They were wrong on school closures and never admitted it. We should never trust them again.
Timothy P. Carney
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Three years ago this week, at about sunset on Friday night, my county government announced that it would bar all religious and private schools from opening their doors on the first day of school.
https://twitter.com/KateRyanWTOP/status/1289347768780169216
I remember the moment well because it was traumatizing and radicalizing. My kids’ schools had closed in March and stuck with remote schooling for the rest of the school year. They spent those months, plus June and July, preparing for a safe reopening in September. Many other schools in Montgomery County did the same thing.
THE MIXED MESSAGES OF BIDENOMICS
The health officials and the politicians spoke with 100% certainty that closing schools was the right thing to do. They did not consider that any reopening plan could possibly make school safe. They were totally sure that in-person school would risk massive outbreaks, and they did not entertain the possibility that there would inflict serious harms on children by closing schools for months or a year.
County health director Travis Gayles and other health department officials dismissed all objections from parents and school officials as “arrogance” coming from the “privileged classes.”
Gov. Larry Hogan intervened and struck down the county order, thus allowing nonpublic schools to make up their own minds. Gayles fired back, issuing a second closure order. Hogan killed that order too.
Throughout, the politicians in the county defended the blanket closures. County Executive Marc Elrich, at the same time he was trying to close Jewish, Catholic, and other schools, presided over a government that opened bars for longer hours, reopened tattoo parlors, and let private organizations host “learning hubs” in empty public school classrooms.
Other politicians followed Gayles and Elrich.
Here was state legislator Eric Luedtke:
https://twitter.com/EricLuedtke/status/1291838698716307457
And here was county councilman Will Jawando:
The stupidest arguments, from county councilmen and liberal commentators was to the effect of If it’s not safe for public schools to open, why should private schools play by different rules?
There were a dozen answers to that tendentious question, but the simplest one was this: The public schools were making a mistake in closing; private schools shouldn’t be forced to repeat that mistake.
Gayles, Jawando, and everyone else who flatly asserted it was unsafe to return to school—and who refused to acknowledge the harms of remote schooling at the time—were dead wrong.
In-person students in MoCo were less likely to get COVID than were remote students. The dozens of non-public schools that were open while public schools were closed saw one COVID hospitalization and zero COVID deaths.
The harms of school closures have been repeatedly documented. Learning loss was massive in Montgomery County as in much of America. MoCo has also seen a youth crime wave, including a public school crime wave.
We should turn Jawando’s line back on him: The learning loss and crime wave is on you, Will Jawando.
The scary thing is that none of these politicians or health officials ever admitted to being totally wrong. (I regularly got on County Council press calls and asked them if they regretted school closures or attempted school closures.)
If a politician or regulator makes a grave error and can’t admit it or explain it, nobody should ever trust that politician or regulator again. Unfortunately, none of these closers suffered for the harm they imposed on children.
Elrich got reelected, Jawando is running for Senate, Luedtke got promoted to a job in the governor’s office, and Gayles cashed out to a company that helps kids deal with the mental-health consequences of the lockdowns and closures.