
Washington and Lee professor Christopher Seaman and his son (Photo by Ash Daniel)
Before it shut down the world, before everybody knew somebody who’d had it, before over a million Americans had lost their lives to a pandemic that has dragged on far longer than most of us ever saw coming, COVID-19 was already an issue treated more like politics than public health. One would think that public health — and especially children’s health — would be something we could all rally behind. But politics took priority. Now, equipped with three years of 20/20 hindsight, one can’t help but wonder if children’s health was ever really a priority.
The first case of COVID-19 in the United States was confirmed on Jan. 20, 2020, but it wasn’t until March 11 that the World Health Organization declared it a pandemic. Containment efforts followed. On March 13, every K-12 school in the commonwealth was ordered to close. By the 15th, whole states were shutting down, and on April 3, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended that individuals wear masks outside of their homes.
For those most worried about COVID-19’s impact, this was exactly what they’d been waiting for — an actionable piece of advice, a sign that maybe there was a way to avoid a deadly disease beyond simply staying inside and isolating. Others, almost immediately, began to resist the guidance, calling the CDC’s pleas for masking and other mitigation measures everything from overreaction to overreach to (for a small but vocal minority of Americans) open tyranny. The division was stark, the lines were overwhelmingly politically drawn, and any efforts since to protect our most vulnerable have been muddied by bickering and accusations of partisan agenda.
Since the beginning of the 2021-22 school year, thanks in no small part to at-home testing and widespread vaccination, more and more students have been able to return to the classroom. A huge proportion of effort and resources, however, have been focused toward getting back to “how it was before.” But if the safety of children is our priority, an obvious question arises: Was “the way it was before” even safe to begin with?
On Dec. 12, 2022, a federal judge ruled that universal masking in the classroom is a “reasonable modification” protected under the Americans With Disabilities Act and that parents of disabled students can request that peers and teachers mask in their children’s classes. The suit, Seaman v. Commonwealth of Virginia, is a major win for parents of students with disabilities.
For all the complaints and the fatigue surrounding face masks, one thing must always be unequivocally understood: There are students for whom catching COVID-19 represents a very real threat to their lives, and those same students are as entitled to a public education as any able-bodied child. We’d all like to put the last three years behind us, but we also have to try to put better days ahead.
“I get that many people would like to be done with COVID,” says Christopher Seaman, a law professor at Washington and Lee University and the plaintiff for whom the suit was named, “but for families with a medically vulnerable child, ‘return to normalcy’ simply isn’t an option. My son has been a cancer patient for over four years, he was diagnosed with leukemia shortly after starting kindergarten, and even though he’s been in remission for over a year now, he is still immunocompromised.” Seaman’s son had never been able to attend a full school year until this year, when “peer masking,” he says, “allowed him to return safely.”
The thing everyone seems to agree on is that in-person learning, especially among younger children, is important. Seaman and the other parents involved in the lawsuit just want to make sure that everyone is afforded the opportunity to learn in person. Seaman says that his son “loves being back in class in person, which has helped him to thrive both educationally and socially. And there are hundreds, possibly thousands, of other children across the commonwealth who are similarly in need of accommodations like peer masking so they can have the same experience. No family should have to choose between their child’s health and their education.”
The way things were before is gone, and it’s not coming back. We’ve had three years to grieve, but now it’s time to stand up straight and face reality. Immunocompromised children are no longer safe in maskless in-person classrooms, yes. But the truth is they were never really that safe in schools before, either. Now the question is, where do we go from here? Do we strive for something better? We’ve been given our wake-up call. It’s time to reconsider some things and do what we should have been doing from the beginning: taking care of our most vulnerable and giving every child the opportunity to grow up safely.
David Lefkowitz is a reporter, freelance writer and Richmond-area native. You can find his work on reasonablyspeedy.substack.com and other websites.