Thank you to Fayette County Public Schools for saving lives and educating students

As we mark one full year of our kids being back in the classroom —and as we approach a day in the near future where we hopefully can put COVID in the rearview mirror — I believe it’s worth reflecting on the Fayette County Public Schools’ pandemic response, to fully appreciate how lucky we have been to live in Lexington as parents and students.

Thinking back to the pre-vaccine period, I’m not trying to minimize how challenging the experience was for a lot of families, but it’s not outlandish to think that we *could* have made remote learning work. After all, there are families who spend thousands of dollars a year to educate their kids via virtual school. It was a reasonable, viable option to pursue during a pandemic. Nonetheless, while it became obvious that virtual instruction is not the right medium for K-12 education in a large and diverse school district, the failure was not due to a lack of effort. Administrators worked tirelessly to distribute laptops, to provide hotspots to kids who didn’t have home internet, to get meals to kids who rely on free/reduced-price lunch, and generally to make sure no kids were falling through the cracks and disappearing from the system.The teachers performed double-duty, developing a new curriculum and teaching our kids while they served as tech support for their classrooms too.

Also, there is perhaps a silver lining: we’re all more tech savvy and accustomed to the ins and outs of remote learning. And so if NTI (non-traditional instruction) days become necessary due to a weather event or widespread sickness, it’s a really nice backstop to have — better than extending the school year, at least. Most importantly, there is a good chance that we saved the lives of — or prevented severe healthcare outcomes for — many high-risk educators and caregivers. The late 2020 wave was already the most dire for Fayette — with the first, third, and fourth worst months for COVID-caused deaths. We can never know how things would have worked out otherwise, but keeping our schools closed during that time was very likely worth the sacrifice.

Step ahead to February 2021 after the vaccines were available for frontline workers and high-risk adults. I don’t know how you could look at the FCPS performance since that time as anything other than a resounding success. With robust vaccine uptake, masking, and other reasonable policies, we kept our doors open for a solid year. They even were open for the summer of 2021 with the IGNITE program—- to help kids who had fallen behind due to the shortcomings of remote learning. By contrast, many communities around us that shunned masking had to resort to school closures during the current academic year.

Given this track record, it’s disappointing that people have reacted to the COVID protocols with such anger and impatience. It simply wasn’t reasonable to expect that school and health officials were going to drop masking and other measures during the Omicron wave — at the very moment we needed every tool in our arsenal to keep case numbers low. Moreover, the attitude of some parents that these protocols are something awful that we did TO our kids doesn’t make any sense. We implemented them FOR our kids so they could learn in person instead of at home ... Remember?

As a point of comparison, Apple is arguably the most successful company in the world with a workforce of highly paid, vaccinated adults. Like many other such companies, rather than navigate the logistics of safely reopening, they’ve had their staff work remotely for two years. And even after they return on April 11, they will initially only be in the office one day each week! During a pandemic, creating a safe environment where people can spend all day around each other – Monday through Friday – is a real challenge, it seems.

Again, these protocols were FOR our kids. We did right by our kids. They got to socialize on a consistent basis and learn face-to-face with their teachers. And for all of the noise made by some parents, the heavy lifting was actually done on the frontlines in the classroom and by the leaders who were administering the policies to keep our schools healthy and open. So I’d like to offer my sincere gratitude to everyone at FCPS. You deserve credit even for the parts that ultimately didn’t work out, because it all required such an incredible amount of effort. I hope you feel an immense sense of professional and personal pride for everything you’ve done on behalf of our community these past two years. Thank you.

Mark Linnen is a financial services consultant, Lexington resident, and proud FCPS parent.