By Sydney Trent and Emily Guskin Updated Aug. 25 at 8:00 a.m. Originally published Aug. 25, 2021228
Sophia Grigsby watched with horrified amazement as insurrectionists stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, defiling the halls of power in a violent attempt to prevent Joe Biden from becoming president.
The 16-year-old from rural Minnesota wondered, fleetingly, if she had been naive in believing that the protests last summer following the murder of George Floyd had truly marked a turning point. Yet even as the televised spectacle confirmed her belief in the rising dangers of white supremacy — some of the rioters were carrying Confederate flags — Grigsby’s optimism won out.
“Even with the murder of George Floyd, I’m finding people have become so much more aware,” said Grigsby, who starts her junior year of high school in St. Peter, Minn., this month. “While our country is really divided, I think that part of that division is because of that newfound awareness.”
Despite some difficulties as a mixed-race student, including oncefiling a legal complaint againsther school district after it failed to stop classmates from hurling racial slurs at her, Grigsby is also optimistic about her own life. She sees herself graduating from college, meeting her husband in medical school and raising two children — “a boy and a girl, twins,” she hopes — all the while most likely becoming rich.Story continues below advertisement
Grigsby’s largely upbeat attitude about the future, combined with a world-weary realism that seems mature beyond her years, is echoed in the findings of a nationalWashington Post-Ipsos poll of teens ages 14 to 18.
While still hopeful about what lies ahead, many teens do not view the current moment so favorably. Fifty-one percent say that now is a bad time to be growing up, compared with 31 percent who answered that way 16 years ago, in a poll of teens conducted by The Post, the Kaiser Family Foundation and Harvard University. Their parents are even more negative, with more than 6 in 10 saying it’s a bad time for teenagers to be growing up.
These young Americans, who are coming of age amid a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic, political and social unrest, growing economic inequality and rising crime, are keenly aware of the country’s problems. Majorities view political divisions, racial discrimination, the cost of health care and gun violence as “major threats” to their generation, according to the new Post-Ipsos poll. Nearly half also rank climate change as a major threat.
Some are already trying to make a difference. Heily DeJesus, who lives in Lebanon, Pa., said she dashed from her brother’s high school graduation to a Black Lives Matter protest, where they all took a knee for a selfie as her brother raised his fist in the air.
“It felt great to know that we’re a part of making a change for the world,” she remembered. “Even if it’s a small town, we’re still making a change.”
The survey of 1,349 teens was conducted online in May and June primarily through Ipsos’s randomly recruited panel of U.S. households. Overall results have a margin of error of plus or minus three percentage points, and the relatively large sample allows comparison of White, Black, Hispanic and Asian teens.
These young people are part of what is likely the most diverse cohort in the nation’s history.New Census Bureau data shows that the country’s under-18 population is majority-minority for the first time, with White children making up 47.3 percent of that age group compared with 53.5 percent in 2010. Their childhoods have been marked by racial justice protests and a growing societal acceptance of LGBTQ people. Most also perceive significant discrimination against a wide range of groups in American society. Black and transgender people topped the list, with about 6 in 10 teens saying Black people are treated unfairly very or somewhat often and an almost equal share saying the same thing about transgender people.
Montgomery County announced Wednesday that it is requiring county employees to get vaccinated against the coronavirus or get tested regularly, the latest area government to impose such a mandate for their workers amid a surge of new cases mostly infecting the unvaccinated.
All county government employees will have to submit proof of vaccination by Sept. 18 or face having to take regular coronavirus tests, County Executive Marc Elrich (D) said in a news conference Wednesday.
The weekly average number of cases per 100,000 residents is up most starkly in the region in Virginia, where the figure reached 32 as of Wednesday, compared with six a month ago. In D.C., the figure was 24 as of Wednesday and seven a month ago, and Maryland was at 17 as of Wednesday compared with four a month ago, according to data collected by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Hospitalizations are up, too, with 1,376 covid-19 patients hospitalized in Virginia compared with 400 a month ago. In Maryland, the number is 849, compared with 318 in late July, and in D.C., it was 143 vs. 52 a month ago, federal data shows.
