Safety Third

 My kids had returned to school for exactly one day - six measly hours at most - when my cell phone pinged with the first COVID alert of the semester. 

As I follow instructions to open my email, my heart racing, I stood at the ready for the bad news. I would refresh the window until the email explainer materialized some minutes later, my stomach contracted into knots. 

We’ve gone through more than 18 months, two rounds of precautionary isolation, and an untold number of disposable masks, and the message of impending doom always throws me for a loop.

This time school officials had detected a case of COVID-19 during a routine screening of athletes, who, as a surprise to me, are not required to be vaccinated so long as they agree to once-per-week testing, which will not be conducted without a parent's consent.

So much for "safety first."

“Oh … yeah,” my daughter says, rolling her eyes and dropping her books on the table with a thud. The alert has already been the talk of the school. “It's probably a footballer," she says, noting a posse of study hall detectives are already busy sussing out dirt from the rumor mill. "It's only a school," she says with sarcasm. "We aren't entitled to facts."

This goes against everything I thought I understood about how back-to-in-person-school was handling "high risk" athletics. It also factored into the decision to allow my kid to rejoin his team. 

As I waded through the web pages about protocols and policies, which all touted the value of being vaccinated as the best way to control this pandemic, I wondered if I was losing my mind. I felt I understood, quite clearly, that the students engaged in risky team sports would be required to be fully vaccinated. It took several reads to understand that mandates were mentioned only as far as the school was investigating the potential to implement them.

Not that it would. 

Without a determination, the season would go forward and err on the side of "safety third."

So ... This is how it's going to be. 

As we mull old platitudes about how sports build character, we should consider the shrugging of shoulders about parents valuing their kids' personal goals over public health. 

The facts as stated are clear and resounding. It is in the National interest to vaccinate as many people as possible to limit infection. It is in the community interest see to it that spread is minimized to the largest extent possible, which should mean requiring immunization for high-risk activities. 

It is astounding that we are in this predicament since, for generations, schools have required a host of immunizations against communicable diseases as well as health evaluations for participation in sports.

This is not about fairness. Or rights to body autonomy. No one - and that includes my immunized kid - has ever had an unfettered right to play sports on a team. 

All the analogies we've accepted about the benefit of sports -- the need for hard work, and skill, and humility -- are empty platitudes when they aren't put into practice. Because sports only have the potential for character building when all those stars align.

And the truth is those stars rarely align on their own. 

It's a shame that our state's schools haven't moved more quickly to protect the health and safety of our communities, especially as our infection rates increase.

This is no time to take our eyes off that prize.

We should urge our districts to mandate vaccines for all eligible students and staff if we are to continue in-person learning.

Integrity isn't something we can wear on our sleeves like a number on a jersey if we are unwilling to roll up those sleeves.