My name is Rob Mattheu and I’m a parent of Maddie Mattheu, a UK sophomore and former JCPS student. She’s a talented artist and incredible student looking to become an art teacher when she graduates. After a year and a half of quarantine, I know she and her entire family would love it if she could have a normal college experience.
It is not the fault of her or her family that we can’t. We masked, socially distanced, supported restaurants only via take out, exercised caution around our friends and family, limited our personal gatherings, and when necessary or required, got tested. It wasn’t easy for us, especially my 79 year old mom, who lives alone and had to seriously curtail her social activities. We were fortunate to have a supportive employer and jobs that allowed us to work from home. When eligible, we were among the first to get fully vaccinated, twice driving miles away from Louisville to get our shots. My wife got it with my daughter at UK, and I drove to the temporary Kroger site in Frankfort.
As I said, we wanted to return to normal. It’s why we did what we did. Back in spring of 2020, my daughter and our family accepted that her senior year of high school would be ruined by COVID. Her prom was cancelled, her last days with friends spent solely online, and a diploma was conferred via a graduation ceremony we attended in front of a computer on YouTube.
We also had to accept her freshman year of college would be radically different than what kids usually experience. It was a year of online classes, social distancing, few on campus events, and grabbing your meal and leaving rather than hanging out with friends. But she did it. We all did what we had to do because we saw normal around the corner. We just had to exercise common sense, err on the side of caution, get vaccinated, and work to slow the spread.
I know that this education committee wanted to get back to normal. I know because many of you started saying it a week after the pandemic shutdowns started. In fact, several of you acted like nothing changed. It was not uncommon to see committee meetings and floor debates full of maskless senators and representatives during the pandemic, with little regard for social distancing or the welfare of those who were trying to be cautious. Some of you got COVID, and rather than promoting safer behavior when you returned, continued the way you did prior to getting the virus. You attacked our governor for shutting down commerce and schools. You attacked teachers for expressing concerns about the safety of their classrooms. You did nothing to acknowledge the long hours teachers were working to create new online lessons and keep up with students they only saw via computer. You acted as if they enjoyed teaching to a computer camera rather than face to face.
And then when we finally had a vaccine and a light at the end of the tunnel, your party went off the deep end, spreading misinformation about the vaccine, pushing unsafe or unethical treatments that didn’t work, or saying we shouldn’t live in fear because God would protect us. Now you didn’t just want a safe reopening of the economy, you wanted us to lift all common sense restrictions. You limited the Governor’s powers to lead in a time of crisis, knowing full well that you would not be able to meet and make changes if the crisis continued. You called vaccine and mask mandates “tyranny”. You had spent a year railing against virtual learning and shouting we needed to get back to the classroom. But when we finally had hope that we could, you didn’t want to do anything to stay there.
Instead, this committee focused its energies on racist propaganda and bigoted community members telling you how Critical Race Theory was taking over schools and threatening our precious bodily fluids and American way of life. When the delta variant began to overshadow that manufactured crisis, you shifted to COVID misinformation, inviting people with questionable ideas, qualifications, and resumes to tell us how masks and vaccines were dangerous.
As our school boards and superintendents were inundated by angry mobs who threatened both their jobs and their personal safety, you either remained silent, or worse, participated and encouraged the anger.
You make a big show in your campaigns about being “pro-life” and caring about kids and families. You showed how much you cared about this two weeks ago when a mother of a child who has cancer was warned by committee member Steven West that she only had two minutes to make her case for masks, while he gave several anti mask advocates more than twice that amount to convey false and misleading information about COVID.
So I ask you. Why are most of you on this committee? Why does it even exist? What exactly is it this committee does to ensure our kids are able to learn in a safe and protective environment? How does this committee further the cause of education when so many of you are poorly informed, incapable of critical thinking, or just cynically grandstanding and misinforming others for your own political gain? How can we expect to improve vaccination rates and common sense measures like distancing and masks when your members are touting horse dewormer and other unproven medications? Do you expect our students to be better citizens of the world when they see you whining about the “tyranny” of having to wear a piece of fabric over your face? What do they think when they see many of you are more outraged by the “trauma” of a mask or vaccine than you are about mandatory active shooter drills and actual school shootings? How do we get back to normal if many of you won’t do the bare minimum asked of you to try and get there?
Kentucky’s kids are watching you. They’re seeing you trivialize the concerns of their student representatives to Frankfort and focusing on politics over practicality. They’re watching as you allow empty rhetoric turn school board meetings into places of fear and concern. They’re watching you ignore and misrepresent science and deliberately create confusion when all they want to do is go back to school and stay safe.
Honestly, what you’ve done the past year and a half is an embarrassment and a sad validation of the stereotypes people place on Kentucky. It’s a reason why many of our brightest and best students leave the state when they graduate. You want to call yourselves an education committee? It’s time for you to cut the politics and step up. If you don’t want our state or local school boards to take steps to protect kids, and you don’t want the Governor to do it, and you want to keep schools open, tell us your full plan for doing so now and in the future? Otherwise, shut up, get out of the way, and let the adults take over.
Thank you.