A letter to the HISD School Board from a Houston physician's Facebook page:
"Dear esteemed HISD board members and district representatives,
Thank you for your service to Houston and our great state of Texas. It is my honor to write to you on behalf of struggling parents and students. We all share a commitment to the well-being and best interest of our community, and your choice to selflessly serve and make a difference is not just admirable, but what I hope my own boys aspire to.
I want you to know I share your heart for service. I am an emergency physician on faculty at the McGovern Medical School at the University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston, TX. It is both my joy and honor to serve the public by training the next great generation of emergency physicians and to care for Texans at Memorial Hermann Hospital in the Texas Medical Center, the busiest trauma center in the nation, and Lyndon B. Johnson General Hospital, part of the Harris Health system and the busiest emergency department in the city where we truly serve "the least of these." I am writing as a concerned citizen, and not as a representative of the university.
I have two sons ages 8 and 7, Micah and Jonah, whom I adore, but I'm not writing on their behalf. I'm writing on behalf of all students at the mercy of your decisions the decisions whose impact on the students of the Houston Independent School District cannot be understated. I don't envy the difficult decisions ahead of you and I appreciate the complex nature of our problems at hand. My beliefs occupy a small territory where legitimate concern for public health overlaps with concern about the erosion of individual liberties and a widened gap between the haves and the have nots. I urge you to be apolitical in your decision-making, and trust that you'll make the best ones.
I was raised to treat every individual the same, to eschew favoritism a value challenged in our current political milieu, but one I hold to steadfastly. I work hard to treat our forgotten homeless and poor with dignity, touching them with bare hands as I would anyone else. The current pandemic has robbed the healing quality of human touch from my practice and our collective pattern and replaced it with fear. Fear to be human to hug, to shake hands, to interact, to assemble, and to teach in person. Fear has led to unprecedented economic devastation, destruction of cultural fabric, increased incidence of substance abuse, alcoholism, suicidality, and a lost generation of poor and uneducated. Here's where you have the power to restore dignity to an entire generation of Houstonians living in poverty.
We are now a single income family. We can afford to be a single income family. There's been very little financial impact to our situation. In fact, our financial situation may have improved a bit payments to more than 100K in student loan debt have been temporarily arrested by the federal government and we were fortunate enough to refinance our home mortgage, reducing our monthly payment substantially. I don't need to tell you that we are a minority in HISD in so many ways. Namely, we're not economically disadvantaged like 79% of children in HISD (https://www.houstonisd.org/achievements). I don't need to tell you that "virtual learning" disproportionately and adversely affects those 79%, many of whom cannot afford to be a single-income family; many of whom aren't fortunate enough to have internet access; many of whom do not speak English as their primary language (or English at all, for that matter, like my youngest son's best friend, or more than half of my patients at LBJ hospital that are Spanish-speaking only). I don't need to tell you that the current draconian policies regarding returning to school only serve to widen the opportunity chasm between my boys and 79% of others. I don't need to tell you that the overwhelming monolith of evidence supports returning to in-person education and that "schools are an important part of the infrastructure of communities and play a critical role in supporting the whole child, not just their academic achievement" (cdc.gov). I don't need to tell you that there are simple, safe, effective practices to reduce the spread of COVID-19 and educate our children in the best way possible. I don't need to tell you that children are not only less likely to get COVID-19 than adults, but have remarkably less serious illness (Bialek et al., 2020). I don't need to tell you that many other industrialized countries have opened school without deleterious consequences including China, Denmark, Taiwan, Norway, Singapore, Austria, Australia, France, Sweden; many of which don't even require masks (Melnick et al., 2020). I know you know these things. So, your decision really depends on your commitment to equal opportunity for all Houstonians, not just a select few.
Perhaps more important than all the facts that support reopening schools is the insidious indoctrination of our youth. We've indoctrinated them with the ideology of fear. We've taught them to exercise an abundance of caution at the expense of their dreams. We've paralyzed a would-be engineer that her would-be bridge isn't worth the risk. We've suspended the athlete's pursuit of excellence and team spirit for the perils of caution. We've halted the collective imagination of an entire generation; a generation ripe to reimagine transportation, healthcare, government, and commerce.
In 1999, Dr. Don Berwick, former CEO/Founder of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement and former Center for Medicaid and Medicare Services administrator appointed by Barak Obama, issued an address at the 11thAnnual National Forum on Quality Improvement in Health Care. The address detailed his and his wife's personal experience with the shortcomings of the healthcare industry through her battle with a neurologic condition. As a correlate, he recounts an incident in Mann Gulch, Montana in 1949 in which a wildfire took the lives of 13 young men and changed the way firefighting was managed in the United States. One survivor developed an ingenious survival plan called an "escape fire." Dr. Berwick went on to describe several "escape fires" for healthcare that could revolutionize the industry in the same way that the Mann Gulch fire revolutionized the firefighting industry (Berwick, 2002). I ask you now, what is your escape fire? The current system of virtual education is failing Houstonians. How can we save education and revitalize an entire generation that is at risk of losing faith in our system? I urge you to choose the narrow path of courage and restore in-person education for the sake of equality, for the sake of a generation, and for the sake all Houstonians.
