Editorial Roundup:

The Dallas Morning News. July 8, 2020.

Coronavirus exposes the weak underbelly of the child care system

When Gov. Greg Abbott recently paused the reopening of Texas to slow the spread of the coronavirus, he also enacted new emergency health and safety standards for child care operations.

That was a good move, but additional steps are needed if child care centers are going to be available when parents need to return to work.

This is no easy task. Many child care centers are barely holding on during the pandemic as parents stay home or worry about the risk of infection. Of course, the hard reality is that unless parents have more child care options that they can trust, many will not go back to work, and that will hurt the economy.

This issue is as important as reopening schools, but it hasn’t received adequate attention.

Child Care Relief, a coalition of business and early-childhood education groups, estimates that about half of child care facilities will not survive the pandemic, eliminating about 4.5 million child care slots nationally. The Center for American Progress estimates that in Texas 483,632 licensed child care slots, about 54%, are at risk of disappearing.

Nor does it help that about 45% of Texas families live in child care deserts with little or no access to quality child care, and not surprisingly these are in low-income neighborhoods.

Coronavirus has exposed the fragility of child care. Even before the pandemic, the absence of quality facilities kept many parents of young children, mostly women, out of the labor force. A White House report last year estimated that in 2016 about 3.8 million nondisabled, working-age parents with children under age 6 weren’t in the labor force, and another 6.6 million parents with children under age 13 were working part-time because they couldn’t increase their work hours without child care. By some estimates, child care issues collectively cost companies and workers about $57 billion each year.

Strategically, this should be the time for local, state, and federal governments as well as private industry to work toward making sure that the core of the child care infrastructure survives the pandemic. Some are calling for another round of financial aid from Congress to rescue struggling child care centers. Our view is that if regional chambers of commerce, employers and nonprofits aren’t working to ensure employees will have access to child care during and after the pandemic, they’ll be stalling the recovery from this recession. Our region already has a shortage of middle skills workers, and the lack of child care will only worsen a difficult situation.

The economic recovery from this pandemic depends in large measure on whether workers can return to work. If child care systems, which were already facing financial instability prior to COVID-19, don’t survive this crisis, the return to work will be greatly hindered.

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Houston Chronicle. July 7, 2020.

No need to wait on Austin for police reform. Local officials can act now.

Now is the time to strengthen the 2017 Sandra Bland Act, named after the 28-year-old Black woman who died five years ago in a rural Texas jail. That law should have marked a major step toward comprehensive police reform, but by the time it had passed the Legislature, most of its police reforms had been removed. Instead it was a badly needed, but much weaker, bill aimed at improving the way police and jails safeguard inmates with mental health problems.

That’s why it’s so heartening to see the law’s architects mounting a campaign to restore provisions stripped from the original bill four years ago amid opposition from major law enforcement groups.

The next session begins in January, and state Rep. Garnet Coleman and state Sen. John Whitmire are right to get started now, while bipartisan revulsion over the video of George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis is fresh on everyone’s mind.

But other, equally needed reforms, needn’t wait. There are many steps cities and elected sheriffs in Texas’ 254 counties can take on their own.

They can start by following the example of the Texas Commission on Law Enforcement, which last week revised the method for collecting data on traffic stops to include racial breakdowns on why the stop was made and what is found during searches of motorists. That key piece of information was required under the Sandra Bland Act but had not been included in data submitted by law enforcement agencies.

After a request by Coleman, the commission also added implicit bias training to a course required for every police officer - another provision that had been included in the original Sandra Bland Act but was left out of the final version.

Changes such as these, and many others, don’t depend on legislative mandates.

“They don’t have to wait, and I would encourage them not to wait,” Coleman told the editorial board. “If we could go into session or if the governor called a special session, we’d go in and do this now. Do not wait. Cities and counties, you have the power to do it, so go do it.”

Coleman and Whitmire want to curtail police searches of vehicles, limit arrests for offenses punishable only by fines and end so-called “pretextual stops,” in which officers stop motorists for minor traffic violations hoping to stumble upon evidence of other, more serious crimes. All of these are measures that got stripped out of Coleman’s original Sandra Bland bill.

Those were urgent reforms then, and they are even more so amid the growing awareness of how such policing practices disproportionately target people of color. A 2005 study found two-thirds of Texas police departments searched blacks and Latinos at higher rates than white drivers. In Houston, where the population is less than 25 percent African American, Black drivers made up a third of traffic stops made last year by police.

According to research by Frank Baumgartner, a political science professor at the University of North Carolina and author of numerous racial profiling studies, departments nationwide almost uniformly search people of color at higher rates.

