UK professor: UK needs to make adjustments to help K-12 kids get back to schools

Fayette County wants to bring students back into the classroom safely. The University of Kentucky wanted the same thing, and gave it a try. It also welcomed students into residence halls, dining facilities, libraries and gyms. Now that UK is responsible for roughly half of the county’s COVID-19 caseload, it’s time for the university to rethink its priorities. Without significant changes to UK policy, FCPS will be unable to move from online education to effective hybrid or in-person models. And without successful K-12 education, everyone – including universities – will be worse off.

As a UK professor, I might be expected to favor college freshman over first-graders when it comes to in-person education. That could not be further from the truth. Undergraduates can learn calculus online. But it has long been recognized that very young students face significant challenges learning to count without handling actual objects. Just as babies need to be held in order to grow, young children need to use all their senses – including those not accessible through pixels – to learn basic reasoning skills.

What’s more, these early years of education may well prove the most important. According to the US News and World Report, “Research shows that average annual learning gains for children in grades K-2 are dramatically greater than those for subsequent years of school.” Given the significance of the earliest grades to overall development, online education doesn’t just hurt young people and their families; it exerts significant negative impact throughout a lifetime, including on college readiness. First grade matters more than freshman year in part because without adequate first grade, there will be no freshman year.

Walking to the grocery store last Saturday afternoon, I passed half a dozen front-yard gatherings. On this first UK football game day of the season, beer was flowing, crowds were close, and there was barely a mask in sight. I remember being that age and not wearing a bike helmet because it made my hair look flat. I don’t blame these students for having the same sense of immortality; as irrational as it might seem to those of us who have had time to learn otherwise, feeling invulnerable to tragedy in one’s late teens and early 20’s is as age-appropriate as a 5-year-old not wanting to sit still in front of a screen. But it does bespeak a larger responsibility on behalf of the university. Governor Beshear has said it. Superintendent Caulk has said it. UK students comprise half the COVID caseload in our county, and this is one if not the major reason that FCPS education must remain online or develop a hybrid model which poses increased risk to school employees among others.

If the university administration’s callousness to the effect of their all-in approach to collegiate life on younger students is distressing, the excuses President Eli Capilouto has been publicizing are infuriating. UK’s recent claim that college students somehow don’t spread the virus except to other students is patently absurd to anyone who’s stood in line at Graeter’s or Great Bagel. In yet another defense of the status quo, Capilouto resorted to fond remembrances of Trump staffer Deborah Birx’s compliments during her recent visit to the university.

Recent headlines about how the White House pressured the CDC to alter its data regarding the risks of COVID to young children make Birx’s praise less than convincing. Reading Capilouto’s cheery self-congratulation on how much she liked us, I was, for the first time in over twenty years as a professor, truly ashamed of my employer. If keeping elementary school kids home so that college students can live in dorms is irrational, acting like those largely responsible for this turn of events deserve a pat on the head is downright immoral.

President Capilouto, please understand that our 42,000 FCPS children need in-person instruction even more than UK’s roughly 30,000 young adults need to have the full “college experience.” In the long term, accepting this fact will protect higher education by providing future students with the basic learning skills necessary to succeed in college and beyond.

Marion Rust is Professor of English at the University of Kentucky and Editor of Early American Literature.

This story was originally published September 30, 2020 at 10:48 AM.