Ending the isolation

It would be one thing if the bureaucrats and politicians on the other side admitted their error. They don’t. I’ve repeatedly called into our county government conference calls to ask them whether they think they got it wrong, and they have never granted an inch. What happens next time?

I realized I was still affected by this fight only recently. Someone on Twitter explained why so many vaccinated people are still masking up, even as the virus disappears. A lot of people had a lot of trauma this past year, he explained. And we’re still processing it.

That’s when I realized that I had escaped the worst of COVID’s trauma, but I still had trauma. And my trauma was caused by Dr. Travis Gayles, health officer for Montgomery County, Maryland.

On July 31, 2020, we were enjoying a quiet summer Friday night. And then my wife began screaming.

It was just before 8 p.m. I was in a chair to the left of our bed, finishing up an article on St. Damien of Molokai, whose statue is in the U.S. Capitol. My wife was lying in bed scrolling through Twitter. The kids were in bed.

Then came Katie’s exclamation.

“What? No. No!”

“What is it?” I asked.

I couldn’t imagine how one tweet could get her so agitated.

It was a tweet by WTOP’s Kate Ryan, reporting that “Montgomery County’s Health Officer directs [that] private and independent schools remain closed to in-person instruction until October 1st.”

As I loaded up Twitter, confusion and anger flooding my brain, my wife’s agitated exclamations gave way to despondence. The county government was trying to ruin our lives.

We send our children to three different Catholic schools: The local parish school for our youngest three, plus an all-boys school and an all-girls school for the older ones. These schools had spent the spring and the summer preparing for reopening amid the coronavirus pandemic. The buildings were altered, the ventilation was improved, tents were purchased, curricula were adjusted, teacher training was lined up, rules were drafted, parents were being educated.

We were going to open in person five days a week, and do it safely, with masks, social distancing, and sanitizing measures.

But the county, at about sunset on a Friday less than a month before opening day, announced that it would bar our schoolhouse doors. No other county in the country was attempting to close the nonpublic schools. It wasn’t a gut punch. It was a haymaker to our faces, and a sledgehammer to our plans.

For 141 days, our family had been largely locked down and isolated. A few small cookouts or fire-pit happy hours with friends had been our only socialization outside of extended family.

Two kids’ birthdays had passed without parties. My kindergartener had lost his tee-ball season, and my fifth grader had lost his Little League season. Our middle-school daughter had lost the special final summer at her one-week sleep-away camp. Our other kids lost their one-week nature camps. Nobody we knew was throwing the sort of big barbecues that typically defined our summers, at once helter-skelter and languorous, where we adults in normal times would recline amid swarms of children and fireflies. The local swim club wouldn’t even allow our kids to play in the pool with other kids.

And our children hadn’t set foot in a classroom in three and a half months.

We went along with the closures and the mask mandates, even though we felt the loss of community acutely.

In fact, our older kids’ schools had, in the spring, shut down before the public schools because so many teachers and administrators had been closely following the spread of the coronavirus through China. I had written op-eds in support of school closures.

That was back when we assumed the coronavirus was spread like the cold, flu, or stomach bugs our kids had regularly brought home from school. That was back before we realized that, miraculously, kids (especially young kids) were far less likely to get sick with COVID or to spread it, and were almost immune from serious cases. At the outset, there were even concerns it would spread on surfaces, further supporting the closure of schools.

So, we struggled through a rough spring. Our children thankfully had teachers who took remote teaching seriously. The teachers were trying something new and often had to shift gears. Thankfully, the teachers required very little Zoom, and for the younger ones, almost none.

Many of my friends remarked how their kids seemed to be thriving. “Dad, I get my work done in 90 minutes, and then I can play or read or relax all day. I save so much time by not going to school.”

That wasn’t our kids. They suffered academically and emotionally from remote learning.

For some of them, it was their extroversion that made them thrive so much more in a classroom than at home. For others, it was their learning disabilities. For all of them, and for Katie and me, it hurt that the person trying to drill the conjugations or math facts or explain how to tell time was also the person telling them: clear the dinner table, stop touching your sister, do not disrespect your mother, and please mow the lawn.

The lockdowns and closures were traumatic for us, because they were isolating. We desperately needed the schools to reopen in the fall.

We needed teaching administered in person by other adults who hadn’t spent all weekend expending parental capital. We needed the men and women whose jobs — vocations — were teaching.

More importantly, we needed to expose our kids to the wonderful men and women of virtue of all races and ages and personality types and interests who, through example and informal interaction as much as through formal instruction, would help form our children into Catholic men and women of virtue.

It takes a village to raise a child, and our “village” is largely the three Catholic schools where we send our kids, including the school at the parish where we worship.

We have met our friends and our children’s friends through these schools, and the schools are where we see them. These schools are where we sing, play sports, eat communal meals, serve the poor, love our neighbor, find role models, serve as mentors, seek advice, find a human-level safety net, and worship God.

And Montgomery County’s health officer Travis Gayles was trying to take all these things away from us. That’s why I say he was trying to ruin our lives.

