Parents Rally At State House To Bring Kids Back To School

BOSTON — Parents frustrated with district plans to reopen schools online, or only partially in person this fall, are set to march in protest outside the Statehouse on Wednesday afternoon.

The rally comes as a number of school districts across the commonwealth have announced they likely will not reopen in person but instead are deciding between a school year that starts fully online and a hybrid model.

In July, the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education asked districts to come up with three reopening plans — including a fully remote plan and a partially remote plan — but recommend aiming for in-person learning, while abiding by science-backed guidelines it had researched and released. Those guides covered everything from wearing masks to asking that students stay at least 3 feet from one another to increased hand-washing. After surveying parents and teachers, and visiting schools to get a sense of what it might look like, a number of districts added their own guidelines — from setting desks farther apart to having plexiglass dividers.

In Brookline, for example, the interim superintendent said he did not feel comfortable with the idea of sending children to school without the extra precautions. Yet those extra precautions would make it difficult to have a full student body indoors. Brookline, like many districts, has indicated it is leaning toward a hybrid model of reopening.

Enter Bring Kids Back MA, a grassroots group of parents and community members. It is calling on Gov. Charlie Baker and the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education to issue a "transparent, metrics-based approach to guide the reasonable reopening of local school systems for in-person learning."

"We all worked hard in Massachusetts to get the numbers under control. But to what end? Our children are the ones losing," reads the group's protest invitation on Facebook.

The American Academy of Pediatrics, the U.S. surgeon general and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have all suggested that a real-life return to school should be driven by local transmission rates within each community.

There is still no vaccine for the coronavirus, which has been responsible 8,740 deaths and 121,000 confirmed cases of infection in the state. Across the country, more than 163,000 people have died because of the COVID-19 virus.

Still, in Massachusetts, the rates of infection have leveled off and are still lower than in much of the U.S. On Tuesday, the governor released new data relaying that some 318 communities in the state have low case numbers but that 33 communities will require more strategies to stop the spread of the virus.

Read more: MA Designates 33 Communities High, Moderate Risk

It follows that for the 318 communities with low numbers, in-person reopening could happen, parents say. But with teachers unions pushing loudly for online-only school, and the process becoming more and more political, parents say the children themselves have been left out of the equation.

So the group plans to stand outside the Statehouse for two hours in an effort to call attention to what they say has been fraught process.

"As parents, we have followed all of the requests to provide feedback, advocating to our state and local leaders and task forces over and over again," reads the group's Facebook invitation. "We are continually being told that they are working in the best interest of our children, yet it is increasingly clear that what may have begun with good intentions has now become a muddled mess of political battles between groups of adults. In the process, our children are being left behind."

The protest is scheduled for 3:30 p.m. to 5:30 p.m.