The great American disease that has made the coronavirus crisis here far worse than it should have been is the disease of partisanship, which has infected everything from wearing masks to reopening schools.
The Orange County board of education jumped into this skirmish, which on Monday voted to recommend schools to reopen without requiring children to wear masks or participate in social distancing. The board minimized the risk of the disease to children and dismissed fears that they could infect adults in their homes.
Many of the specific recommendations incorporated in a “white paper” the board approved Monday by a 4-1 vote contradict those of the California Department of Education, the Orange County Department of Education, and the federal Centers for Enforcement and Control. Disease Prevention, all of which recommend instituting facial coverage and social distancing whenever practical in schools.
A real medical crisis has been hijacked by Sacramento politicians to make things difficult for the economy. They want to harm the economy to beat Trump.
Orange County Board of Education President Ken Williams
They also run counter to the decisions of the Los Angeles and San Diego Unified School Districts, which will start the school year with online-only classes.
The Orange County Board White Paper states that in K-12 classes, “social distancing of children and reduced census classrooms are not necessary and therefore not recommended.” She says that “children play a very small role in the spread of COVID-19 and that” requiring children to wear face covers can even be very harmful to the child. “
These conclusions are supported by some research, but they are by no means definitive, especially given the initial state of research on the virus and the multiplicity of situations in the classroom.
The only dissenter on the board, Beckie Gómez, criticized the white paper for making forceful claims without citing specific research.
“As an educator, when you say something you should be able to back it up,” she said. “And there are many places where we don’t endorse it.”
The white paper also addressed the difficulty of supporting children in cloth masks.
It’s tempting to see the county board’s action as a flare-up of Orange County’s historic conservative past, which seemed to have been overtaken by a wave that swept Democrats across the county’s six congressional seats in 2018. In fact, the actual editors of the white paper clearly come from conservative or libertarian politics.
“What we are seeing now is that a real medical crisis has been hijacked by Sacramento politicians to make things difficult for the economy,” Ken Williams, chairman of the county board, told me.
When I asked him why the state government would want to harm the state’s economy, he replied, “They want to harm the economy to beat Trump.” That’s all it is.”
As my colleagues Hannah Fry and Sara Cardine observe, the county has been abuzz with resistance to wearing public masks. Former county chief of health Nichole Quick was fired from her job after she imposed a mandatory mask order in May. Orange County is one of 29 that have been ordered by Governor Newsom to severely delay its reopens due to an increase in COVID-19 cases and deaths.
The board vote is worse than it seems and not so bad. To take the second point first, the board has no authority to direct local schools to reopen or remain closed. It is essentially an appeals body with jurisdiction over inter-district expulsions, suspensions, and transfers, with some other nebulous oversight of the county’s department of education budget and programs.
“The highest authority that determines who will open the schools and under what conditions are the individual trustees of the school district,” says Williams.
In other words, anything you’ve read that suggests the “county” had ordered the reopening of unmasked schools is a big exaggeration. In fact, the Irvine Unified School District has already told the board, essentially, to jump into the lake.
“IUSD is no governed by the OC Board of Education and our district will not follow its non-binding recommendations, ”he said.
What about the aspect of this action that is worse than it seems?
The material the board released before its vote on Monday implied that its “white paper” was the product of the deliberations of 11 “expert panelists.”
It was nothing like that. The “panel” met exactly once, for a public meeting on June 24 in which each gave a statement for a few minutes setting out their views on the reopening of the school, then gave a closing statement after the comment. public. They did not deliberate together. The four I reached on Tuesday hadn’t even seen the white paper.
The panel was comprised of six doctors, including Clayton Chau, who succeeded Quick as the county health officer and rescinded his mask mandate; former superintendent of Los Alamitos school, Sherry Kropp; urban policy expert Joel Kotkin of Chapman University; public policy expert Michael Shires of Pepperdine University; Orange County Supervisor Don Wagner; and Larry Sand, an education expert at the California Policy Center.
The moderator for the July 24 meeting and also the editor of the white paper was Will Swaim, president of the California Policy Center.
How some of these members got to the board is a bit of a mystery, but there are some clues. Of the six doctors on the panel, five, all except Chau, appear among the more than 500 doctors who signed a May 19 letter to President Trump urging him to reopen the US economy due to the “negative health consequences of national growth exponentially shutdown. ”
Another signatory is physician Jeff Barke, the husband of the vice chair of the county board, Mari Barke.
Simone Gold, a panel member and an emergency physician who was the primary signer of the doctors’ letter, described the tips for wearing masks as “a mass scam.” She says the media has “an agenda … to make you think that there are no real events that you can discern for yourself.” … That’s a very good way to let people live in fear. “
The California Policy Center is affiliated with right-wing organizations such as the State Policy Network and through the SPN, the United States Legislative Exchange Council, which has received funding from the Koch brothers network. The California group has campaigned against public employee unions, including teacher unions, and welcomed the 2018 Supreme Court decision Janus, which undermines the finances of public unions.
Mari Barke disputed that the “panel of experts” had been politically stacked. She said the presence of five signatories to the May 19 letter to the president among the panel’s six doctors was “random.” … It certainly wasn’t our recruiting base. “
Barke said the board launched the white paper process because some of its members felt left out of the county education department’s effort to develop its reopening guidelines.
Wandering at the suggestion that the board panel was politically inclined, he challenged me to examine the original committee assembled by the Al Mijares County Superintendent to draft the departmental guidelines.
So here it goes: It was comprised of 28 school superintendents, 13 representatives from local school boards, eight county health and social service officials, and seven Department of Education officials, including Quick and Chau. That is a fairly broad spectrum of direct experience in public education and public health. In comparison, the board panel had a single (former) public school official.
None of this means that members of the county panel of experts were sincere in expressing concern about the mental and physical health of children forced to stay home from school.
“My position has been consistent since the start of the pandemic, which is that the biggest mistake in the government’s response was the closure of the school system,” says Mark McDonald, a panelist specializing in child psychiatry. “My reasoning is that there is significant known emotional and physical harm to children who stay home and out of school for long periods.” The consequences include poor nutrition, emotional disturbances, and vulnerability to abuse.
“Children under the age of 5 are poorly hygienic, but they are a very minor part of this epidemic and do not appear to transmit it to adults,” said Michael Fitzgibbons, panel member and infectious disease specialist for staff at St. Joseph Hospital in Orange. However, he recognized that teens have an “adult spread pattern” to adults and other teens. “For them, the masking seems to be more reasonable.” (The “white paper” did not distinguish between children and adolescents).
Those views would have been made more effective if the Orange County board had sponsored a non-political roundtable where professional positions could be established, the best available evidence weighed, and presented to the public as a measured program with all options in place. . objectively.
That was not the method of the meeting. “They stacked the panel with people with a particular point of view and didn’t listen to others,” says Kotkin, whose opinion is that policies on reopening schools should take into account the wide range of socioeconomics among school-age families. children.
Kropp says he intended to talk about what was best for the children in the reopening process. But when he arrived at the June 24 meeting, “It was clear to me and quite heartbreaking that the discussion had become so political. I didn’t feel like there was an open discussion at all. Twelve individuals each had an opinion. “
The Orange County Board of Education could have increased the public’s understanding of how best to serve children in the K-12 system by allowing its experts to develop a program together. Instead, she displayed them to a crowd in their individual silos, gave ideologues the task of creating a “white paper” and turned what could have been serious discussion into an opportunity for right-wing propaganda.
The board gave a lesson to the public, a lesson on how to undermine their own goals.
