Sowing

 

Schools across the nation find themselves in an impossible situation, as they are stuck between increasingly dire medical advice, frustrated parents, and tricky political realities. A school board in northeast Texas, for example, temporarily added facemasks to its dress code to get around their governor’s enforcement ban on them in public places. In Florida, where COVID numbers are surging in large part due to the Delta variant, the governor has threatened to withhold salaries from school leaders if they go against his rule to forbid a mask mandate. Meanwhile, here in Illinois, schools that ignore our own governor’s mask mandate risk the loss of funding, sports, and even accreditation itself.

In our local area, schools that are following the governor’s unpopular mask mandate, as difficult a decision as that was, chose the right long-term decision for their students. I’ll explain my reasoning shortly to give folks a chance to grab the pitchforks, but before doing that let’s try to clarify the main purpose of a school district in the first place.

            A local board of education has many responsibilities, but most of them can be condensed into one basic idea: to offer the students who live in its district the best education that resources allow.

            So, what in the world does that have to do with masks?

            Well, in a normal year – nothing. As a veteran teacher and as a parent myself, I would suggest that wearing a mask on your face would actually be a detriment to education for all kinds of reasons that you’re undoubtedly already very familiar with. In 2021, though, I would argue that masks are an unfortunate necessity to give school district’s the best opportunity at doing their main job, which—again—is to keep the doors open for as many students as possible.

            Masks will help keep students in school because they help decrease the amount of germs that a potentially infected person exhales. Masks aren’t foolproof, of course, and they are less useful for keeping germs out, but multiple studies do suggest that they help slow down the spread of most viruses, including COVID-19.

            Effingham Unit 40, for example, among other schools, kept its doors open five days a week last year with the help of universal masking. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends universal masking in schools, including for those who are vaccinated. Considering that the CDC recommends indoor masking for schools and that area hospitals have even asked local school boards to follow those guidelines, one might assume that the decision to implement this mitigation strategy, particularly for students who haven’t had the opportunity to get vaccinated, would be an easy decision, as it was in many parts of the country.

 Which brings us to my second point.

            Masks will also help keep students in school because if masks aren’t worn, schools might literally have their doors shut. Now, I’m about as much a legal scholar as most folks on Facebook, but I do know that at the end of the day, controversial issues like this are not decided in the “comments” section. At some point courts will decide if the ISBE has the legal authority to do what the governor has threatened to do: cut funding, stop sports, remove accreditation. Punitive governing is not good governing, of course, and Governor Pritzker will likely suffer political consequences for his decisions, but the reality is, those threats are very steep hills to die on.

Granted, if a school district wants to risk those privileges to protect students from what they consider the tyranny of mask wearing or to even make a political gesture toward an unpopular governor, that’s really no one’s business outside the district. By the end of this calendar year, however—perhaps sooner—this may no longer be a hypothetical discussion, anyway. With some school districts throughout the nation masking up and some not, we’ll have plenty of evidence in the form of quarantine numbers, for example, to decide if wearing masks was a good idea. We’ll also know whether or not our own governor is bluffing.

I’ve never been on a school board, but I imagine that sitting down to make masks optional when it’s decided that they aren’t really needed is much easier than sitting down and figuring out how to generate the five million dollars that’s been lost from state funding, or figuring out what to tell the school’s seniors who are trying to apply for college without a diploma that’s recognized by the ISBE. It seems that for the sake of a child’s education—to say nothing of the health of the community at large—we ought error on the side of caution, as annoying as mask wearing can sometimes be.

In closing, this is a hard time for everyone, and it would be easy for me to shrug my shoulders, huddle up with my “tribe” and share memes all day that mock those who disagree.

But that’s useless. It’s careless at this point, and perhaps even dangerous. For the sake of our schools and everyone in them—students and staff—we must ignore the impulse to make this a civil rights issue, because it’s not.

Masking is simply a mitigation strategy we will someday not need; it’s a small piece of cloth that we’re sewing into Fort Sumter.

 

 

Variant

 

Studies suggest that after the family doctor, the most trusted person in someone’s life—after their local radio personality, supermarket cashier, and neighborhood scold—is their uncertified life coach, which is me. Thus, I’ve taken it upon myself to chime in on our nation’s most recent facepalm, which is that we somehow have more COVID-19 vaccines than arms to put them in.

