Editorial: Pennsylvania's handling of school closings gets 'F'

This is not an editorial about coronavirus.

It’s an editorial about questionable government decision-making that just happens to involve coronavirus. The thing is it could be about any big, important issue. Probably a few smaller, more mundane ones, too.

For days, there was hemming and hawing about what would close and what wouldn’t. This college did. That university didn’t. A theater stayed open. A basketball tournament shut down. Everybody was making moves based on the best available information at the moment as more cases of covid-19 were diagnosed in Pennsylvania, across the country and around the world.

But things started picking up speed Thursday as Gov. Tom Wolf shut down the schools in the hottest virus hotbed of Montgomery County. By Friday morning, there was a conference call where superintendents from districts across the state talked with Pennsylvania Education Secretary Pedro Rivera about what to do. Close? Not close? Distance learning?

They hung up after being told the decisions were on them. So they started to make plans. Fox Chapel Area announced it was closing. So did a slew of others. Penn-Trafford said it would close for two days while educators made alternate plans that would be announced subsequently.

There would have to be some kind of arrangement because there was absolutely no budging on the state-mandated 180 school days.

That all lasted a few hours. Just after 3 p.m., it all changed. The governor closed all the schools for two weeks. Whatever plans districts had set in motion were now off the tracks. The 180 days? Of course there would be no penalty for missing that mark.

“First and foremost, my top priority as governor — and that of our education leaders — must be to ensure the health and safety of our students and school communities,” Wolf said.

He’s not wrong.

So why was getting there such a comedy of errors? Why was so much of Friday such a colossal waste of the time educators could have had to better prepare for the monumental task of educating an entire state’s worth of kids during a pandemic?

There are 500 school districts in Pennsylvania, with more than 3,000 schools teaching kids from pre-K to graduation. And that doesn’t count the parochial and private schools.

The idea of telling all those superintendents — working without the state’s constantly evolving information on the outbreak — to figure it out on their own was inefficient and unfair to educators, kids and parents.

Emergencies don’t grade on a curve. It’s pass or fail, and Friday’s fumbles were a definite F.