“The privileged class of the county is showing their behinds,” health officer Travis Gayles of Montgomery County, Maryland, wrote on Aug. 1, dismissing objections from parents, teachers, and principals upset at his blanket closure of all nonpublic schools.
Gayles ultimately failed in his efforts to block the schools from reopening in the fall, but during the week his department spent defending his order, Gayles and his colleagues shared, in emails, their low opinion of the county’s religious and nonpublic schools and the parents who send their children to them.
A public records request revealed two email chains in which the health officials dismiss parents’ and schools’ arguments against closure as spasms of “privilege” and “arrogance.”
Gayles announced his blanket closure of all nonpublic schools after hours on Friday, July 31. At the time, the county had hit its all-time low in COVID-19 test positivity, 2.3%, and no other area county or city had issued such an order. By Saturday morning, Jewish schools in Silver Spring, the Catholic Archdiocese of Washington, and some independent schools throughout the county were objecting loudly and preparing lawsuits.
A local orthodontist married to a public school teacher emailed Gayles Saturday afternoon, Aug. 1, with a request.
“I ask that your department of health visit Bullis,” a private school in the county seeking to reopen. “Bullis has exceeded my expectations for the safety of my precious youngest child. … At the very least could you please provide the specific criteria which you would need to see achieved in MoCo and the necessary protocols in the schools in order to provide the critical and essential in person learning.”
Gayles forwarded the message to colleagues, commenting only, “The arrogance…”
Tiffany Ward, the Chief Equity Officer of the county, replied, “SMDH, totally unsurprised by this.” Ward then invoked the local private school Holton Arms. “Want to let you know that Holton alums who are in the medical field are singing your praises and saying you made the right decision. Not sure what current parents are saying. But folks need to know they can’t buy their way out of the needed pandemic precautions!”
“Absolute arrogance and privilege,” added Deputy Health Officer James Bridgers to the email chain. “Imagine what you would do if your child was exposed? You mitigate risks by being overly cautious.”
The nonpublic schools, however, were mitigating risks precisely by being overly cautious. Gayles had not even bothered to review their plans. “We have been preparing to open with all safety precautions suggested by state, county, and the CDC,” explained Rebecca Prater, principal of the Fellowship Christian School in Germantown, Maryland.
“We put a lot of effort,” said Rabbi Yitzchok Merkin, headmaster of the Yeshiva of Greater Washington in Silver Spring. “We worked very hard. We’ve been working with experts from NIH on infectious disease. … We had a whole plan.”
Gayles had closed schools without even reviewing the schools’ plans. And the emails suggest he never considered their objections to the closures as valid.
On Saturday night, Aug. 1, Shantee Jackson, a specialist at the county’s Department of Health and Human Services, emailed colleagues a story from CNN about Gayles’s order.
“Thanks…but why are on e-mail on a Saturday night lol,” Gayles replied a minute later.
“It has been a long day and the privileged class of the county is showing their behinds as my grandmother would say,” Gayles wrote. “We will continue to press ahead and do the work to keep our folks safe.”
When asked about this email in a weekly press conference Wednesday, Gayles replied, “MPIA requests are able to take emails out of context and cast a light in terms of how you’d like to print your story. … We stand by that guidance, and we stand by what we’ve put forward.”
County spokesman Scott Peterson responded: “The county does not have any animus towards any residents about any issue. All decisions made related to COVID guidance are always with the health and safety of all residents first and foremost as was done with guidance on the opening of schools.”
Two days after Gayles’s order, Gov. Larry Hogan nullified it by amending the state’s emergency declaration. Gayles responded later that week with a new order closing all nonpublic schools, but Hogan’s health department struck that down as well.
Gayles, while issuing and defending the order, repeatedly cited rising cases in the county over the summer, but that appears to have been entirely an artifact of increased testing: the three-day average in new Montgomery County cases doubled from a low of 58 on Jun. 18 to 113 on Jul. 31, but testing had more than doubled in that time. Hospitalizations, meanwhile, had fallen by half.
The county didn’t have more COVID-19 spread in late July — it was just catching more cases. The three-day positivity rate had dropped by two-thirds from 6.9% to 2.3% — half the threshold the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had set for reopening schools.
At the same time that Gayles tried to close nonpublic schools and to dismiss all objections as arrogance and privilege, the county approved private, in-person “learning hubs” of a dozen students doing remote learning in public-school classrooms. That wasn’t consistent with the assertion that St. Bernadette school couldn’t possibly educate children safely.
In the end, a few dozen nonpublic schools opened in person, mostly Catholic parochial schools, with an estimated 8,000 students and a few hundred staff. Among those, there has been exactly one COVID-19 hospitalization and zero deaths. Public school students in Montgomery County in March returned to school four days a week, and county numbers suggest that from September through March, students in school were far less likely to get coronavirus than remote-only students.