Your servant,
Ben Cooper, MD"
"Dear esteemed HISD board members and district representatives,
Thank you for your service to Houston and our great state of Texas. It is my honor to write to you on behalf of struggling parents and students. We all share a commitment to the well-being and best interest of our community, and your choice to selflessly serve and make a difference is not just admirable, but what I hope my own boys aspire to.
I want you to know I share your heart for service. I am an emergency physician on faculty at the McGovern Medical School at the University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston, TX. It is both my joy and honor to serve the public by training the next great generation of emergency physicians and to care for Texans at Memorial Hermann Hospital in the Texas Medical Center, the busiest trauma center in the nation, and Lyndon B. Johnson General Hospital, part of the Harris Health system and the busiest emergency department in the city where we truly serve "the least of these." I am writing as a concerned citizen, and not as a representative of the university.
I have two sons ages 8 and 7, Micah and Jonah, whom I adore, but I'm not writing on their behalf. I'm writing on behalf of all students at the mercy of your decisions the decisions whose impact on the students of the Houston Independent School District cannot be understated. I don't envy the difficult decisions ahead of you and I appreciate the complex nature of our problems at hand. My beliefs occupy a small territory where legitimate concern for public health overlaps with concern about the erosion of individual liberties and a widened gap between the haves and the have nots. I urge you to be apolitical in your decision-making, and trust that you'll make the best ones.
I was raised to treat every individual the same, to eschew favoritism a value challenged in our current political milieu, but one I hold to steadfastly. I work hard to treat our forgotten homeless and poor with dignity, touching them with bare hands as I would anyone else. The current pandemic has robbed the healing quality of human touch from my practice and our collective pattern and replaced it with fear. Fear to be human to hug, to shake hands, to interact, to assemble, and to teach in person. Fear has led to unprecedented economic devastation, destruction of cultural fabric, increased incidence of substance abuse, alcoholism, suicidality, and a lost generation of poor and uneducated. Here's where you have the power to restore dignity to an entire generation of Houstonians living in poverty.
We are now a single income family. We can afford to be a single income family. There's been very little financial impact to our situation. In fact, our financial situation may have improved a bit payments to more than 100K in student loan debt have been temporarily arrested by the federal government and we were fortunate enough to refinance our home mortgage, reducing our monthly payment substantially. I don't need to tell you that we are a minority in HISD in so many ways. Namely, we're not economically disadvantaged like 79% of children in HISD (https://www.houstonisd.org/achievements). I don't need to tell you that "virtual learning" disproportionately and adversely affects those 79%, many of whom cannot afford to be a single-income family; many of whom aren't fortunate enough to have internet access; many of whom do not speak English as their primary language (or English at all, for that matter, like my youngest son's best friend, or more than half of my patients at LBJ hospital that are Spanish-speaking only). I don't need to tell you that the current draconian policies regarding returning to school only serve to widen the opportunity chasm between my boys and 79% of others. I don't need to tell you that the overwhelming monolith of evidence supports returning to in-person education and that "schools are an important part of the infrastructure of communities and play a critical role in supporting the whole child, not just their academic achievement" (cdc.gov). I don't need to tell you that there are simple, safe, effective practices to reduce the spread of COVID-19 and educate our children in the best way possible. I don't need to tell you that children are not only less likely to get COVID-19 than adults, but have remarkably less serious illness (Bialek et al., 2020). I don't need to tell you that many other industrialized countries have opened school without deleterious consequences including China, Denmark, Taiwan, Norway, Singapore, Austria, Australia, France, Sweden; many of which don't even require masks (Melnick et al., 2020). I know you know these things. So, your decision really depends on your commitment to equal opportunity for all Houstonians, not just a select few.
Perhaps more important than all the facts that support reopening schools is the insidious indoctrination of our youth. We've indoctrinated them with the ideology of fear. We've taught them to exercise an abundance of caution at the expense of their dreams. We've paralyzed a would-be engineer that her would-be bridge isn't worth the risk. We've suspended the athlete's pursuit of excellence and team spirit for the perils of caution. We've halted the collective imagination of an entire generation; a generation ripe to reimagine transportation, healthcare, government, and commerce.
In 1999, Dr. Don Berwick, former CEO/Founder of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement and former Center for Medicaid and Medicare Services administrator appointed by Barak Obama, issued an address at the 11thAnnual National Forum on Quality Improvement in Health Care. The address detailed his and his wife's personal experience with the shortcomings of the healthcare industry through her battle with a neurologic condition. As a correlate, he recounts an incident in Mann Gulch, Montana in 1949 in which a wildfire took the lives of 13 young men and changed the way firefighting was managed in the United States. One survivor developed an ingenious survival plan called an "escape fire." Dr. Berwick went on to describe several "escape fires" for healthcare that could revolutionize the industry in the same way that the Mann Gulch fire revolutionized the firefighting industry (Berwick, 2002). I ask you now, what is your escape fire? The current system of virtual education is failing Houstonians. How can we save education and revitalize an entire generation that is at risk of losing faith in our system? I urge you to choose the narrow path of courage and restore in-person education for the sake of equality, for the sake of a generation, and for the sake all Houstonians.
Your servant,
Ben Cooper, MD"
"They weren't raiding a Girl Scout troop looking for overdue library books."