Bully for Tom Boasberg for keeping Denver schools open Wednesday.
It took leadership to leave the lights on.
The day was nostril-freezing, face-cracking miserable. With a high of 6 degrees and a low of minus 17, some school buses wouldn’t start, streets were slick, and morning schedules were thrown into chaos. The boiler went out at one school.
It would have been marginally safer — perhaps — and no doubt easier for some families if superintendent Boasberg had simply closed schools.
Because he didn’t, he suffered the wrath of thousands of parents and students, as well as the Denver Classroom Teachers Association president.
“Very bad decision-making,” warned one commenter on Facebook. “Quite embarrassing as well. Hope you’re ready for the problems headed your way when kids experience frostbite.”
But Boasberg’s choice was not uncalculated. He came down on the side of compassion, common sense and demographics. He said Denver Public Schools “has a responsibility to the thousands of families of working parents who are on moderate incomes, have few to no child-care options, don’t get paid days off from their jobs, and therefore face a huge burden when schools are closed . . . while private- sector and other public-sector businesses are open.”
Eureka.
How long has a sizable portion of the female population of this country been in the workforce now? Three or four decades? Hard to believe, but it’s taken that long for many in society to realize the Donna Reed-Father Knows Best stay-at-home-mom model has gone the way of the tuna casserole.
Six in 10 mothers are not home during the day. They have outside jobs. And when their kids can’t go to school — because they are sick, because the school is closed due to sub-zero temperatures, or because of a teacher development day — it’s a much bigger hardship than bundling up and throwing on an extra pair of socks because, after all, this is winter and this is Colorado.
(You do have to wonder why private enterprise, or a non-profit, has not seized the opportunity to come up with a safe, affordable emergency day-care solution for working parents. The logistics and liability must be mighty barriers indeed.)
Small-government advocates will absolutely skewer Boasberg for this part of his reasoning for keeping DPS open.
We consider our schools to be learning centers as well as community centers where children and families can get help with health and other social service needs. And we feel an obligation to the public we serve to keep our schools open as much as possible.
Horrors. More nanny state, they’ll complain. More parental control being usurped by government. More tax money down the welfare tubes.
But Boasberg went further. For many of our kids, this is the only place where they get two hot meals a day. And good for him. Ask a working single parent to define a godsend, and I guarantee you a reliable square meal for his or her child will top that list.
As I child, we were never so poor that we worried about meals. But my 90-year-old stepdad tells of how his parents — first-generation Italian- Americans who married at age 15 — went to grade school in New York City for one reason alone: they could count on a free meal there.
The nation still prospered. The couple went on to raise three very successful children.
Since Jan. 8, when a gunman killed six people and wounded 13 in Tucson, the news has been heavy with talk of the need for more civil dialogue. We’ve seen small steps, like Sen. Mark Udall’s initiative to integrate Democrats and Republicans in the audience at the State of the Union address.
Maybe it influenced Boasberg. If so, score one for the good guys. And at last check, there were no reports of frostbite among DPS students.
Mary Winter (mwinte@aol.com) of Denver, a former Rocky Mountain News writer, works for .
