A recent Colorado Politics article caught my eye, as they often do. The story tells of the changes and adaptations that are being made by the good folks who run the Colorado State Fair. Scheduled for the last bit of August and into the first week of September, the fair is usually a pretty people-intensive event. I’ve been to several state and county fairs over the years, and I’ve always enjoyed two things: funnel cake and the livestock competitions. But especially funnel cake.

As a kid, I was fortunate enough to spend my summers on my grandparent’s farm in western Iowa. In hindsight, I believe those summers shaped my thinking on many things. I remember my grandpa teaching me how to catch and then, well, dispatch, a chicken for Sunday dinner. I was aware of where my food came from and I’ve always had an appreciation for the land and the sustenance the agricultural sector provides to the 98% of Americans who don’t live on farms. Spoiler: Your beef didn’t start off as wrapped packages in the grocery store, it used to be a cow.

In the era of COVID, the fair planners faced a number of difficult challenges. From my perspective, they’ve made a number of very smart decisions to keep people as safe as possible while also keeping the spirit of the fair going. For example, some events will be livestreamed on the fair’s web page. But some events will take place on site, including the livestock competitions. Given the ability to show pigs, cows, chickens, and such in open-air barns and where opportunities for good social distancing are many, the fair planners seem to me to have come up with a smart plan. Kids who have spent months working on their 4-H animals will get to show them off, with masks (for the kids; it’s not clear from the article if the cows will also be masked. And now that I think about it, “the Masked Cows” would be a good name for a band, but I digress…).

Which, of course, brings me to our schools…

Regular readers (hi mom!) will recall that I’m not especially fond of our president. His incompetence, combined with his dishonesty, makes for an exceptionally dangerous situation during a national pandemic, and his bizarre obsession with “fully opening schools” this fall is an excellent example of his hazardous thinking. Both Trump and his Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos (a billionaire from Amway) have pushed hard for schools to fully open this Fall. They haven’t provided specific recommendations on how to do that, let alone any additional funding to keep the kids, teachers, and staff safe, but they insist that schools open, so there.

We’ve already seen a handful of schools around the country open, and we’ve seen photos of halls filled with kids with only a few masks visible. It is not entirely clear why Trump is obsessing about schools. If you have ever been around kids, or were once a kid yourself, you know that getting youngsters to do things like keep a proper social distance or not to cough of sneeze on each other is nearly impossible. Heck, I taught at a military academy and those highly disciplined young people still passed a variety of illnesses around every year. I can’t imagine how first-grade teachers are supposed to keep little Sally and Billy from taking their masks off. Trump apparently sees COVID as dangerous enough that he thinks we might need to postpone the election (spoiler: he can’t and we won’t), but heck, send the kids into classrooms for seven hours each day right now.

The science is mixed, as it always is when confronting a new challenge. That is why scientists sometimes change their advice as we learn more. But the evidence to date seems to suggest, thankfully, that kids don’t get as sick as grownups when they get the virus. But to argue that that fact means it is OK to reopen normally forgets the fact that very few grade-school kids live on their own. There are parents, grandparents, siblings, and others that they encounter. And given that many teachers are in an older demographic, it seems reckless to willingly expose those folks to the virus.  Indeed, as many as 20% of teachers are expected to retire or quit, rather than return to classrooms they fear are not safe, which will make safe reopening even harder.

Just this week I got word, as a High School football referee, that our season has been postponed until next Spring, as the folks in charge could not figure out a safe way to play football this fall. If we are canceling sports and fundamentally altering the State Fair, why can’t Trump and his people see that a blanket insistence that schools reopen is foolish and risky? I suspect it has something to do with his cratering poll numbers, but our children should not be the test subjects for his mendacious schemes. 

Now, far more importantly, where the heck am I going to get my funnel cake fix?