A traumatic decision

Everyone experienced trauma over the past 14 months. We didn’t lose anyone close to us to the virus. I lost only a little bit of work. Our suffering was from the isolation, and we saw school as our emergence from that isolation. Our trauma was caused by Dr. Gayles’s efforts to lock us into that isolation indefinitely by locking shut the institutions where we live our lives.

At the time, I thought politics was at play. The county school board was about to vote to close all public schools, and the Washington Post ran stories about public schools’ fears that the best students would flee to private schools. Montgomery County teachers took to Facebook to plead, in effect, even though remote learning is dreadful, don’t pull your kids from the public schools.

The same week the county announced it would close private schools, the same county government pursued agreements with private camps and daycares to run quasi-private schools in public school classrooms. They would be called “learning hubs,” and parents would pay the private organizations that would help their kids learn in classrooms. The county helped in the efforts, one of the camp CEOs explained, “because teachers need daycare.”

Also, the health department flatly refused requests from schools that wanted their reopening plans reviewed. One private school parent wrote in an email to Gayles, “Could you please provide the specific criteria … and the necessary protocols in the schools in order to provide the critical and essential in-person learning?”

Gayles forwarded the email to a few colleagues, commenting only, “The arrogance …”

When parents, teachers, and school heads fought back, Gayles emailed his friends, “The privileged class of the county is showing their behinds.”

To explain his blanket announcement, and refusal to even consider individual schools’ plans, Gayles repeatedly pointed to rising case numbers in the county. This looked like statistical sleight of hand.

The county had, to its great credit, more than doubled testing over the course of the summer. So finding more cases didn’t mean there was more spread. It meant we were finding more of it. Hospitalizations had halved over the summer, and test positivity hit its all-time low of 2.3% the day Gayles issued his order. That 2.3% was less than half the positivity threshold the CDC had set for safe reopening.

Public records requests did not reveal any coordination between Gayles and the teachers unions, or any request by the public schools to close the private schools. So, the political motives I ascribed to the county health department, in my anger, appear to have been misguided. But my anger itself wasn’t misguided. A blanket school closure made no sense amid low and falling positivity, and after the schools had poured great resources into making classrooms safe.

Months of studies had shown that schools could be safe by taking precautions and that kids were not a threat for serious illness or for spreading the virus.

Over the summer, the American Academy of Pediatrics had called for children to be back in school.

The National Academies of Science in mid-July called for schools to open: “Given the importance of in-person interaction for learning and development, districts should prioritize reopening with an emphasis on providing full time, in person instructions in grades kindergarten through grade five and for students with special needs.”

Former CDC Director Robert Redfield said, “I don’t think I can emphasize it enough, as the director for the Centers for Disease Control, the leading public health agency in the world: It is in the public health interest that these K-12 students get the schools back open for face-to-face learning.”

Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told the Baltimore Sun, “Reopening schools is really important. It’s a difficult issue, but it’s one that should be addressed as a matter of priority. There’s good evidence that we can do so safely … if certain conditions can be met.”

Parents, principals, and teachers wanting to reopen our Jewish, Catholic, and other private schools had all of these experts on our side.

So we fought. We held protests. I wrote article after article. My kids took to singing Hamilton lyrics at me: “Why you always writing like you’re running out of time?” But they knew why. My children desperately wanted to go back to school in the fall. So for them, we fought.

The principals at our children’s schools fought, too. This wasn’t true at every school. As Gayles and his colleagues noted in emails, some of the most elite private schools, such as Holton-Arms, or Barron Trump’s St. Andrew’s Episcopal, were happy to open as remote-only.

But the best institutions fought the county. And we won. Gov. Larry Hogan, who was hardly a laissez-faire COVID cowboy, took our side and struck down Gayles’s order, twice.

Yet fighting this fight earned us scorn and hatred. We were scolded that we wanted teachers and students to die so we could get our “babysitting.”

Of course the hysterics were unfounded.

Being in school proved safer in Montgomery County than being out of school. Of the 8,000 or so teachers and students in-person at nonpublic schools most or all of the year, there was exactly one who got COVID serious enough to warrant hospitalization. There were no deaths. Between September and March (when public schools finally reopened), numbers suggest remote learners got the coronavirus more than in-school learners.

And in our parish school, basically nobody got sick. There were one or two positive tests, but none of them became symptomatic. Needless to say, there is zero evidence the virus spread at all in the school.

Our older boys’ school had more cases, perhaps including some spread at school or school activities. But thanks to outdoor classes, mandatory masks, and less tolerance of boyish wrestling, the spread was rare, and no severe cases ever popped up.

And we got a full year at all three schools. Things weren’t as fun. The kids had fewer field trips, less sports, a middle school play with a masked cast. But we had life, because we had our community. I thanked the principal at our parish school on the last day when I dropped off our kids for our third time.

She stretched her arms out to encompass the dozens of teachers and hundreds of students: “We’re meant to be together.”

Thank God our government didn’t tear us apart.

Timothy P. Carney is the senior political columnist at the Washington Examiner and a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He is the author of Alienated America: Why Some Places Thrive While Others Collapse, The Big Ripoff, and Obamanomics.