Hospitals have not yet reached capacity but are experiencing a surge in demand. The last time this many people were hospitalized in D.C. and Maryland was in May, but hospitals there still have fewer covid-19 patients than they did at the peak of the pandemic in December and January. Virginia last reached today’s numbers in March.
Public health officials have said vaccines are their best tool against the pandemic, and more governments and private employers are issuing mandates requiring their employees to get vaccinated.
Elrich said county officials had been in negotiations with union leaders for several weeks and agreed on final details for the vaccination-or-testing requirement this week.
Now that the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine has full federal approval, he urged other employers and businesses in the county to require vaccinations among staff or patrons, adding that he thinks it can serve as a strong incentive to the segment of the county’s 1 million eligible residents who have yet to get a shot.
Sixty-six percent of Montgomery County residents are fully vaccinated — the second most in the state, behind only Howard County, which has 70 percent. About 50 percent are fully vaccinated in Prince George’s County, and 58 percent are in Baltimore City and Anne Arundel County, state data shows.
According to The Post’s tracker, about 57 percent of D.C. and Virginia residents are fully vaccinated compared with 61 percent of Maryland residents.
Across the nation and region, however, the vast majority of infections, hospitalizations and deaths are occurring in the unvaccinated.
“It’s the unvaccinated people who stand as our largest obstacle to getting back to normal,” Elrich said.
Coronavirus infections in Montgomery have climbed in recent weeks, with a seven-day average of 140 on Wednesday, compared with a low of six in June. But Montgomery County Health Officer Travis Gayles said it’s noteworthy that covid-related hospitalizations and deaths have not surged to the same extent as cases.
“This is encouraging news that hopefully we’ll be able to blunt the impact of the delta variant,” Gayles said.
The Loudoun County Health Department and public schools will open a new vaccination site at Sterling Elementary School on Sept. 4. It will be open every Saturday from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. and by appointment for now. Vaccinations are open to anyone 12 or older and are free.
The new location replaces the site at the Dulles Town Center, which will close permanently on Sept. 3.
“We are committed to being a COVID-19 vaccine provider for those unable to obtain vaccine through their medical provider or neighborhood pharmacy,” said Loudoun County Health Director David Goodfriend.
In another sign the virus surge is driving outbreaks, the Virginia Department of Health on Wednesday reinstated regular reporting of coronavirus outbreaks in nursing homes, camps, day-care centers and pre-K, as well as schools including K-12, colleges and universities. The dashboard names the facility and the number of cases and deaths.
The biggest outbreak in the state is at an assisted-living facility in Halifax, where there have been 40 cases and at least one death, state data shows. There are multiple smaller outbreaks in Henrico and Chesterfield counties outside Richmond, and Hampton and Chesapeake in the Hampton Roads region.
Antonio Olivo and Jacqueline Dupree contributed to this report.
Ms. Whippman, the author of “America the Anxious,” is writing a book about raising boys.
A while back, at the bookstore with my three sons, I started flicking through a kids’ magazine that had the kind of hyper-pink sparkly cover that screams: “Boys! Even glancing in this direction will threaten your masculinity!”
In between the friendship-bracelet tutorials and the “What Type of Hamster Are You, Really?” quizzes, the magazine featured a story about a ’tween girl who had been invited to two birthday parties scheduled for the same time. Not wanting to disappoint either friend, she came up with an elaborate scheme to shuttle, unnoticed, between the parties, joining in the games at one before racing off to arrive just in time for the same games at the other, then repeating the sprint for cake at each house and so on. This was a tale of high-stakes emotional labor and I related to it strongly — if not the actual scenario itself, then at least the nerve-frazzling, people-pleasing compulsions driving it.
