Missing in school reopening plans: Black families’ trust
For Farah Despeignes, the choice of whether to send her children back to New York City classrooms as the coronavirus pandemic raged on last fall was no choice at all.
Despeignes, a Black mother of two, watched in despair as her Bronx neighborhood was devastated by COVID-19 last spring. She knew it would take a long time for her to trust that the nation’s largest publicschool system could protect her sons’ health — and by extension her own.
“Everything that has happened in this country just in the last year has proved that Black people have no reason to trust the government,” said Despeignes, who is an elected parent leader on the local school board and has taught at several colleges.
She added, “My mantra is, ‘If you can do it for yourself, you shouldn’t trust other people to do it for you.’ Because I can’t see for myself what’s going on in that building, I’m not going to trust somebody else to keep my children safe.”
Even as more districts reopen their buildings and President Joe Biden joins the chorus of those saying schools can safely resume in-person education, hundreds of thousands of Black parents say they are not ready to send their children back. That reflects both the disproportionately harsh consequences that the virus has visited on nonwhite Americans and the profound lack of trust that
Black families have in school districts, a longstanding phenomenon exacerbated by the pandemic.
It also points to a major dilemma: School closures have hit the mental health and academic achievement of nonwhite children the hardest, but many of the families that education leaders have said need in-person education the most are the most wary of returning.
That is shifting the reopening debate in real time. In Chicago, only about a third of Black families have indicated they are willing to return to classrooms, compared with 67% of white families, and the city’s teachers union,
which is hurtling toward a strike, has made the disparity a core part of its argument against in-person classes.
In New York City, about 12,000 more white children have returned to classrooms than Black students, although Black children make up a larger share of the overall district. In Oakland, California, just about a third of Black parents said they would consider inperson learning, compared with more than half of white families. And Black families in Washington; Nashville, Tennessee; Dallas and other districts also indicated they would keep their children learning at home at higher rates than white families.
Last summer, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that 62% of white parents strongly or somewhat agreed schools should reopen that fall, compared with 46% of Black parents, even though both groups expressed the same level of concern about the quality of their children’s education.
And multiple studies, including a new CDC report, have found that schools that take appropriate safety measures can reopen in communities with relatively low coronavirus infection levels.
Education experts and Black parents say decades of racism, institutionalized segregation and mistreatment of Black children, as well as severe underinvestment in school buildings, have left Black communities to doubt that school districts are being upfront about the risks.
“For generations, these public schools have failed us and prepared us for prison, and now it’s like they’re preparing us to pass away,” said Sarah Carpenter, executive director of
Memphis Lift, a parent advocacy group in Tennessee. “We know that our kids have lost a lot, but we’d rather our kids to be out of school than dead.”
Biden wants to ramp up virus testing and vaccinations, while pushing Congress for billions of dollars to help schools reopen safely. He has promised that racial equity would be a cornerstone of his coronavirus response.
But the trust gap is not limited to education; many Black Americans are similarly skeptical of the medical establishment and are thus more likely than white people to express wariness about being vaccinated.
In many cities and districts, Latino and Asian American families are also less likely than white families to send their children back. Asian Americans have opted out of in-person classes at the highest rates of any ethnic group in New York City. Latino families in Chicago were most likely to say they would keep their children at home when schools reopened.