Last night my 10-year old daughter showed me the backpack she picked out for back to school. I pretended to be excited but I wanted to throw up.
It doesn’t seem right on an elemental level to be sending our children and teachers and school staffs into close proximity for extended periods of time with hundreds of people, when cases are skyrocketing and when so many businesses aren’t open because of the danger.
I want my and all kids to have the normalcy of school and of peer community, but I want them to be healthy and safe, and right now I don’t have confidence they will be, given our leadership and its like-minded base.
We can’t even get many adults to value wearing masks, distance, and wash their hands. Tell me how we’re going to get millions of elementary, middle and high school students raised with the same values, to do these things in the most compressed and socially-pressured environment?
How can we expect students to honor the needs of others and the many health requirements that will need to be in place, when all they hear at home is that this virus is an overblown hoax and that masks are a form of oppression?
This isn’t going to be an easy Fall no matter how things unfold. None of us have had to navigate anything like this. No children in our lifetime have had to face these challenges. These are heady days to be a parent in America.
