No elected official has ever taken an action that helped me and my family as much as
Larry Hogan
did.
My former governor in Maryland, in early August 2020, intervened twice to stop our out-of-control county health officer from shuttering all non-public schools. In so doing, Hogan not only saved the school year for my children, he saved us from a destructive thoughtless county government that was trying to ruin our lives.
LARRY HOGAN IS BETTING ON A REAGANITE REVIVAL
Hogan left the governorship earlier this week, with a sky-high approval rating, except among some of the left-wing diehards in Montgomery County. He’s got
strong views
about the GOP’s past and future, and not-so-strong
views
about abortion. He
wants to run for president
, an aspiration generally dismissed by conservatives.
But I will eternally be grateful to Hogan and applaud his actions, which were politically costly but morally right and nationally important.
On July 31, 2020, right about sunset on a Friday, Montgomery County Health Officer Travis Gayles announced out of the blue that the county would bar in-person schooling in non-public schools until at least Oct. 1.
Gayles misleadingly cited rising COVID cases in the county — positivity and hospitalizations were plummeting, meaning more cases were showing up only because testing was going way up that summer.
Jewish schools, Catholic schools, and other private schools all objected to this shocking order, which was made without public debate, without democratic input, and without any reasonable basis. Gayles and his colleagues in the county government reacted with utter
disdain
to the public and private critiques and lobbying they received.
Many private schools in the county had
spent hundreds of thousands of dollars
installing COVID mitigation measures, including new ventilation, plexiglass shields, and cleaning protocols. These schools were even requiring masks and social distancing, but Gayles and the county government didn’t care.
The county council shared the health department’s contempt for the parents, teachers, and principals who pleaded to be allowed to open.
That’s when Hogan stepped in. On Monday afternoon, Aug. 3, Hogan
nullified
Gayles’s order. “Private and parochial schools deserve the same opportunity and flexibility to make reopening decisions based on public health guidelines,” Hogan said. “The blanket closure mandate imposed by Montgomery County was overly broad and inconsistent with the powers intended to be delegated to the county health officer.”
Gayles was undeterred. Keep in mind that in these days, COVID spread was close to zero, and the very same county government was renting out public school classrooms as “
distance learning hubs
” where parents could pay private companies to use, kind of like classrooms.
Nevertheless, Gayles issued a second order on Wednesday of that week to bar the schoolhouse doors, this time leaning on different legal authority.
The state intervened again. Hogan’s health secretary declared that while the county could close individual schools for outbreaks, blanket closures were not legal. Gayles was
forced
to retreat and withdraw his second order.
The next two years have proven how 100% correct Hogan was, and how 100% wrong Gayles and County Executive Marc Elrich were to try and close every school in the county.
For instance, students in remote schooling got COVID
three times as often
as students actually in school buildings. The cost of remote learning to students — academically, socially, physically, emotionally — continues to manifest. Gayles had dismissed these as minor “downstream effects.”
Yet, at the time, Hogan took a lot of abuse for his actions. A Washington Post op-ed by Democratic attorney Sarah Killory
called it
“a political attack on Montgomery County’s Public Health.” The op-ed, similar to
CNN
, tried to tie any resistance to school closures to Donald Trump.
The county council from then on treated Hogan poorly. He had burned bridges with the state’s largest county by stopping their bad action.
Plenty of conservatives were upset with Hogan for not intervening on behalf of public school families. Hogan argued to me that under state law, the governor has no authority to overrule county school boards.
I say the county’s actions would have ruined our lives because
our family has built our lives around the schools our children attend
. Our government tried to take this away from us. Larry Hogan knew this was harmful and unjust, and intervened at his own political cost. Our schools would have been permanently weakened if we had been kept apart for an entire year as the MoCo public school students were.
Hogan didn’t merely save our family and the tens of thousands of families at the other schools that opted to open in the fall. Hogan probably saved hundreds of thousands of families around the country from remote schooling.
Gayles was a trailblazer in trying to force the Jewish, Catholic, and other non-public schools to close. Certainly other cities, states, and counties would have followed suit had he gotten away with it.
Part of the reason my wife and I decided to move out of Montgomery County last year was that we saw the same incompetent and disdainful county government staying in power, while Hogan, term-limited, would not be around to protect us from them.
I don’t know if many of my fellow conservatives will support Hogan if he runs for president, but everyone who had a child going to school in person in Maryland in the fall of 2020 ought to thank God for Larry Hogan.
