BIPPS and Brooks: Legislators should think in terms of school-level control

Kentucky Youth Advocates executive director Terry Brooks rightly urges the General Assembly during this week's special session to give individual schools more of the decision-making power when it comes to policies dealing with containing the coronavirus and its variants.

As Brooks notes, a rubric for masking might make different options available for green-zone schools than for red-zone ones.

He advises lawmakers to make decisions about quarantines and shutdowns school-based instead of district-based, thus avoiding “‘all in and all out' decisions for the district at large.’”

 I urge a similar approach in my statewide syndicated Bluegrass Beacon column released on Thursday in which I write: “Considering how differently the virus affects not only diverse communities but various individual schools within them, legislators must do better than just punting tough decisions to local entities like school boards.”

To help facilitate such successful decisions, Brooks notes the need to “create a transparent and consistently updated dashboard around pandemic data on a school-by-school basis.” He suggests legislators provide funding for to create this “critically important data transparency.”

Using federal COVID relief monies to create and maintain such a database would be a proper use of these funds, which are one-time dollars and should not be used to create new government programs for which new funding will need to be found in the future.

Creating such a database would also be an effective way of giving parents the information they need to make the best decisions regarding how they will respond to the pandemic in their children’s schools.

“Every parent in every school deserves to know what is happening – and what is not happening – in their children’s school,” Brooks writes.

I concur, writing: “Policymakers … should actively search for ways to give a lion’s share of the control to parents themselves regarding whether, for example, their children wear masks to schools.”