It’s hard to have faith that the leadership of local school districts in Northern Virginia is going to swallow hard and accept that there’s now a directive from the state level that it’s time to get on with educating students by starting to wean ourselves from the excessive focus on COVID health at the expense of broader student (physical and mental) health.
But hope springs eternal, so we’ll have to see what comes out of these school districts between now and the March 1 deadline for eradicating mask mandates.
[The Democratic Party of Virginia, which is about as hapless in its messaging as, well, the Republican Party of Virginia, was out with a press release this week that Gov. Youngkin was running roughshod over the rights of local school boards to make decisions at the local level. They seemed to have no such complaint when Gov. Northam was doing so. As my favorite Casey Kasem line puts it: “Ponderous, man, f***ing ponderous.”]
It’s sad yet still almost hilarious that some keyboard cowboys are taking to their blogs and social media to hint darkly that anti-mask students will be bullying those keeping their masks on.
Right.
This is Northern Virginia: The bullying, albeit perhaps a little more nuanced, will come from school leaders and those who walk in sync with them, working every day to make students who choose to take off masks feel uncomfortable about doing so.
And it probably won’t be hard to keep themost kids in line: Should you find yourself driving past any middle or high school when classes get out in the afternoon, you’ll see many if not most students still masked up, despite the fact that (a) the types of masks they are wearing are pretty much useless and (b) wearing masks outdoors was debunked as a public-health strategy in the very easliest days of the pandemic. And yet, having had their impressionable minds filled with doom and gloom and fear by parents, teachers and other authority figures, it continues.
Yep, those are going to turn out to be well-adjusted adults ……
Question for the assemblage: When our dazed and confused president attempts to gain political glory by using his State of the Union speech to declare this pandemic over — it seems to be conventional wisdom that that’s where we’re headed — what do the local school systems do then? Defy a president from their side of the aisle? Gonna be fun to watch.
THIS IS WHY I LOVE THURSDAYS! That’s the day the Falls Church News-Press comes out, and the day I get to delve into the thinking of that paper’s editor/publisher/owner Nick Benton.
In this week’s edition, he devotes an entire column to huzzahs that CNN – a network whose viewership can now be counted on fingers and toes – is “finally” calling out FOX News on issues.
“Finally”? CNN has been attacking FOX (and vice versa) for a decade, and almost incessantly during the Wuhan unpleasantness. This hardly is a new thing, except in News-Press-land.
- Scott McCaffrey