This birthday party stressfest is a pretty standard-issue story for female childhood. The girls in my sons’ classes will likely have read or watched hundreds like it — stories framed around people, their friendships, relationships and emotions, their internal dramas and the competing emotional needs of others. These were my stories as a young girl, too — the movies and TV shows I watched, the books and comics I read, the narratives I internalized about what was important.
But reading the magazine now, as the mother of three boys, this type of people-driven story felt oddly alien. I realized that, despite my liberal vanities about raising my sons in a relatively gender-neutral way, they had most likely never read a story like this, let alone experienced a similar situation in real life. It turns out that there is a bizarre absence of fully realized human beings in my sons’ fictional worlds.
As male toddlers, they were quickly funneled into a vehicle-only narrative reality. Apparently, preschool masculinity norms stipulate that human dilemmas may be explored through the emotional lives of only bulldozers, fire trucks, busy backhoes and the occasional stegosaurus.
As they aged out of the digger demographic, they transitioned seamlessly into one dominated by battles, fighting, heroes, villains and a whole lot of “saving the day.” Now, they are 10, 7 and 3, and virtually every story they read, TV show they watch or video game they play is essentially a story with two men (or male-identifying nonhuman creatures) pitted against each other in some form of combat, which inevitably ends with one crowned a hero and the other brutally defeated. This narrative world contains almost zero emotional complexity — no interiority, no negotiating or nurturing or friendship dilemmas or internal conflict. None of the mess of being a real human in constant relationship with other humans.
An exception to the “no real humans” rule: The small subgenre of realistic fiction aimed at elementary and middle schoolboys is actually wildly popular. Jeff Kinney’s beloved “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” series, for example, has sold more than 250 million copies while the middle school graphic novel series “Big Nate” has sold over 20 million. My sons and their friends gobble up these books, hungry for something that reflects their own lives. They gain a lot from them too — a jumping off point to think about their own real-world challenges and relationships, and a way to open up discussions about the emotional dilemmas they face.
But the main characters in this genre tend to be slightly depressing antiheroes, middle school nihilists who are almost defiantly mediocre. Their driving narrative motivation is often a kind of contempt — for school, teachers, annoying siblings and nagging parents. This background sense of grievance can sometimes be casually misogynistic, in the “stupid, dumb girls” vein. Although later examples of these books have dialed this back, if we follow these characters’ trajectory of resentment and self-loathing to its most extreme conclusion, it’s not a huge stretch to imagine one of them in 10 years’ time, trolling feminists online from his parents’ basement.
The lack of positive people-focused stories for boys has consequences both for them and girls. In the narratives they consume, as well as the broader cultural landscape in which they operate, girls get a huge head start on relational skills, in the day-to-day thorniness and complexity of emotional life. Story by story, girls are getting the message that other people’s feelings are their concern and their responsibility. Boys are learning that these things have nothing to do with them.More on boys, men and culture
We have barely even registered this lack of an emotional and relational education as a worrying loss for boys. We tend to dismiss and trivialize teenage girls’ preoccupation with the intricacies of relationships as “girl-drama.” But as Niobe Way, a professor of psychology at New York University and the author of “Deep Secrets, Boys’ Friendships and the Crisis of Connection,” says, “When we devalue things associated with femininity — such as emotions and relationships — boys miss out.”
The imbalance doesn’t just put exhausting pressure on girls and women to bear the social and emotional load of life — to remember the birthdays and wipe the tears and understand that Grandma’s increasingly aggressive eyebrow twitch means that she needs to be separated from Aunt Susan — it harms boys and men, too. They are missing out on internalizing concepts and learning skills crucial to a connected, moral, psychologically healthy life.
Probably because of this difference in socialization, boys score lower than girls of the same age on virtually all measures of empathy and social skills, a gap that grows throughout childhood and adolescence. This has implications across the board. Among first graders, social emotional ability, including the skills to form and maintain friendships, is a greater predictor of academic success than either family background or cognitive skills. Boys are now lagging behind girls academically at every grade level through college, so providing them with a more nuanced and people-focused emotional world — in what they read and watch, and in the conversations we have with them — might go some way toward closing that gap.
