19, this publichealth and public-education question has been politicized, so that each of our parental anxieties gets reduced to an ideological check mark.

On Tuesday, the Texas Education Agency issued a set of mandates stipulating that public schools in this state must provide daily on-campus classes for students. Parents worried about the health risks can opt for virtual instruction, but teachers and other staff members have little choice but to put themselves at risk.

The sense of powerlessness being felt by parents and teachers around the state is profound, because TEA is giving us an all-or-nothing proposition, with minimal local control.

Some school districts were working on hybrid strategies, with a mix of in-class and virtual learning achieved through staggered schedules. They were granting parents a voice in the process, by asking for guidance on the best way to move forward.

With one quick move, however, TEA has nullified that process and silenced those parental voices.

Either you decide to put your kid at risk, or you decide to quarantine your kid away from their classmates. There’s no neutral ground and whichever side you pick, you can’t help but feel that you’re doing wrong by your child.

TEA’s move came on the heels of pressure from President Donald Trump, who has been adamant in his insistence that schools must fully reopen next month. He also has threatened to pull federal education funding (something he doesn’t have the power to do) from schools that don’t comply with his wishes. “Now that we have witnessed it on a large scale basis, and firsthand, Virtual Learning has proven to be TERRIBLE compared to In School, or On Campus, Learning,” Trump tweeted on Friday. “Not even close! Schools must be open in the

Fall. If not open, why would the Federal Government give Funding? It won’t!!!”

The Trump administration has sought scientific cover from the American Academy of Pediatrics, which issued a set of guidelines two weeks ago stating that “all policy considerations for the coming school year should start with a goal of having students physically present in school.”

On Friday, however, the organization shifted its tone.

“We should leave it to health experts,” the AAP said, “to tell us when the time is best to open up school buildings and listen to educators and administrators to shape how we do it.”

Health experts guiding educators, with politicians relegated to the sidelines. I like the sound of that.