 A year ago, one of President Trump’s biggest concerns was, “How quickly can America develop a vaccine that will help us stop this virus?” Well, now we know, and the answer is very clear: Who cares? 

Although free, safe and effective vaccines have been available for months now, only about half of the eligible American population has been fully inoculated, and, in many parts of the nation, that rate is much, much lower. While that might seem strange coming from the country that cured polio and placed multiple humans on the moon, it is perhaps unsurprising considering that many Americans simply no longer trust those very institutions—medicine, science and government—that helped bring those achievements to light. For these readers, vaccines seem unnecessary at best or dangerous at worst, so, let’s consider a few of their concerns.

Reader Concern One: This whole thing is very suspicious.

Response: Well, not really. Epidemiologists have been warning us about the plausibility of a zoonotic pandemic for years. The question was never “Is this going to happen?” but instead “When, where, and how bad?” Even if it turns out Covid-19 did escape from a laboratory, pandemics do happen on planet earth and shouldn’t be dismissed as pretend, particularly after one has been linked to millions of deaths worldwide.

Since humans aren’t really designed to “social distance” and being asked to wear a mask to decrease the amount of germs we exhale is apparently a violation of multiple Constitutional amendments, our best bet for curbing the virus before it mutates further  into “double secret probation” status is to get people vaccinated. 

Which would have likely worked in 1955, the same year Americans stood in lines for hours to get their kids inoculated from the previously mentioned polio.

Reader Concern Two: This vaccine is just a way for them to track and/or control us.

Response: Regardless of how you define “them,” “they” probably already know more about you than does your spouse, and while that might be a good thing for your marriage, at the end of the day, none of us are all that interesting.

We wake up and we buy stuff.

Thrilling.

This vaccine isn’t going to track anyone unless it’s duct taped to a smartphone.

Reader Concern Three: Hardly anyone my age even gets that sick from this, though. What’s the point? Can’t we just wait for herd immunity?

Response: We could if we were cows, I guess, but since we have a vaccine that works, perhaps the more humane strategy would be to “take one for the team” to help protect those in our community who aren’t so blessed with good health. Besides that, if it keeps mutating—which it will because that’s what viruses do—herd immunity could be years away if it even happens at all.

Reader Concern Four:  What if getting the vaccine is just the first step in getting the mark of the beast?

Response: Although I am no theologian, the idea that God, the creator of the Universe, is in the business of punishing people for the simple act of trying to keep themselves and their community safe, seems a bit off brand. God is God, after all, not some pagan trickster deity trying to con people into eternal damnation. God is love, and it seems that taking an hour or so out of our day to make ourselves less contagious to our neighbor would be a pretty straightforward manifestation of that idea.

Reader Concern Five: Those so called “experts” have flip-flopped on this issue more times than a pancake house on a Sunday morning! Why should we trust them?

Response: Well, now I’m hungry, but yes, the message does keep changing because it’s based on real time data, which is also changing. I would be much, much more suspicious of all of this if the message had been static for the last eighteen months.

Reader Concern Six: My family doctor said I shouldn’t get the vaccine. 

Response: Did they actually tell you that?

Concern Six Continued: Well, I assume they would if I asked. Besides, shouldn’t I wait awhile until more data is available?

Response: OK, that’s a reasonable concern, but keep in mind that over a billion human beings have been fully inoculated at this point and we have months of data to suggest that getting vaccinated significantly decreases your chances of getting seriously ill from the virus or spreading it to someone else. While no vaccine can ever be one hundred percent effective, that's a considerable amount of data.

Regardless, I will reiterate what I said a few months ago: getting vaccinated--or not--should be a choice. As an uncertified life coach, however, and as a fellow citizen, I would simply recommend that you do, in fact, talk to your actual doctor about it. Talk to folks who’ve been inoculated themselves. If you’re a prayerful kind of person, then definitely pray about it.

Yes, these vaccines were branded for “emergency use,” but that’s more of a process protocol than an indicator of their safety, as they will likely be approved for even young children by the end of this year. In fact, we had our twelve-year-old daughter vaccinated recently, and while that might count as child abuse in some circles, please understand that she has not, as of yet, developed any strange side effects. (Unless you count her sudden inability to remember how to clean up her room.) She took the shot with an impressive amount of enthusiasm, as it meant she could start living a more normal version of an adolescent life without being worried she was bringing something home to her immune-compromised little sister.

After discussing the issue with some trusted family doctors, it was a pretty easy decision to make.