The impact on boys’ mental health is also likely to be significant. From a young age, girls’ friendships tend to be more intimate, deeper and more emotionally focused, providing a support structure that is often sorely lacking for boys. According to the American Psychological Association, this lack of support, and the masculinity norms that underpin it, can contribute to a range of serious mental health problems. Adolescent boys are also at almost twice the risk for death by suicide as girls — so this is an urgent problem.
We talk about toxic masculinity as an extreme scenario — the #metoo monster, the school shooter — but it is more like a spectrum. We have normalized a kind of workaday sub-toxic masculinity, which is as much about what we don’t expose boys to as what we do.
The stories we tell become our emotional blueprints, what we come to expect of ourselves and others and how we engage with our lives. And in the vast majority of situations we are likely to encounter in the course of a lifetime, there is no hero or villain, no death and no glory, but rather just a bunch of needy humans kvetching over who said what. Understanding how to navigate that with grace and skill is the beating heart of human connection.
So let’s work toward a brave new world, in which a boy can proudly shuttle between two birthday parties, sweating with compulsive people-pleasing. Let’s give boys some girl drama, teach them the dark arts of emotional labor and likability. We might all be healthier for it.
Ruth Whippman, the author of “America the Anxious,” is writing a book about raising boys in the age of #metoo, misogyny and male rage.
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Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.A version of this article appears in print on Aug. 9, 2021, Section A, Page 17 of the New York edition with the headline: Let’s Teach Boys the Art of Emotional Labor. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | SubscribeREAD 1548 COMMENTS
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One of the most distressing aspects of the Covid pandemic has been seeing governors and state education officials abdicate responsibility for managing the worst disruption of public schooling in modern history and leaving the heavy lifting to the localities. Virtually every school in the nation closed in March 2020, replacing face-to-face schooling with thrown-together online education or programs that used a disruptive scheduling process to combine the two. Only a small portion of the student body returned to fully opened schools the following fall. The resulting learning setbacks range from grave for all groups of students to catastrophic for poor children.
From the start, elected officials seemed more concerned about reopening bars and restaurants than safely reopening schools that hold the futures of more than 50 million children in their hands. Failed leadership continues to be painfully evident as the states enter yet another pandemic school year without enforcing common-sense public health policies that would make a much-needed return to in-person schooling as safe as possible. These policy failures are compounding at a time when the highly infectious Delta variant is surging and the coronavirus seems likely to become a permanent feature of life.
Consider a new state-by-state analysis of reopening policies by the nonprofit Center on Reinventing Public Education. The analysis shows that many states have urged localities to return to in-person schooling while promoting policies that conflict with the goal of educating young people in safety. For example, as of this month, nearly one-fourth of the states had banned Covid-19 vaccination requirements, hamstringing localities that want to prioritize student safety. As of early August, only 29 states had recommended that students wear masks — down from the 44 states that did so last fall — and nine states had banned masking requirements. President Biden took the right approach on Wednesday when he announced that his Education Department would use its broad authority to deter the states from barring universal masking in classrooms.
State leaders would be wise to further protect children by requiring teachers to be vaccinated — without exception. Meanwhile, parents who wish to know what proportion of the teaching staff has been vaccinated are being thwarted by the fact that only a few states are publicly reporting this information.
Governors and other elected officials are trying to whistle past the devastating learning setbacks that schoolchildren incurred during the shutdown. That story is coming to light in studies and reports that lay out the alarming extent to which all groups of students are behind where they should be in a normal academic year and how the most vulnerable students are experiencing the steepest drop-offs in learning.
