Building Back Better:
the U.S. Department of Education
by
It’s back-to-school season, and not since half a century ago, when court-mandated desegregation roiled so many schools, have students needed to navigate such a fraught learning environment. The underlying cause this time around is the COVID pandemic, and the weird, ongoing politicization of this public health issue has exacerbated matters to a tragic degree.
President Joe Biden’s American Rescue Plan, which squeaked through Congress last March (receiving only Democratic support in the Senate), included funding to help school districts invest in PPE, update ventilation systems, and establish other measures that would keep students, teachers and support staff safe when they returned to school.
But with kids under the age of 12 still ineligible for the coronavirus vaccine, the federal Centers for Disease Control earlier this summer issued additional guidelines to help K-12 schools bring students back safely. Among the recommendations, the CDC encouraged adoption of a universal, indoor mask-wearing policy to help minimize the exposure of students, teachers and staff to the highly infectious Delta variant that now prevails.
While a handful of states embraced the mask-wearing mandate, most abdicated any responsibility in that regard and left the matter up to local school districts and parents.
Along with some Trump-affiliated politicians, right-wing talk personalities like Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham jumped into the fray with anti-mask screeds. This motivated their followers around the country to protest at school board meetings and picket outside of schools, waving signs that declared “we don’t co-parent with the government,” and masks represented “the new symbol of tyranny.”
Eight states – Texas, Florida, Arizona, South Carolina, Oklahoma, Utah, Iowa, and Arkansas – explicitly moved against CDC recommendations and prohibited school districts from establishing masking policies.
Since then, there have since been some successful legal challenges by local school districts against the anti-masking policies in some of these states, and at the end of August the Department of Education opened civil rights investigations into the anti-mask policies in Iowa, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee and Utah, alleging that those policies discriminated against kids with disabilities, who are at greater risk of severe illness should they contract the coronavirus.