San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
By walking out, students say what needs to be heard
When I was a student, we had fire drills.
Now, students are faced with active shooter drills and repeated outbreaks of COVID-19 in their schools. Many students don’t feel safe. Not only are they afraid of exposure, they are dealing with extraordinary interruptions in education.
The education experience hasn’t been “normal” in nearly two years. As schools grapple with the omicron variant, many are running out of teachers and bus drivers, who are calling in sick. Students are tired. But some are speaking up. The students in Texas and across our country who are staging walkouts are promising examples of youth civic engagement and leadership. They are demanding their voices and needs be heard.
Walkouts are a historic tool of last resort for students, and they speak to a level of mistrust of the establishment and desperation many young people are feeling. Assuming that each student’s intentions were pure in skipping class, consider how afraid they must feel to call for a return to virtual school, which they know doesn’t work for education or mental health.
In the nearly two years since COVID-19 made its unwelcome debut, most districts still haven’t figured out a way to make students generally feel safe. Friday, small groups of students walked out at Round Rock ISD, an Austin suburb district of 56 schools and 48,421 students. It was a much lower turnout than expected. More than 1,800 students and more than 490 parents and faculty signed online petitions requesting the district offer remote learning amid the omicron surge, according to the student group’s petition and tweet.
“The students of Round Rock ISD no longer feel comfortable going to school as cases of COVID-19 soar,” the students wrote. “If the district can’t create a safe learning environment, we must shift to remote learning until cases go down again.”
Round Rock ISD’s COVID-19 dashboard shows positive case counts went from 75 for the week of Dec. 17 to 1,587 for the week of Jan. 7 (which included the entire winter break), to 2,226 the week of Jan. 14 and 1,886 the week of
Jan. 21. Tests have been difficult to find during this time, and some people are asymptomatic, so the numbers are likely much higher.
Maybe the cold front is to blame for the walkout’s low turnout. But a more plausible culprit could be this harsh reality: The fight is unwinnable because the students’ enemy is the insidious virus, not the school district.
“Regarding their concerns — we share them,” said Round Rock ISD spokesperson Maritza Gallaga.
Round Rock ISD is a model. It employs prevention efforts that are safer than those of many Texas districts. Its mask requirement is based on risk-based threshold phases set by Austin Public Health, Travis County, and the Williamson County and Cities Health District, which Thursday was at “Red/Stage 5, masks required with health/developmental exemption available.”
Round Rock students are calling for more robust contact tracing, a better-enforced mask mandate, access to quality masks and testing. They also want substitutes for their teachers who are sick, so they don’t have to gather with multiple classes in a space to be watched by teachers filling in during their conference periods.
Hundreds of students in Boston, Chicago, New York, Washington,
Minnesota and other places have walked out of schools in protest, demanding safety changes or remote learning during the latest omicron variant surge.
Their walkouts demand change, but are their ideas for changes possible? And would they make students feel safer?
No. There is no way to make any school 100 percent free of the virus. And in-person school is still best, even now.
But schools across Texas must be as safe as possible — and clearly, that’s not always happening.
Schools need a statewide plan to be established by a new, nonpartisan state task force as our Editorial Board called for last week.
Our Editorial Board recommended that education and health experts be part of that task force — one that takes politics out of this issue — but students must also be included. Their voices must be heard, and it shouldn’t take walkouts for that to happen.