On the morning of Nov. 14, 1960, no parents were more afraid of sending their children to school than the parents of four 6-year-olds in New Orleans.
The children, all African American girls, were that day integrating the city’s public schools. Brown v. Board of Education outlawed racial segregation in public schools in 1954, but Louisiana didn’t desegregate until ordered by a federal judge in 1960.
Even then, the school district in New Orleans delayed as long as it could. The parents of the girls, torn between giving their daughters the best education available and not wanting to endanger them, chose the educational opportunities, knowing the law was on their side.
Three of the girls went to McDonogh No. 19 Elementary School. The fourth, Ruby Bridges, broke the color line at William Frantz Elementary School. On that first day, and for the rest of the year, the kindergartner was escorted by federal marshals to protect her from screaming mobs. The image of Bridges and the marshals was captured in Norman Rockwell’s iconic painting “The Problem We All Live With.”
Sixty years later, the problem we’re all living with — the one that has parents afraid to send their children to school — is the novel coronavirus.
In 1960, in New Orleans, school districts and mobs who wanted to keep children out of school were on the wrong side of history. In 2020, in Texas, the attorney general and Texas Education Agency, intent on rushing children back to school, are on the wrong side of history and science.
Federal marshals can’t protect the children, but school superintendents guided by public health professionals can. That they’re not being allowed to is irresponsible and dangerous.
On July 17, the San Antonio Metropolitan Health District banned Bexar County school districts from reopening for in-person learning until after Labor Day because of the high risk of spreading COVID-19. Health departments in Texas’ other four largest counties issued similar orders.
At first, the TEA said that school districts ordered to remain closed and offer only online classes would continue receiving state funding. But Tuesday, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton wrote a nonbinding legal opinion that health departments didn’t have the authority to keep schools closed.
This prompted TEA to reverse itself and say school districts could provide only online classes for the first eight weeks, but on the ninth week must open for in-person learning or lose state funding. This applies to all districts, including those in communities heavily afflicted with COVID-19.
Neither Paxton’s opinion nor the TEA’s reversal are based on science or consideration of the risks to which students, teachers and staff, and their families, will be exposed. These are arbitrary dictates that undermine the gradual reopening the districts have been preparing for as they balance the necessity of children being in school with their safety.
Forcing districts to choose between health and safety, and state funding is unconscionable.
“We don’t have room in that calculus for politics,” Brian Woods, Northside ISD superintendent, said last week in an Express-News Editorial Board meeting that also included Edgewood ISD Superintendent Eduardo Hernández and SAISD Superintendent Pedro Martinez.
Each is basing his decision on science and health metrics, and they won’t put children and others at risk.
Martinez said that if after eight weeks, Metro Health finds no change for the better, his campuses won’t reopen for in-person classes. “We’re not going to allow children to come in if it’s not safe,” he said.
Hernández, speaking as if Paxton and the TEA were present, said, “Give us the space to lead. Don’t threaten us with funding issues. Don’t scare us.”
Gov. Greg Abbott’s rush to reopen the state led to the COVID-19 spike, and the surge in deaths and hospitalizations. This should be cautionary tale instead of a model for opening schools.
No one denies children must return to school as safely and soon as possible. But no one should deny that “safely” must precede “soon.”
All of us want children back in school, just like all of us want to eat out, enjoy live concerts, go to sporting events and, most of all, see and embrace family and friends without worrying about spreading the virus and adding to the 153,000-plus lives it’s stolen.
There’s a moral arrogance among those who object to wearing a mask and practicing social distancing, who insist on rushing to reopen schools as if we’re not amid a deadly pandemic. They act as if they’re the only ones inconvenienced when COVID-19 is the problem we all live with.