Mayor Muriel Bowser is refusing the children of the District of Columbia their right to an education, at least through Election Day. Every public school in the nation’s capital will remain closed until Nov. 6, meaning that parents, most likely mothers, will be forced to put their own careers aside to assist in the sham of “distance learning.”
A one-size-fits-all approach rarely works, and Washington’s coronavirus response is no exception. The overwhelming majority of the city has the pandemic under control, but we’re penalizing every public school student because a handful of areas are failing to stop the spread.
In the past two weeks, Washington’s Ward 3 has had just 30 new coronavirus cases. Ward 4 has had more than 5 times that, with 167 new cases. Even more tellingly, these wards are moving in opposite directions. Whereas Ward 3’s had fewer new cases in the week just ended than it had in the two weeks prior, Ward 4 saw an increase. From July 7 to July 21, Ward 4 had 114 new cases, meaning the number of new cases in the following fortnight was 53 cases greater than the prior increase.
| Ward | New cases from 7/7-7/21 | New cases from 7/21 to 8/4 | |
| 1 | 98 | 95 | |
| 2 | 77 | 64 | |
| 3 | 43 | 30 | |
| 4 | 114 | 167 | |
| 5 | 139 | 134 | |
| 6 | 117 | 95 | |
| 7 | 140 | 155 | |
| 8 | 125 | 154 |
What does this mean? For some reason or another, be it better social distancing and mask compliance or generic transmission from increased housing density, the virus is spreading like wildfire in Ward 4, but infections are growing less quickly in other places and diminishing in still others.
It is, frankly, nuts to tell children in Georgetown (total caseload: 32) and Chevy Chase (total caseload: 63) that they can’t go to school because adults in Columbia Heights (total caseload: 766) can’t wear a mask. The education of our children is an essential business, and that means we should build all of our public policy around ensuring that the schools that can safely open do so.
This means sacrifices, small and large. The onus is on adults to avoid carrying the pandemic from Ward 4 across the rest of the city. Just as doctors and essential workers were given the priority of ample PPE, teachers are owed the same. Some classes should certainly be held outside as long as the weather permits, both to aid social distancing with less classroom congestion and because the risk of coronavirus transmission is significantly lower outdoors than indoors. This also means that parents with households that include elderly or immunocompromised people must have the right to keep their kids at home if need be, and teachers who are at risk of coronavirus complications must be able to do the same.
Young people gave up proms, parties, and every other normal thing they would usually be doing from March through August to protect the elderly from a virus that won’t kill a fraction of a percent of us. It’s time for the rest of us to pay back our children in the form of data-driven school reopening policies. That means reopening in areas such as Ward 3 that clearly have this thing under control and cracking down on mask and social distancing violations in hot spots that put the rest of us at risk.
