Manny made the right call: We have to lower COVID-19 rates before kids go back to school.
On Thursday, Fayette County Superintendent Manny Caulk put the burden of reopened schools right where it belongs.
On us.
If we want our kids to return to school, we have to lower the COVID-19 summer surge ourselves.
As Caulk said in a special meeting on Thursday, he has to recommend a virtual start to the school year because cases keep rising. The board agreed and unanimously approved his recommendation. We have roughly one month before school is likely to re-open, albeit remotely.
If we’re going to go back to some semblance of regular school, he said, “we have to change our behavior to reduce the community spread.”
The spread is rising, here in Lexington and across the state. Gov. Andy Beshear says it’s pretty simple. We’re having big parties, going to bars, starting sport teams, going to beach towns and and still not wearing masks. That’s why Beshear started a statewide mask ordinance and lowered the number of people at gatherings from 50 back down to 10.
What does that mean? It means we have to wear masks all the time. It means we have to stop going to bars. It means we have to stop having big backyard barbecues. It’s hard. It sucks, just like nearly everything about 2020. As I wrote in another column, COVID-19 almost seems to understand how to disrupt nearly everything that’s fun.
According to families surveyed in July, nearly everyone wanted to go back to schools. But as the rates rise, parents and teachers are telling board members they’re having second thoughts, and rightly so. All it would take is for one teacher or child to get desperately ill for it all to come screaming to a halt.
Caulk showed a model of possibilities when and if rates go down. If they are minimal, we can have traditional school with students and teachers in masks. If they are moderate, we can have a hybrid version of school, where students go to school part of the time and learn remotely part of the time. But where we are now leaves us no choice but to start school online.
This choice is the hardest one for everyone, for families where parents can’t work at home, or have children with special needs, hardest for kids who want to see their friends and learn best in classrooms. We can only hope that the district’s promise that Non-Traditional Instruction will have improved since our hurried closure last spring is true.
Maybe if any of us had already lived through a global pandemic, we’d have known that we should let schools start before we let the bars reopen. It’s hard to imagine that COVID-19 rates will go down much once South Limestone venues are filled with University of Kentucky students who may or may not wear masks.
All our choices — to dither over masks, to go to Lowe’s and parties — have left the school district with just one. Right now, we have to start with virtual school. If we want other choices for school, we have to start making new ones for ourselves right now.
