THENEWYORKER,AUGUST17, 2020 11
COMMENT
FA I LI N G SCHOOLS
S
chool isn’t due to start in New York
City until after Labor Day, but in
Georgia some districts began opening
last week, even though the state is aver-
aging upward of three thousand new
cases of COVID-19 a day—more than
France, Germany, and the United King-
dom combined. Schools opened in
Paulding County, outside Atlanta, de-
spite there being an outbreak among
members of a high-school football team.
Students posted photographs of the first
days of the term at the high school, show-
ing teen-agers jammed in two-way cor-
ridor traffic, most of them without masks.
Brian Otott, the county’s school super-
intendent, said that the crowding did
not violate its “protocols” and that “wear-
ing a mask is a personal choice and there
is no practical way to enforce a mandate
to wear them.” School administrators
did, however, warn students that they
would be disciplined if they kept post-
ing “negative” images.
Otott’s statement exhibited defiance,
denialism, and a peculiar sort of defeat-
ism—all factors that have contributed
to what it is now clear are woefully in-
adequate preparations to open schools
nationwide. In May, as the number of
new cases in much of the country was
declining, it might have been possible
to believe that, by the fall, it would be
high time and easy, as President Trump
tweeted, to “OPEN THE SCHOOLS!!!”
Indeed, many people who care deeply
about vulnerable populations in ways
that he has never shown are desperate
to open schools. Children can be less
safe at home than they are at school;
families can face a crisis if a parent or
guardian (often a mother) has to stay
with a child rather than go to work.
But as Lori Lightfoot, the mayor of
Chicago, put it last week, when she an-
nounced that all school instruction in
her city will be remote at least until No-
vember, we have now moved to “a very
different place in the arc of the pan-
demic.” Los Angeles, San Diego, Miami-
Dade, Philadelphia, and Houston made
similar decisions. In some places, suffi-
cient groundwork simply hasn’t been
done. In New York City, which has more
than a million students, the virus has
ebbed, but Mayor Bill de Blasio has
offered an inept plan that relies on staff
and equipment that don’t exist and that
the city has no plans to pay for, all to
give children in-person instruction only
one to three days a week. Michael Mul-
ILLUSTRATIONS BY JOÃO FAZENDA
THE TALK OF THE TOWN
grew, the head of the United Federa-
tion of Teachers, has said that the city’s
safety standards are “not enough.”
It remains true, thankfully, that
the number of children who die from
COVID-19 is very small, but they can be-
come quite ill and have high viral loads.
(A video of Trump claiming, last week,
that children were “almost immune” was
taken down by Facebook for violating
its policy on dangerous COVID-19 mis-
information.) And children, particularly
older ones, can spread the virus; in Is-
rael, the reopening of middle schools
and high schools with relaxed social dis-
tancing preceded outbreaks in the wider
community. A study by the Centers for
Disease Control of a summer camp in
Georgia found at least two hundred and
sixty confirmed cases among the some
six hundred children and staff mem-
bers; half the children aged six to ten
tested positive, the highest rate of any
age group present. Staff had been re-
quired to wear masks; campers were not.
The focus on teachers’ safety, and the
stand taken by their unions, has pro-
voked some anger—this is, after all, a
country willing to mandate that a teacher
endanger her life but not that a teen-
ager wear a mask. The most thoughtless
voices, exemplified by a Wall Street Jour-
nal editorial last week entitled “School-
Opening Extortion,” dismiss teachers’
fears and accuse them of being little more
than pandemic shakedown artists look-
ing to “squeeze more money from tax-
payers.” Others argue that teachers are
“essential workers,” and need to take the
risks that come with the job, just as
health-care or transit or food-industry
