It would help if schooling wasn’t compulsory. 

Don’t take that the wrong way — I’m not saying education isn’t important, nor am I saying parents have the right to deny their children access to education. Parents, like governments, have powers and responsibilities over the individuals they claim to legitimately govern, not “rights”, as one human being cannot assert a right over another. Children, like all individuals, are the ones who actually possess inalienable rights, including the right to seek information. 

Education is absolutely important. Children interested in receiving an education need to receive an education somehow, preferably somewhere. That somewhere could be at a school. It could also be at a home. It might even be on the surface of the Moon. Some somewheres, of course, are admittedly better optimized for delivering positive educational outcomes to our children than others. Some homes are better optimized than some schools and vice-versa. The surface of the Moon, meanwhile, would require, among other things, some significant advances in student transportation budgeting. Then again, “snow days” would be considerably less common there. 

The issue with compulsory schooling, as delivered via a set of top-down hierarchical county-sized school districts, which are, in turn, partially managed and partially funded through our state government, is this: Each student, each home, each teacher, and each school are different — and neither our educational bureaucracies, nor the pundits who opine on their proper function, know what to do with that hand-on-forehead obvious insight. 

Different teachers and school staff have different risk budgets, as do different students and different families. A nuclear family with young, healthy parents with excellent health insurance is going to be more willing to accept risks which might lead to familial COVID-19 infection than an extended, multigenerational family that pays medical expenses out of pocket — when they can afford to pay anything at all. Similarly, a teacher fresh out of college is going to be a little more comfortable taking health risks than one doing a Roger Murtaugh impression while counting the days until retirement. 

Trouble is, our current discussions assume there’s a policy direction — open schools or remote schooling — which can satisfy all of these needs and desires simultaneously. There isn’t. 

We pretend there is one, though, because, by law, we compel every child between the ages of 7 and 18 to attend school. Unfortunately, institutions develop different habits when accustomed to compelling someone to do something (telling them what to do and how to do it) than when they’re accustomed to politely asking people to voluntarily do what they want. Chief among those habits is keeping things simple for the ones doing the compelling — it’s much easier to issue one order for a few hundred thousand students and confirm compliance to that order than it is to issue hundreds or thousands of orders, each applicable in varied circumstances, and confirm both applicability and compliance to each of those orders. 

Of course, school districts aren’t military dictatorships. They’re at least notionally democratically accountable, though you’d be hard pressed to find someone who knows who their school board representative is from memory — and when they can, it’s seldom a good sign. All that means, however, is that each school district is accountable to a simple majority of its board’s voters — not a simple majority of families and certainly not a simple majority of students, who have no voice in our political system. Consequently, once a majority of a board’s voters make their preferences plain, the school board is empowered and structured to use the same tools of compulsion used by any other branch of government to apply those preferences against the rest of the population. 

When we write these columns, then, we’re arguing about whose preferences are actually held by the majority of the voting public — and under which conditions we’ll compel our state’s families and teachers into adopting them.

Superintendent Jara, for example, wants to convince a majority of the voting public that, if schools in Clark County don’t reopen soon, a wave of student suicides will wash over Clark County’s families. To back this assertion up, he told the New York Times that suicide rates doubled since the start of the pandemic — from nine to 18 suicides out of more than 320,000 students, or an increase from 0.0028 percent to 0.0056 percent of the student population, or an increase from one suicide per roughly 40 schools to one suicide per roughly 20. 

To be clear, each suicide is a tragedy. I do not seek to minimize the loss experienced by 18 Clark County families this year. As a father, I know I’d be absolutely heartbroken if either of my sons committed suicide. I further agree that schools are a useful source of socialization for children (they are, in fact, the only source of consistent socialization our society permits children to enjoy, which is a subject for a different column), as well as a useful escape for those students unfortunate enough to live in especially toxic homes. 

However, COVID-19 didn’t just shut down our schools — it, along with the measures our businesses and governments employed to reduce infection, put nearly one in three workers in Clark County out of work, many of whom still remain unemployed. COVID-19 also infected hundreds of thousands of Clark County’s residents, killing thousands and hospitalizing thousands more. 

Given the effects COVID-19 has had on Clark County’s families, then, and at the risk of stepping out on a limb, it’s entirely possible that, even if Clark County’s notoriously overcrowded schools were open throughout the pandemic, the student suicide rate would have increased. In fact, while we’re exercising a priori reasoning to deduce from first principles how being forced to stay home might affect our children, we should apply the same reasoning to remember that school environments aren’t uniformly pleasant or healthy, either. School shootings, for example, are considerably fewer than they used to be, and the plot for Back to the Future would go nowhere without the familiarity and emotional salience of multigenerational bullying.

