Getting Back to School: For God’s Sake, Listen to the Kids
When it comes to public policy that impacts children and youth, the best interests of children should govern.
Kids provide important insights into their lives, their concerns, their needs, and their hopes and dreams, but only if we choose to pay attention to what they are saying. Adults should lean in, pay attention, listen, and learn from them.
Children need adults for guidance, safety, and protection. But sadly, their best interests and concerns are, far too often, treated as an afterthought or worse. Instead, the interests of adults and politics often come first, and kids are treated as mere pawns in a political game of catering to anti-science misinformation, anti-vax Facebook groups, and public school privatizers.
In school board meetings across this country, adults have gone off the rails and threatened school board members, educators, doctors, and scientists over the implementation of public health and common-sense measures, such as vaccines, masks, testing, ventilation, and social distancing, that medical experts and science strongly recommend.
There are instances of adults assaulting teachers and even a student over school mask requirements, despite the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the American Academy of Pediatrics have recommended such policies to help students return to school as safely as possible.
One might be inclined to say that these people should stop acting like kids, but frankly, no child would act this way.
Our children are watching and are left in shock at the poor and embarrassing behavior of adults, including their parents.
This is not how you solve disputes in a democracy. In fact, rather than kowtowing and capitulating to mobs (including people that do not even have children in the schools), policymakers should seek out medical experts, educators, and parents who are willing to have civil and rational conversation about the issues.
For example, a recent study has found:
Without interventions in place, the vast majority of susceptible students among K12 schools will become infected and school absences will increase, followed by additional cases in communities as infected students transmit to household members. Universal masking can reduce student infections by 26–78%, and testing biweekly along with masking reduces infections by another 50%. Self-quarantine among exposed students or virtual-by-choice options may further reduce infections.
Our elected officials should also be listening to the children themselves. After all, it is the health, education, protection, safety, and lives of students that is supposed to be the focus.
As Noam Peleg writes for The Conversation:
Children have unique insight into how a school day looks. When presented with information about potential safety measures to be implemented — particularly around physical distancing — they will be able to provide views and solutions relevant to them and other children.
Peleg adds:
Children’s best interests must be a primary consideration, and this can not be done without giving proper weight to children’s own insights.
While adults continue to argue, yell, and threaten the health and safety of each other and that of students and teachers, there is overwhelming evidence that young people want to be vaccinated and take whatever public health and safety measures are necessary to return to school as protected as possible.
Alana Nesser, a 14-year-old Parkland student at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, wrote a compelling, reasonable, smart, and powerful piece for the Orlando Sentinel calling on adults to stop “playing politics with the physical and mental health of every single student in the state of Florida.”
Nesser chides Florida’s elected officials for threatening the funding for schools and educators for taking measures, such as requiring masks, to protect the health and safety of children in school districts across the State of Florida. She writes:
How could the simple requirement of wearing a mask justify a threat to defund of schools or revoke educator salaries?
This disgusting threat does nothing to benefit or protect the children of Florida; it is to make a political point only. The pandemic and the need to wear masks is not a political issue. It is a public health and safety issue. End of story.
Kids get it. They want to be back in school. They want to be learning with their friends. It is their lives that are being impacts by political decisions that put children and teachers at greater risk of COVID-19, which leads to growing cases of exposures, illnesses, quarantines, and school closures.
As Nesser explains:
. . .Florida has the highest rate of COVID hospitalizations for children in the country, and the number of hospitalized children grows every day.
The sharpest increase of admitted patients was in children under the age of 12 who are too young to be vaccinated, and masks are their only form of protection. 38% of young people aged 12 to 19 have been vaccinated in Florida, and less than half of the total population is fully vaccinated. In the past week, our state has recorded its highest ever single-day COVID-19 case number for multiple days in a row.
Masks, properly worn, have been proven time and time again to be effective at reducing the transmission of COVID-19. There has been no credible research to support any adverse effects of mask-wearing.
So, what is the problem? A reduction of risk and no downside other than a little inconvenience? The protection of young people, the future of this country, must come above all else.
And what of mental health? The pandemic has ignited a mental health crisis for young adults who have lost over a year of their childhood and have been deprived of the social and emotional enrichment they get from personal interactions and in-person learning. We need to be back in school and we need to feel physically safe.
Unfortunately, under the guise of “Parental Rights,” some politicians have taken extraordinary measures to block or stand in the way of allowing schools, public health officials, and medical experts to take affirmative measures, such as required masks in certain indoor settings, to protect the health and safety of students and teachers from what is now a fourth wave of a global pandemic.
Even worse, these politicians are blocking public health protections, such as mask mandates, that most students and parents want.
Politicians like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, Texas Governor Greg Abbott, Tennessee Governor Bill Lee, Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds, Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster, and others had their chances to protect kids and failed. Even worse, they actively blocked protections for kids that the public strongly supports.
Dr. Frieden is right. The consequences of their failures have been tragic and dire.
In addition to the education consequences of growing number of children being infected by COVID-19, which includes missing school due to illness and quarantines, kids are having increasing medical problems associated with the COVID-19 delta variant, including higher rates of infection, hospitalization, long-haul COVID, and multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children (MIS-C), which is a delayed heart inflammation or toxic shock response to the virus in some kids, and death.
When it comes to our kids, how is any of this acceptable?!
As Nasser asks and correctly answers:
What must change in order for the adults in the room to say enough is enough? If it takes the voice of a kid, then I will scream it from the rooftops and I urge my fellow students to join me. We need students to return to school safely. We need to follow science. We need to wear masks to protect ourselves and others from transmitting the virus.
The stakes are just too high.
We are well past the time when politicians should sit down, be quiet, lean in, and listen to the kids. This should have happened months and months ago. After all, it is the lives of our kids that are being impacted by failed political decisions that put them at greater risk of COVID-19 and have led to record hospitalizations, quarantines, and school closures. Most kids want and need and to be in school as safely as possible, rather than in a hospital bed or at home due to illness or a quarantine.
Even though some people might want to make it about themselves, this is not a debate about parents.
It is about this: the fundamental rights of children to have their health, education, safety, and lives understood, affirmed, and protected, including their wish to be vaccinated.
Listen to the kids.
