Arkansas State Senator Trent Garner is a Baptist. He should lead fellow Christians in protecting children against COVID

Unmasking a failure in Arkansas!

Echo editorial opinion published by the Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

Unfortunately the Arkansas Legislature failed children. 

When presented a chance to protect Arkansas students, just days away from reporting to school, from the current aggressive form of COVID-19, the legislators walked away from their responsibility to protect children from risk of illness and death caused by COVID.

What it became is a failure of informed leadership and a celebration of ignorance-driven policies that have already put many of the state's children in harm's way.

While health care leaders, medical experts and many public school and university educators pleaded just for an option to respond to the resurgent spread of COVID-19, Republican state legislators remained adamantly committed to a statewide ban on mask mandates by any governmental entity, including school boards.

Forget that they adopted that ban back when a lot of Arkansans were prematurely exhilarated by the progress with vaccinations -- even among a less-than-adequate portion of the state's population -- were having on diminishing the spread of COVID-19. 

It seemed, after more than a year under the stress of a pandemic, that Arkansas was headed toward a summer of normalcy. Everyone was ready to shed masks. Republican lawmakers seized the opportunity to legislate mask mandates out of existence, crippling the use of an effective tool in the fight against COVID-19's spread.

In the spring, they didn't know, but easily could have grasped, the potential that the virus the world has fought for a year and a half wouldn't just shuffle quietly into oblivion. They didn't know, but easily could have grasped, that the threat to young Arkansans ineligible so far to receive any vaccination remained strong. They didn't know, but easily could have grasped, that what the medical experts were warning about -- a virus mutating into something harder to fight and easier to spread -- very well might become a reality.

By now, the evidence is pretty solid that they didn't care about any of that. They, instead, set aside their duty to preserve the public health in favor of a politically driven prescription -- a legislative blockade of local decision-making by school leaders who devote their professional lives to brighter futures for the state's young people. 

Arkansas State Senator Trent Garner represents District 27, in southern Arkansas. He is a Baptist and an "embracer of ignorance".

At the urging of thuggish embracers of ignorance, like gubernatorial dreamer Senator Trent Garner*, the Legislature inserted itself between school boards and their precious charges like a moon eclipsing the sun, casting a long shadow over a generation's capacity to reach for those brighter futures.

In theory, the cry that parents should decide whether their kids will wear masks no doubt resonates. Government ought to stay out of the parent-child relationship as much as possible. But when it comes to operating a public educational system, parental decision-making already has some limits. Young people can't wear certain pieces of clothing -- say a T-shirt featuring a racial epithet -- that would disrupt the educational environment. No matter how much a parent might embrace the expression on the T-shirt, participation in the public school system necessitates a standard of behavior applicable to all students.

Even more relevant to the virulent COVID discussion, public school students have a list of vaccinations that they are expected to have, and prove it they must. 

Yes, there are exemptions, but not without the potential for treating those exempted students differently should a disease outbreak occur. They might be sent home for weeks, whereas students who have protected themselves through vaccinations keep attending classes. Whether it's smallpox or the measles, nobody is idiotic enough to condemn an entire student body to a health threat that can be prevented or diminished.

A disrupted educational environment is one in which education is much harder to accomplish. Arkansas has already witnessed the power of disruption to harm learning over the last two academic years. The availability of vaccines provided real hope that 2021-22 could be an opportunity for public education to get its bearings, but the people who do not take seriously the fight to overcome the pandemic have empowered the coronavirus to be more deadly and more aggressive in spreading. And now, lawmakers have done their best to further empower the virus to upend the school year and the educational futures of thousands of school children.

Just consider the Marion School District, which started the year's classes July 26, with no mask mandate, but school officials encouraged the wearing of masks. The district by midweek last week had quarantined more than 800 people, a number made much larger because the district cannot mandate masks and thus reduce the need for quarantining those exposed to verified COVID cases.

Just days away from the start of the academic year for thousands of other schools, is it reasonable to expect a different result than what Marion has experienced? Masks, consistently worn by everyone, would reduce the disruption to the school districts' main goal, which is educating kids.

Is that what our GOP lawmakers in Little Rock are afraid of?

To prevent the spread of COVID-19 -- which ought to be everyone's goal -- leaving masks optional in the school setting seriously erodes the benefit, especially with an aggressive form of covid-19 like the Delta variant. The higher level of protection for the student body, educators and staff is achieved by universal participation. Leaving masks optional converts the protection into more of a roulette wheel, a real gamble that guarantees more spread of the disease. Couple that with the probability that anti-maskers are more likely to not be vaccinated and it's easy to see the threat level of COVID spread rising.

In keeping a ban on mask mandates by local school districts, our Arkansas Legislature has determined another disrupted school year is preferable to temporary, safe and noninvasive measures to stop the spread of COVID-19. It's a high price to pay, and so very unnecessary.

Arkansas is in a surge of new COVID-19 cases, with daunting hospitalization numbers that are overtaxing the health care systems we have in the state.

In the past, the Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette interviewed candidates for the Legislature and asked them a catch-22 type of question: If as a lawmaker, your level of knowledge on a subject leads to a conclusion that conflicts with the views of constituents, which way would you vote?

Representative leadership isn't always about taking a poll and voting the way the poll turns out. It's about leading the state, not just sticking a wet finger in the air to see which way the political winds are blowing. Our Arkansas Legislature last week could have helped lead this state out of the worst aspects of this pandemic. 

As a body, it failed to lead this state to a better future.

Now, the ban on mask mandates is in the courts. A judge on Friday temporarily blocked enforcement in a lawsuit that raises questions about the legality of the statewide ban.

Governing through litigation is one our least favorite paths. It's inefficient. But when the Legislature has placed Arkansas' children and their health so evidently and unnecessarily at risk, it's hard to blame anyone -- particularly educators -- for trying to overcome the numb-minded pandemic leadership at the state Capitol.

It's only our children's futures at stake.

*State Senator Garner's biography on the legislative website says that he is a native of Magnolia, Arkansas. He and his wife, Kelly, have a son and a daughter and are members of the Baptist church.

If Senator Garner is a pro-life Christian, he has an obligation to support the lives of Arkansas's children. He should have rallied the Arkansas legislature to remain in session for the purpose of rescinding