'Crisis Festers' In Central Bucks School District, New York Times Says

DOYLESTOWN, PA — The New York Times released a piece on the Central Bucks School District on Wednesday, offering a written angle on prior podcast coverage of the Bucks County district. After conducting almost two dozen interviews, a correspondent for the national paper framed his article around an apparent divide between the politics of school board meetings and the immediate needs of district staff and students.

"Nurses are overwhelmed with the demands of contact tracing from Covid-19 cases and paperwork for hundreds of requested exemptions from a school mask requirement," Campbell Robertson wrote. "Custodians, after more than a year of deep-cleaning classrooms, are now cleaning up broken sinks and disgusting messes after a spate of TikTok challenges, viral dares on social media that led to so much vandalism that nearly all of the bathrooms in some schools had to be closed."

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As family consumer science teacher Elizabeth Coyne put it, staff at the schools are in "triage mode" trying to support students' academic and mental health needs with dwindling staff numbers.

School officials and staff told Robertson that, despite these struggles, public comment at recent school board meetings has often been dominated by political commentary less directly connected to school needs.

Earlier in November, Robertson appeared on the New York Times podcast The Daily to discuss these contradictions at Central Bucks in a two-part series called 'School Board Wars.'

Read the full piece in the New York Times: While Politics Consume School Board Meetings, a Very Different Crisis Festers