Having said all of that, many teachers unions around the nation are pushing hard against reopening schools at all. The San Francisco Chronicle recently reported that California’s teacher union announced that, even if teachers and school staff are vaccinated, it still won’t support reopening schools. They’re not alone — the Fairfax Education Association, representing teachers and aides in Fairfax, Virginia, briefly announced on Twitter that they wouldn’t support reopening schools unless no community spread occurred for at least two weeks (this announcement was deleted a few days later). Meanwhile, as the New York Times reported after President Biden announced in his inaugural address that he supported reopening schools as soon as possible, several other teachers unions also expressed skepticism about the idea because of concerns about viral transmissibility even after receiving a vaccine. Thankfully, at least if the Las Vegas Review-Journal’s reporting on the school district’s reopening plans are any indication, the Clark County Education Association is not joining this chorus just yet. 

To be fair to the teachers unions, it’s true there is very little direct evidence that a vaccinated individual cannot give COVID-19 to another individual. There is also very little direct evidence that a vaccinated individual cannot grow a narwhal tusk from their rectum after being vaccinated. The reason there is little direct evidence one way or the other regarding both spontaneous rectal narwhal tusk generation and COVID-19 spreading subsequent to a vaccination is because the universe of human imagination is infinite while our resources and time are not. Consequently, it is physically impossible to rule out every single conceivable correlation between the administration of a vaccine and anything that might or could occur after that, real or imagined.

Thankfully, we don’t need to rule out every possibility, no matter how implausible, to know that vaccines dramatically reduce transmissibility. We know this because we’ve been vaccinating people for well north of two centuries and if vaccines didn’t reduce disease transmissibility, we would have stopped doing it sometime before George Washington inoculated the Continental Army against smallpox. 

Yes, it’s true that the rate of asymptomatic COVID-19 infection hasn’t been tested against vaccine recipients. A lot of things haven’t been tested against vaccine recipients. However, the rate of COVID-19 infection among vaccinated participants has been tested, quite rigorously in fact, and it is much, much lower after receiving a vaccine than it is before one, and an asymptomatic infection would still register as an infection. As a Harvard Medical School professor wrote in The Atlantic, vaccinated people will be able to go back to work and hug friends, especially after vaccines become widespread among the general population, because that’s the entire point of vaccines. 

This includes teachers.

All of that, however, remains beside the point. Neither teachers unions nor superintendents should be in the business of compelling hundreds of thousands of students, families, and fellow teachers to accept their particular assessment of the risks of COVID-19 in our schools, regardless of the direction their assessments take them. Instead, parents, students and teachers should be given the ability to choose for themselves what level of risk is appropriate for themselves. 

Thankfully, many schools in Nevada are already providing the ability to choose — even traditional public ones. 

Washoe County School District, for example, offers in-person instruction for elementary school students and hybrid instruction (a mix of in-person and remote instruction) for middle school and high school students. Regardless of grade level, families can also choose to opt their children out of in-person instruction should they feel the need to do so. 

As for Washoe County’s charter schools (which are also public schools, by the way), their reopening plans provide a spectrum of alternatives for local families. Many charter schools, such as Coral Academy of Sciences and Academy for Career Education, switched to mandatory hybrid instruction to keep the in-person student population within acceptable social distancing guidelines. Conversely, Honors Academy of Literature opted for remote instruction on Fridays, with either hybrid or in-person instruction occurring during the remainder of the week, depending on what each student and their parents opted for. High Desert Montessori School, meanwhile, offered parents three education delivery options (in-person, hybrid and remote only), up to building capacity limits. 

Consequently, Washoe County parents have a variety of choices available for our children, each of which we can choose from according to our appetites for risk, though our options are admittedly limited by both availability and access to technical resources. It also means Washoe County teachers have a variety of employers, with differing demonstrated appetites for risk, to consider as well. 

I freely concede school choice, especially as currently implemented, is not a panacea. Not all charter schools are good for all students. Many public schools are frankly better for some students than many charter schools — my oldest son, for example, used to attend a charter school when he was younger but enjoyed and better thrived in a more traditional public school environment. Not all parents have the logistical resources necessary to get their children to a different school than the one they’re zoned for. 

What school choice does provide, however, is a way for families, teachers, and schools to make choices that best suit their needs, resources and abilities. Those choices won’t be perfect. Frequently, they might not even be good. They will, however, be driven in the direction most likely to produce acceptable outcomes — from the bottom up, based upon information and demonstrated preferences voluntarily provided by each participant in the system. It’s not a perfect system, but it’s a better system than one which makes choices on behalf of hundreds of thousands of students via New York Times columns and union meetings.

Washoe County lets parents decide whether or not their children should go to school. Maybe it’s time Clark County should, too. 

David Colborne has been active in the Libertarian Party for two decades. During that time, he has blogged intermittently on his personal blog, as well as the Libertarian Party of Nevada blog, and ran for office twice as a Libertarian candidate. He serves on the Executive Committee for both his state and county Libertarian Party chapters. He is the father of two sons and an IT professional. You can follow him on Twitter @DavidColborne or email him at [email protected].