Pretext stops, in particular, are too often used as excuses to pull over motorists of color, amounting to little more than “stop and frisks in a car,” as Coleman described them. In 97 percent of those encounters, studies show, police found no evidence of a crime.

Far too often, however, they result in tragedies such as Bland’s death. She was pulled over for failing to use her blinker and arrested after a confrontation with an officer who became furious when she declined his request to put out her cigarette. She hanged herself with a plastic garbage bag in her Waller County jail cell three days later.

“Why are we creating confrontation, agitation, among our citizens over things that don’t pose a danger to society?” Whitmire asked.“Are we really wise to have a police officer walk up to the window and challenge someone about not having a front license plate?”

Why indeed. Local officials should take immediate action to rewrite policy and practices to improve policing. Reforms such as banning choke-holds, giving subpoena power to citizens review boards and ending pretextual stops are all within their reach.

Their fast action to implement reforms at the local level will only increase the momentum in Austin come January, when lawyers will get to work restoring the gutted reforms to the Sandra Bland Act.

Now is the moment to answer the call for police reforms, not with promises for the future, but with solutions in the present.

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Austin American-Statesman. July 10, 2020.

Texas failed the COVID test. Our schools don’t have to.

Much of the debate around reopening schools this fall has been framed in absolutes. We cannot risk people’s health and their lives by filling up classrooms while the coronavirus pandemic rages. We cannot afford to have children lose any more instruction time, or go any longer without the connections and support that schools provide. We cannot continue the unsustainable burdens placed on working parents when children are left to learn at home.

All critically important concerns, all expressed in terms of things we must not do.

So what can we do to safely, sensibly, get kids back to school?

Five weeks away from the start of a new school year, and five months into a pandemic that has left more than 3,000 Texans dead, our state remains ill-equipped to answer that question. Valuable time slipped away while state officials assumed we would just reopen schools with a few safety recommendations and hope for the best. After our disastrous experience reopening the Texas economy that way, it’s clear that won’t suffice.

This moment calls for the Texas Education Agency to provide real leadership, something we caught a glimpse of this week as the agency mandated masks for everyone returning to school this fall. The agency needs to go further. It needs to provide a clear picture of what reopening schools would look like, beyond simply requiring in-person and online options everywhere. Its safety protocols must come in the form of mandates, not suggestions that may go ignored. And state and local officials must be willing to look outside their silos for the best practices and resourceful solutions this monumental challenge requires.

It’s unclear whether the TEA has the backbone for the task, or how much of that work could be accomplished in time to start in-person schooling in mid-August. Texas still lacks rapid-results testing to identify and contain outbreaks at schools. Using temperature scans to screen children will be of little use, pulmonologist Dr. Vin Gupta told our board and other reporters Thursday, because most children who get the virus never develop symptoms. But they could still pass it to teachers, cafeteria workers and counselors, all of whom could then bring it home to their families.

Texas is battling a monster resurgence of the virus: It took nearly four months for the state to see its first 100,000 cases, and only 17 days to add another 100,000. The state has such rampant spread that Harvard researchers say Texas needs another stay-at-home order. Gov. Greg Abbott remains opposed to one, but he acknowledged Friday in an interview with Lubbock TV station KLBK, “Things will get worse.”

There’s little hope the virus would somehow stop at schoolhouse doors. University of Texas epidemiologist Lauren Ancel Meyers told the Austin City Council this week that on the first week of classes at a school of 500 kids, “we would expect that somewhere between 15 and 20 (students) would arrive infected.”

The TEA’s mask mandate, which applies to staffers and students 10 and up, would help slow the spread. Other pieces of TEA guidance - including promoting the use of hand sanitizer and social distancing “where feasible without disrupting the educational experience” - are vague suggestions, not real standards that families and employees can count on.

Regrettably, Texas recently took the same tack with child care centers, until an upswing in cases prompted the state to reinstate some requirements, such as daily temperature checks, in late June. As of this week, the state had 555 children and 1,140 staffers at day cares who have been infected, according to figures obtained by the Texas Tribune, although it’s unclear if they caught the virus at the facility or elsewhere.

Given the similarities of their group settings, schools should be striving to learn from the experiences of child care centers. What safety practices worked? What measures weren’t enough? But the state isn’t pooling any of that information from day cares to better inform other reopening efforts. That failure marks a massive missed opportunity.

Similarly, schools should think more broadly about how they might partner with other facilities - community centers, library meeting rooms and the like - to find the space needed for social distancing.

The explosion we’ve seen in COVID cases, and the suffering of the people behind those numbers, show just how badly Texas botched its reopening of the economy. Our schools don’t have to go that same route. Texans should demand a better plan from state leaders, because half measures and good intentions won’t be enough to protect students and teachers in this pandemic.

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