Credit…Jose A. Alvarado Jr. for The New York Times
An analysis by N.W.E.A., a nonprofit that provides academic assessments, for example, found that Latino third graders scored 17 percentile points lower in math in the spring of 2021, compared to the typical achievements of Latino third graders in the spring of 2019. The decline was 15 percentile points for Black students and 14 percentile points for Native American students, compared with similar students in the past. As Sarah Mervosh of The New York Times describes the situation, the pandemic amplified disadvantages rooted in racial and socioeconomic inequality, transforming an educational gap into a gulf.
A sobering report by the consulting firm McKinsey sounds a similar alarm. Among other things, it notes that the pandemic has widened existing opportunity and achievement gaps and made high schoolers more likely to drop out. As the authors say: “The fallout from the pandemic threatens to depress this generation’s prospects and constrict their opportunities far into adulthood. The ripple effects may undermine their chances of attending college and ultimately finding a fulfilling job that enables them to support a family.” Unless steps are taken to fill the pandemic learning gap, the authors say, these people will earn less over their lifetimes. The impact on the U.S. economy could range from $128 billion to $188 billion every year as the cohort enters the work force.
These findings constitute a scalding rebuke of those who have minimized the impact of the school shutdowns. Perhaps the most grotesque of these minimizing arguments holds that concerns about learning loss are being manufactured by educational testing companies with dollar signs in their eyes.
Children’s advocates at the United Nations got it right last month when they admonished governments around the globe for reacting to the pandemic by ending in-person schooling for long periods instead of using mitigation strategies to contain infection. This communiqué, issued by UNESCO and UNICEF, noted that the shutdown placed children at risk of developmental setbacks from which many of them might never recover, pointed out that primary and secondary schools are not among the main drivers of the pandemic and called for governments to resume in-person instruction as quickly as possible.
In the United States, a growing body of research shows that the suffering of poor children during the pandemic was compounded by the fact that their schools were more likely to remain closed than schools serving higher-income students. This left poor students more dependent on online education. A recent analysis by the National Center for Research on Education Access and Choice found that schools in districts with higher percentages of Black and Latino children were more likely to have remote schooling and that, with all other things being equal, districts with more people living in poverty “were more likely to have remote instruction.”
Remote instruction was clearly a factor in driving what researchers call disenrollment. For example, research by Thomas S. Dee, a professor at Stanford University, and his associates finds that schools that went strictly remote experienced a 42 percent increase in disenrollment compared with those that offered full-time in-person learning. Beyond that, as The Times recently reported, more than a million children who had been expected to enroll in local schools did not show up, either in person or online: “The missing students were concentrated in the younger grades, with the steepest drop in kindergarten — more than 340,000 students.”
Under the best of circumstances, this means that some of the country’s most vulnerable children will begin first grade without the benefit of having had a crucial preparatory year. Under a more ominous scenario, some of the children who lost connection to school in the upper grades may not return to class at all unless districts make a concerted effort to bring them back into the fold.
The learning catastrophe that has befallen the country’s most vulnerable children will take longer than one academic year to remedy. For starters, states and localities will need to create intensive plans for helping children catch up while moving them through new academic material and to devise systems for measuring progress toward clearly stated goals. This project will not be easy to accomplish. But pretending that everything is fine — and that no extraordinary measures are needed — is a recipe for disaster.
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Dr. McCaulley is a contributing Opinion writer and a professor at Wheaton College in Illinois. He’s written frequently about how the pandemic has shaped our lives.
I do not remember the last conversation I had with my father before he died. The weeks and months before his passing were like the months and years of our life together: full of starts and stops. We tried to create the relationship we knew that fathers and sons should have but that we didn’t, because he left our family when I was young. There were times when I called and he did not answer. In other cases, I missed his attempts to connect.
In August 2017, I received a phone call in the middle of the night. My father had died in a single-vehicle accident in California, far from those who knew and loved him.
