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Some locals welcome students as a relief, as it gives parents flexibility to work. But with COVID-19 cases steadily increasing, other parents are concerned about the safety of their children and the potential for them to bring home the delta variant to multigenerational households.

Last week, there was a statewide positivity rate of 4.4% and a daily average of 161 cases. In many ways, the danger to be faced by students in August is still very much the same as it was in Hawaii’s summer surge last year, because cases are again rising and the vaccine .

While government officials have frequently invoked terms like “best practices” or “science-based” to put a stamp of safety on the return of in-person instruction, this entire process still reeks of politics driving education.

As we have seen throughout the entire pandemic, what is considered safe has been a moving target, and when government gets things wrong, people get sick or die. It would be academic hubris to take on vaccines and consider that to be the end-all.

People assume that because mRNA vaccines have been shown to be mostly effective against alpha and delta strains in limited studies in the UK, that this somehow crosswalks to everyone, everywhere seeing similar effectiveness, but that simplifies the science too much.

Parents who think their children – and indeed, their entire household – would be safer with distance learning until things cool down are completely justified in taking a wait-and-see attitude toward the continuing pandemic.

The problem is, not every public school student will have distance learning options available, and in lieu of that, not all parents can afford to send their children to a private school with distance learning either.

The law requires children to go to the public school in their geographic areas, pandemic or not, and Hawaii . Yes, like every other government policy in the Aloha State, , but exemptions put people at the mercy of bureaucrats.

Why We Should Consider A Voucher System

In Hawaii, public education is a mess. The solution to every single problem faced by the Department of Education even prior to the pandemic was simply to throw more money at it or demand more money from taxpayers.

Public education , and in Hawaii, education is a monopoly of chaos that pits parents and their children against politicians and powerful unions. It is precisely for times like these, when parents don’t like COVID-19 pandemic conditions or trust public assurances of safety for school children, that giving parents more educational choice .

One of the proposals that has been pitched for years is what is called , where parents can opt out of public education and receive a subsidy roughly equivalent to what it costs to send their child to a public school, and that could be used to attend a private school of their choice. The theory is that this would force competition for money among schools to provide the best possible facilities and educational programs.

If Hawaii had a voucher system, parents who didn’t like the safety arrangements at the public school their children would normally attend could send them to a private school that had an all-distance option. If the voucher didn’t cover the full cost, they could pay the rest out-of-pocket. Public schools would either have to aggressively improve their services, or they’d lose out to private schools that had better safety and educational services.

In the past, I have resisted the idea of vouchers, not because I oppose parental choice, but because I have worried about where private schools would be able to drive up prices, as has happened at private colleges over recent decades.

However, if the upcoming session of the Legislature were to to create a brief voucher pilot project just to cover the COVID-19 pandemic for, say, the next four years, this might provide a way for parents to get their children through school without worrying about infections. And if the system didn’t work, an automatic sunset date on the pilot project could shut it down before it got out of hand.

This is clearly a controversial idea, but during this ongoing pandemic, if the law still demands that parents send their children to school, they should have the right to send them someplace where they feel their keiki would be most comfortable and safe. To be entirely at the mercy of the public school system in a pandemic is more unreasonable than the government creating vouchers.

This is one of those areas where I, as someone who has worked at the Legislature in years past, can tell you that policymakers might say behind the scenes, “The DOE will hate it. Public school teachers will hate it. Unions will hate it.”

And that is probably true. But when it comes to your children, who you love, the real question is, should bureaucrats make the call on their safety, or should you?