The Marion School District ventured first into the Delta- variant frontier and is now sending back what would be valuable dispatches if heeded.
Marion is showing other school districts how it's likely to go as they begin trying in a few days to have school in a re-emergent pandemic. And it's showing state legislators how they might make things better.
The eastern Arkansas school district of 4,000 students, about 70 percent eligible for school lunch aid, was alone in the state in beginning its fall term on Monday, July 26. It was part of an emerging national concept that learning rhythms are healthier with a fall break after nine weeks.
The concept also holds that shorter summer breaks help underprivileged kids who tend to lose ground disproportionately when out of school, owing to environment.
On Tuesday, the seventh day of this advanced school year, Marion superintendent Glen Fenter, an educator with decades of educational administrator experience, wrote a letter to the Arkansas General Assembly asking for help.
He explained that school closings are especially harmful in poor districts with single working parents and sub-caliber broadband. He said the district had done all it could to get students vaccinated and to encourage mask-wearing and good health habits. But getting eligible kids vaccinated had been a slow-going effort, he was sorry to say.
So, he wrote to legislators that the district had--on this Day 7--more than 500 students out of school on quarantine because of active cases and the accepted protocol for isolating students exposed to those infected.
The district hadn't yet met the state standard for forced closure and conversion to less-desirable virtual learning, but the rising rate meant that could happen any day.
That standard is that a school must be closed if its infection rate exceeds by a certain rate the infection rate of its community. It could be, then, that, in an unvaccinated community with an unmasked school population, the virus would just pass back and forth freely from campus to town and back again to keep the rates more or less the same, meaning high and higher.
Catastrophic for hospitals, surely. But the same.
District officials had been on the phone nearly to midnight, Fenter said, trying to get unsuspecting parents notified that their uninfected kids could not come to school the next morning. That's a tough call to make and tougher one to get, especially for, say, a single working mom with two or three children who has an 8 a.m. appointment at her workplace.
So, there it is--a report from the front, timed just as legislators descended on Little Rock to consider the situation and as school officials statewide warmed up to join Marion on the frontier in a few days.
What was it that Fenter wanted from legislators? I'll let him tell you with excerpts from his missive.
He wrote, "We are, as many others will soon be, fighting a battle that we are not appropriately equipped to win, a battle that if lost could well lead to mandated school closings and the subsequent economic upheaval" of the sort experienced last year.
Thus what he wanted, he wrote, was for legislators to "afford school districts the opportunity to make the decisions that they feel best serve the needs of their students and their communities."
He's asking mainly, but not necessarily entirely, for a repeal in this week's special session of the ban on local-school mask mandates.
Be advised that his view is not universally shared, or perhaps even widely shared, among school superintendents statewide. Some don't want the political headache. They haven't yet experienced Marion's seven-day attrition rate of 500.
What Fenter advocated is much like what Sen. Jonathan Dismang is stressing. That's not necessarily pre-emptive mask mandates from schools, though those would be ideal, but at least an available tool if the maskless situation goes all Marion on everybody.
Fenter's letter concluded, "If circumstances beyond our control are forcing us to plow new rocky ground, at least let us pick our own mules."
It's a metaphor grounded in Fenter's background in western Arkansas where there is a rich heritage of mules and rocky ground.
The rocky ground is the Arkansas political and cultural landscape amid a pandemic. The mule ... well, that's a mask, basically, though it could be other things.
But the stubbornness often associated with mules ... that's some of these legislators, I regret to say.
John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.