As I grieved, my father’s death brought a certain clarity about my calling as a husband and parent. If my relationship with my dad had been marked by brokenness, I wanted my relationship with my wife and children to be marked by healing. It also forced me to re-evaluate my career. Impressing other writers and academics ceased to be my goal. Instead, I would focus on using my words to find beauty and hope. I couldn’t write a different ending for my father’s story, but I could show that a different ending was possible for others.
Over the past year and a half, many people have experienced something similar to what I did when my father died. I am not the only one who has received a terrifying call that wakes us from our slumber and changes us forever. It may have been a notification about a loved one going on a ventilator rather than dying in a car crash, but the trauma is the same. This pandemic has left conversations and lives cut short.
And it seems to be bringing a similar clarity to people about their priorities: The pandemic has led to one of the largest shifts in jobs in recent memory, with millions of Americans making changes. The housing market is exploding as many people reconsider where they want to live. We are in the midst of a societal shift, an awakening to how much we want our lives to be different. But the changes leave an issue unaddressed: Why didn’t we know all of that before?
All these changes that people are embarking on during the pandemic make me think that we weren’t that happy before the pandemic. What about our lives prevented us from seeing things that are so clear to us now? When I talked to friends and neighbors about this, two themes emerged. The pandemic has disabused us of the illusion of time as a limitless resource and of the false promise that the sacrifices we make for our careers are always worth it.
Before the pandemic, we knew we were going to die, but we did not believe it. Maybe we believed it, but considered it a problem to be dealt with later. In the meantime, exercise and a reasonable diet was the tithes we paid to our fears. We believed we had time.
For all that we know about the relatively low mortality rates of Covid-19 among the young, it remains something of a deadly lottery. You could take all the precautions, be basically healthy, and still die, quickly. I have classmates and friends who graduated from high school and college alongside me who have died from this disease.
We have had to consider our collective mortality. And we are now faced with the question of meaning. Like the biblical psalmist says, “We have escaped like a bird from the fowler’s snare; the snare has been broken, and we have escaped.” (Psalm 124:7). Covid-19 threatened to capture us in its snare, but thus far we have eluded it. What shall we do with this opportunity?
This opportunity made plain what may have been hidden. Maybe the sacrifices we make for our careers are not worth it. When we had the illusion of time, the lower pay, long commutes, high cost of living and separation from loved ones seemed a small price to pay for a successful career. But the pandemic reminded us that there are some things more important than vocational progress.
Friends with children came to see that living far from family meant that they did not have a social network that could help them when school and life logistics became difficult. Covid-19 showed us that when systems break, we need people.
This was equally true for single friends who lived in areas where the entire social scene catered to married people with families. Being at home helped many people realize how lonely they were before the pandemic and how few people they could really turn to in need.
The pandemic has reminded us that life is more than what we do. It is about whom we spend our lives with. We cannot hug a career or laugh with a promotion. We are made for friendship, love and community.
I recognize that for some, Covid-19 did not raise the same existential questions. They had to deal with the issues of survival, including the need for food and a warm place to sleep. Nonetheless, I have relatives in service industries raising similar questions. They are no longer willing to deal with harassment from rude customers for a barely livable wage. They are struggling to pay their bills, but they are doing so on their terms with their humanity intact.
If there is a lesson in this for employers, it is to remember that employees are more than workers. We have an identity outside the hours committed to making a living. Jobs that treat their employees honorably, provide flexibility and leave room for life outside of work will thrive.
I did not get to speak to my father a final time, but I did deliver the eulogy at his funeral. The need to make sense of his death revealed what was so often hard to see in the ebb and flow of our life together. He was not simply the villain who caused so much pain to our family; he was a broken person trying to find himself in a world that rarely shows damaged Black men pity. He was like most of us, a mass of contradictions.
In that eulogy I spoke about how an earlier brush with death via a heart attack changed him. He finally began to ask ultimate questions and work his way toward his own answers. He and I began to have hard and necessary conversations. I confronted him about things he had done and the real pain he caused. It was not a healing, but it began something we never got to finish.
