San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Give kids a seat in the bar
Santa, California children need more this Christmas than you can fit in the sleigh. But could you at least give every Californian under the age of 18 their very own barstool?
Why barstools? If our kids are going to get back to education and socialization anytime soon, their best shot lies in restaurants and bars — the places that adults care most about keeping open these days.
Yes, St. Nick, turning the bars into havens for those too young to drink legally is not a great idea. But it’s way better than anything California has offered its kids during this pandemic.
Our state’s grownup Scrooges, giving short shrift to data showing low COVID19 transmission rates for kids, miss few opportunities to damage children’s academic, social and mental health. So we’ve closed the schools and imposed distance learning that produces educational regression and screen addiction. We’re keeping children away from friends, coaches, mentors, and even beloved grandparents, aunts, and uncles. ( Also on the banned list: you, Santa!)
The message is clear: Adult wish lists are what matter this COVID19 season. And no Elf on the Shelf watches representatives elected exclusively by California adults ( who won’t let their children, even 17yearolds, vote) flout COVID19 rules of their own making.
This dismissal of child interests isn’t new. It’s seen in government budgets that favor seniors, in public indifference to school shootings, and in our goslow approach on climate. And it isn’t going away. Barring an organized resistance by children, our best hope for saving kids is to smuggle their interests into policies that protect adults first. Which is why my three sons and their fellow kids need those barstools for Christmas. Let the kids dine out as they study, if they can’t use schools.
A kidsinbars policy might work well. BYOB — bring your own barstools — would make sanitation a cinch. Food and drinks for kids could be paid for by federal school lunch funds. While schools won’t exploit their ample outdoor space to remain open safely, bars and restaurants have grabbed any sidewalk or parking spot they can — space that could be used for kids to study or for teachers to hold classes.
Yes, turning restaurants over to kids might make them crowded — but not nearly as cramped as the small dwellings that kids occupy in our housingstarved state. Restaurant wait staff might not be trained educators, but they’d at least represent some adult supervision for the many California children who are left alone at home, or are supervised by older siblings.
Now, Santa, adults love to argue that all of the COVID19 chaos will be over soon, and that kids’ lives will soon be back to normal. But that talking point is a monstrous lie, and you should dump an enormous lump of coal on anyone who uses it.
For one thing, vaccines haven’t been tested on children, so kids will be among the last to be vaccinated. For another, while the pandemic may end, the damage to children will remain, and adults have no intention of repairing it.
Santa, perhaps you could bring California some real plans to make up for all the instructional time missed, to give extra support to the majority of kids performing below grade level, to address declining social skills and soaring anxiety ( including an escalating suicide rate) among young people, and to find all the student dropouts.
Because our state and our school don’t have such plans. Instead, maddeningly, our leaders are using the pandemic to justify doing less for kids.
The most blatant example is the justreleased Master Plan for Early Learning and Care, prepared by leading consultants at the state’s direction. It’s supposed to be the expression of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s central campaign promise to create a “cradle to career” system to support child development, But it’s actually a blatant betrayal of 25 years of promises for universal child care and preschool — and an example of why kids simply can’t be too cynical about adults.
The master plan offers no real plan. Instead, it proposes new requirements and consolidations of existing programs, a titanic shifting of deck chairs that could damage those preschools and daycares that have struggled to survive the pandemic. It reverses previous commitments to provide universal preschool ( only some 3yearolds would get it, and 4yearolds would get it only after an endless phasein). Worst of all, this master plan proposes no public funding source for expanding early childhood services, other than by imposing complicated new fees on overburdened families.
If California cared about its kids, we’d be making child care universal, seriously enforcing mask mandates, and vaccinating teachers and child care providers first. And we’d have plans to compensate for this useless year: free beforeand afterschool tutoring for kids, and a new schedule that keeps public schools open for the next four summers, from 2021 to 2024, until students have gotten all the instructional time lost in 2020.
But in California, a place of progressive promises and regressive reality, such ideas will be dismissed as too costly and unrealistic. In that case, Santa, I have one request. Could your elves design a new version of our state seal? It would be just like the old one, except that it replaces “Eureka” with our real motto: “Screw the Kids.”