Mask mandates, critical race theory: This year, schools are a political battlefield | Editorial

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Back to school

How South Florida students, parents and teachers are coping with a return to the classroom.

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‘Going back will be nerve-racking.’ How students will cope with a return to the classroom

Mask mandates, critical race theory: This year, schools are a political battlefield | Editorial

Lessons I learned from teaching during the pandemic: Miami-Dade’s teacher of the year

Some kids will be vaccinated, others won’t. Same with teachers. That’s troubling to many.

Here’s how to help your child if they’re anxious about returning to school

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Protesters burning masks outside of a School Board meeting in Broward County. Others accusing Miami-Dade County Public Schools of shaming children for being white. Gov. Ron DeSantis and other Republicans crusading against mask mandates and a new boogeyman they want us to believe has invaded Florida classrooms: Critical Race Theory.

Once upon a time, public education was a topic that transcended politics, where people with different views more or less agreed on how to educate children. There were disagreements, of course — whether to teach sex ed and the evolution-versus-creationism debate.

With a global pandemic that has killed close to 40,000 Floridians and further polarized Americans — you can predict COVID-19 vaccination rates based on how a community voted in the presidential election — schools again are the highly visible stage upon which politicians, trying to rev up their supporters, get a coveted spot on national television and launch culture wars.

That’s a cheap, shameful tactic and a disservice to the 2.7 million students in Florida, including the 334,000 in Miami-Dade County. It does nothing for the 8-year-olds who cannot read at their grade level or the parents worried about their children catching the coronavirus.

Back to square one

Back to school was supposed to mean back to normal in the 2021-22 school year, which begins on Aug. 23 in Miami-Dade. But, almost as if overnight, Florida broke records in the number of COVID cases and hospitalizations, thanks to the highly contagious delta variant.

“I feel we are at the intersection of the ‘Twilight Zone’ and ‘Groundhog Day’ because we were here last year,” Karla Hernandez-Mats, president of the United Teachers of Dade, told the Herald Editorial Board. “It’s unfortunate we are back in the situation where the state of Florida is making national news for COVID cases.”

Most students are expected to go back to in-person learning in the fall, Miami-Dade School Superintendent Alberto Carvalho told the Board. Meanwhile, Florida pediatric hospitalizations have spiked. Young children are less likely to have severe cases of COVID-19 and few have died, but that risk isn’t zero. Doctors are on high alert for multisystem inflammatory syndrome, a rare but serious illness that can occur in children infected with the coronavirus.

No parent should want to risk finding out whether their child will be one of those cases, but many parents steadfastly insist that they don’t want their kids forced to wear masks at school. And the governor is firmly in their corner.

Children under 12 cannot get vaccinated yet, and vaccination rates among teens are low — roughly 40% have received at least one shot in Florida. School districts should be free to make decisions to keep children and staff safe, but politics has made that harder. DeSantis, Florida’s chief bully, signed an executive order in late July threatening to withhold funding from districts that don’t comply with the Department of Health’s guideline on mask mandates, which says parents must be given the option of opting out. Many experts who specialize in children’s health agree that masks provide protection for kids, among them the American Academy of Pediatrics and the organization’s Florida chapter, not to mention the GOP’s favorite punching bag these days, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The politicization of schools amid the new surge in coronavirus cases puts parents between a rock and a hard place.

David Derrico and Brigitte Mau have children in elementary school in Palm Beach County who are too young to get vaccinated. They are homeschooling one child this coming year, but had to send their oldest one back to the classroom because she would lose her spot at an elementary school on the Florida Atlantic University campus where children are selected through a lottery.

To them, DeSantis’ order exemplifies Florida’s laissez-faire attitude toward the virus and schools. They worry about children eating indoors without masks and won’t send their youngest child back until vaccines are available for young children.

“The back-to-school plan is to pretend COVID is over,” Derrico told the Editorial Board. “The facts and numbers don’t seem to change anything.”

Saying no to masks

Of course, there are parents who agree with DeSantis.

Erica Chao, whose two children are going into second and fourth grades, said she might pull them out of school if there’s a mask requirement. She worries about the potential long-term health effects of wearing masks, even though there’s no evidence that masks cause health problems for children.

Chao, who lives in north Miami-Dade, said remote learning didn’t hurt her kids academically last year. Not all children, however, had the same experience. While Chao stayed home when work as a blogger covering local events dried up during the pandemic, many children didn’t have the same support: children left unsupervised, those with learning disabilities.

There are plenty of stories of what their lives were like during the time of remote learning. For example, a teacher in Redland, an agricultural area in South Dade, remained online after school was over to keep an eye on a student who was home alone watching his siblings until their parents came back from work, Hernandez-Mats told the Board.

Such above-and-beyond acts show many teachers’ passion and commitment, but it’s also a snapshot of the challenges educators will face when kids return to the classroom: making sure students like Chao’s kids stay on track while helping those who are behind. Teachers will also be under pressure to raise test scores, which plunged, as expected, during the pandemic.

While Miami-Dade public schools’ hands are tied on what they can do to keep the coronavirus at bay, fortunately, they seem more equipped to remediate learning losses.

Miami-Dade ran the nation’s largest summer-school program this year, according to Carvalho, with 75,000 students in summer school and academic camps (roughly 7,000 used to attend summer school on average before the pandemic). When the 2021-22 year starts, students who are falling behind will have longer days with after-school and a new online tutoring program. The district will use federal stimulus money to provide transportation for students who need to stay in school after hours, Carvalho said.

“So students who need more will get more in a differentiated way, very personalized way,” Carvalho told the Editorial Board. “It may be a child who lives in poverty and their performance is suffering in a high-performing, wealthier school.”

The School Board has also ramped up its investment in mental health by approving $13 million to boost counseling staff and hire 100 part-time professionals to work with students. That’s much needed given that almost 50% of students were remote last year and will now need to re-acclimate to the classroom — while potentially dealing with the trauma of losing loved ones or suffering abuse.

Address racism, not CRT

You know what else affects children’s mental health?

Racism.

That’s the real problem Miami-Dade Public Schools must address next year, not Critical Race Theory, the latest made-for-Fox-News lightning rod for Republican officials like DeSantis, who have successfully pushed to ban it from schools despite the fact it is normally taught in law schools and universities, not in K-12. The theory says that racism is embedded in many of our institutions and doesn’t manifest itself only in person-to-person interactions (How shocking!).

It was a waste of time and energy that Carvalho was forced to publicly announce — twice — that Critical Race Theory is not part of Miami-Dade schools’ curriculum after the district was accused of “Marxist indoctrination” during School Board meetings.

However, Florida’s recent ban on the theory will not preempt conversations about systemic racism and race in classrooms, Carvalho told the Board. The district will also not back down from its recently adopted plan, in which, “We declare boldly that diversity, equity and inclusion are the driving forces and the foundational principles that drive our strategic plans,” he said.

Who would have thought that the terms “equity” and “diversity” would be considered bold in 2021?

There’s nothing typical about this next school year. But things could be easier if we just let medical guidance and a respect for history be the foundations of a good education.