Schools, politicians and parents just blame it all on COVID-19

OPINION:

It’s time to treat yourself to a “quarantini.”

However smart your student-athlete is, however creative and nimble your young performance artist is, however brilliantly your teenage Sheldon bangs out theories that matter, the scaredy cats have — screech! — scratched it off the blackboards.

School districts across the land have scrapped the fourth academic quarter, which means whether you have a child who earned all A’s or dropped out, it really doesn’t matter.

Blame it on COVID-19.

Once colleges and universities decided they would scrap the semester and employ distance learning — and not have to return tuition, room and board — public schools took a lesson from their playbook.

School campuses, closed. Public libraries, closed. Recreation centers and their hot spots, locked down. Computer use at Starbucks and McDonald’s, “nonessential” assets.

And if you don’t have an internet connection at home or a laptop or computer at home anyway, then politicians put your child on the expendables twice, perhaps three times — once with all the other children, a second time for being poor and a third time for special needs.

By the time laptops, internet access and distance learning plans were in the hands of students and competent public school teachers, Easter had passed.

Take another sip, because it doesn’t get any better.

Public school buildings are shuttered for the remainder of the academic school, but you won’t be recouping your tax dollars. The money already has been spent on salaries, textbooks for this school year and likely the next, and more than a few “experts” to train teachers and bookkeepers on the ins and outs of Distance Learning 101.

And, before you slide the remaining ounce of your quarantini, consider this: After four or five weeks, you finally got the rhythm of the homeschooling thing — dining room for kids, uncluttered vanity for mom and smooth, disinfected kitchen table for dad, all with Clorox wipes at the ready. You even managed to prep meals by 7 a.m., which is about the same time the kids would board the school bus. Except in the age of the coronavirus, there’s no schoolbus (though drivers and managers still get paid.)

The rub is that you go through all on behalf of your kids and your sanity and then — and then — the coronavirus picks your pocket again. Employed and unemployed.

What?

Well, all crystal balls are clouded by the virus right about now. However, rest assured politicians are going to blame the coronavirus and reach out from the left for higher taxes.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo is so shaky, he’s even canceled the state presidential primary, while D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser is planning to fill deficits projected for this and the next fiscal year.

And what do spendthrifts do when they recklessly gamble money they don’t have?

This year, they blame COVID-19.

Another quarantini, anyone?

• Deborah Simmons can be contacted at dsimmons@washingtontimes.com.