When he died, I was in the early stages of writing what became “Reading While Black.” It has the following dedication: “This book is dedicated to the memory of Esau McCaulley Sr., who died before he ever got to see a book bearing our name in print. Whatever else I am, I will always remain your son.”
I did not dedicate the book to him because we were close. We were not. I dedicated it to him because his life and later tragic death forced me to make decisions about who and what I wanted to be. It gave me courage to write even if the world rejected it. I was changed through the calamity of his death, and the changes continue. It seems that Covid-19 has dealt a collective trauma to the American consciousness and that the full fruit of that trauma remains uncertain. One thing is clear: Our previous normal was not as good as we thought it was.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.
Opinion by Adam Zimmerman August 9, 2021 at 11:51 a.m. EDT5
Adam Zimmerman is a communications consultant who lives in Rockville.
A Montgomery County school district recently announced that all teachers and staff must get vaccinated against the coronavirus or be subject to weekly testing and other requirements. “I have an obligation to do everything I can to ensure that our kids are safe and healthy,” said Gary Ledebur, the school board member who developed the policy.
Alas, that Montgomery County school district is in Pennsylvania. But the Montgomery County school district in Maryland should follow suit and mandate coronavirus vaccines for all teachers and staff.
I am a parent of two Montgomery County Public School (MCPS) students who are still too young to get the vaccines, and I know the first day of school will bring even more trepidation and nerves than usual. MCPS has issued several directives, including universal masking, to ensure a safe and successful return to classrooms. Montgomery County recently reinstated a mask mandate for all individuals in indoor public spaces and implemented new vaccination protocols for county employees. These steps will help, but they’re not enough to give families peace of mind. The failure to require coronavirus vaccines for teachers and staff is a glaring omission by MCPS, one that threatens the entire community and increases the odds of significant coronavirus outbreaks in our schools.
In response to my email to the Montgomery County Board of Education urging a vaccine mandate for teachers and staff, a staffer replied that “MCPS continues to work with our state and local health department to determine appropriate mandates.” It does not take a degree in epidemiology to realize that a school year that has not even begun is already threatened by the delta variant surge. On July 1, the 14-day average new coronavirus case rate in Montgomery County per 100,000 residents stood at 0.7. It is now 8.0 — a greater than elevenfold increase in only six weeks that has vaulted Montgomery County back into the “moderate” category for risk of transmission — and it is rapidly approaching “high” transmission risk.
This surge is happening despite Montgomery County having one of the highest coronavirus vaccination rates in the nation. This does not mean that the vaccines are ineffective; research continues to show that vaccines remain exceptionally effective at preventing severe cases, hospitalizations and deaths. Rather, the surge illustrates how devastatingly contagious the delta strain is. We do not yet fully understand the short- or long-term impact of the delta variant on our children, but we do know that caseloads and hospitalizations among young children are rising. This situation demands caution and even greater fidelity to science and public health.
Despite our high vaccination rate, more than 35 percent of Montgomery County residents are unvaccinated, including the vast majority of MCPS’ nearly 70,000 elementary school students. We have already seen some schools shut their doors almost immediately after opening them — leading the head of the American Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten, to announce that she supports vaccine mandates for teachers. Young children are best protected when the adults around them do the right thing; a coronavirus vaccine mandate for MCPS teachers and staff would demonstrate that principle in action.
Since coronavirus vaccines were authorized last December, MCPS has consistently encouraged teachers and staff to get vaccinated, partnered with Johns Hopkins to ensure an adequate vaccine supply and sponsored clinics at schools and other neighborhood sites. But as of June, several thousand MCPS personnel were still not vaccinated. Persuasion and encouragement have only brought us so far; all it takes is one case to light a match that engulfs an entire school in flames. We must do more and we should not wait.
Mandating coronavirus vaccines will help ensure a healthy and safe school year for everybody. Developing the particulars of such a plan, including exemptions for those with medical conditions that preclude vaccination, is necessary. But on whether such a mandate is needed, there is no question, and there should be no delay.
Our teachers are heroes; our school staff are essential workers; our children are everything. Let’s do this for them.5 Comments
“….Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules, and they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them; disagree with them; glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.“
On January 20, 1961, President John F. Kennedy issued a challenge to all Americans: “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.”
Two months later American University hosted a National Conference on Youth Service Abroad, organized by students from AU, the University of Michigan, and the National Student Association. Nearly 500 participants, representing 300 schools in 45 states, gathered in Washington, DC, to discuss the goals, mission, and methods of a new Peace Corps.
Two months later American University hosted a National Conference on Youth Service Abroad, organized by students from AU, the University of Michigan, and the National Student Association. Nearly 500 participants, representing 300 schools in 45 states, gathered in Washington, DC, to discuss the goals, mission, and methods of a new Peace Corps. The original 1961 legislation that created the Peace Corps laid out three goals:
1. Help the people of interested countries meet their need for trained men and women.
2. Help promote a better understanding of Americans on the part of the people served.
3. Help promote a better understanding of other peoples on the part of Americans.
The 30 individuals whose objects and stories we showcase here represent a sampling of the nearly 240,000 volunteers who have answered Kennedy’s call to serve since 1961. This exhibition illuminates how the Peace Corps has offered alternative ways to advance peace and promote international friendship.
Today we confront unprecedented global challenges, including the coronavirus pandemic, climate change, and an immigration crisis. In March 2020 the Peace Corps evacuated 7,300 volunteers from 61 countries. Now the agency has an opportunity to return volunteers to the field with a new sense of purpose. How will the Peace Corps, at 60, create positive change in our complex world? How should it address concerns around racial, economic, and asymmetrical power dynamics? The Peace Corps must find a way to remain relevant in an ever changing environment.
Peace Corps at 60: Inside the Volunteer Experience explores these challenges through the lens of the third Peace Corps goal. The objects these volunteers chose to keep embody memories of their Peace Corps experiences. The stories behind those objects reveal the reciprocal relationships between volunteers and their country hosts. These relationships have always been central to the Peace Corps experience and essential to the agency’s role and service. Micro-memoirs accompanying each object tell these stories, providing a window into the agency’s past and lessons for its future.
Serve America Together is a campaign to make national service part of growing up in America.
For too long, national service has not been an option for most young Americans. The college affordability crisis has left too many students with debt that they’re struggling to repay. Millions of young people are out of work, their talents untapped. Communities across the country face significant unmet challenges including education inequity, disaster relief, aging populations, and substance abuse issues. Americans are more profoundly polarized than any moment in recent history. We are beginning to truly confront the systemic racism of our institutions and society. And our country is grappling with public health, economic, social, and educational crises as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Imagine a future in which young people earn college tuition by addressing our communities’ greatest challenges — where they are empowered to shape their own destinies and those of their communities, regardless of zip code. Imagine a future in which empathy trumps apathy and participation and problem-solving outmatch indifference. Imagine a shared experience far stronger than anything that may seek to divide us.
This future is entirely achievable if a year of service is part of growing up in America. The White House, Congress, state and local leaders, business, community and philanthropic leaders, and every American should be working to make this future a reality. America has been at crossroads like this before. If we are going to achieve this bold vision, we must be audacious in our call to action and make national service a national priority. National service can transform lives, strengthen communities, and fuel civic renewal. Our country can do big things together. And Service Year Alliance is organizing the stakeholders, the strategy, and the movement we need to bring this vision to life.
We believe civilian national service should:
1. Exist at scale, engaging at least one million young Americans in civilian national service annually
2. Address America’s unmet needs
3. Bridge divides and fuel civic renewal
4. Be an opportunity for all
5. Build pathways to long-term success for individuals who serve through benefits and connectivity to future education and careers.
Our campaign platform is detailed below. Read More
Posts by Paul Costello1
