The pandemic has changed few, if any, institutions more than it has changed our public schools. At all levels.

You can argue that COVID-19 has changed dining out, retail and health care drastically and you’d be right. But the lasting effect on and in the schools may be both wider and deeper. After all, our next generations are coming up through the public schools.

The question is whether the nation’s and especially Maine’s public schools are equipped to deal with a new normal. And who will define that new normal.

It became clear early on that the former White House would sit out the pandemic, so state and local governments stepped up. Not without repercussions. Not without confusion. The result for 20 months in Maine schools has been a hodgepodge. Schools close, go to remote learning, which turned out to be little or no learning. Schools go hybrid, kids in seats some days but at home other days. Masked kids. Unmasked kids.

Lately, with schoolhouse classes resumed and with a vaccine available for children ages 5 through 11, simplicity still eludes us. Don’t even think about standardization.

Examples. Lewiston schools are holding vaccine clinics for kids 5 to 11. But Auburn schools are not, instead referring kids to the vaccine clinic at the Auburn Mall. Lewiston’s school committee voted to require masks in all schools; Auburn didn’t do so until five cases of COVID turned up at Edward Little High School. What happens when students from Lewiston High and students from Edward Little socialize together in the evening?

Winthrop teachers and administrators asked to resume remote classes for three weeks because Winthrop High School has the second highest infection rate among schools. The school committee said no, but canceled school for Thanksgiving week. Teachers and parents are pushing back against the board.

In Aroostook County, Hodgdon and Katahdin schools don’t require masks. But their athletes must mask up for indoor games because the other County schools threatened to boycott them.

Shifting advice and interpretations created an opening for people already critical of schools. Board meetings (or Zoom rooms) were packed. Some people physically attacked board members, and police had to be called. During my eight years as a director in the Mount Blue School District, board meetings were usually less than exciting. No longer.

To the issue of pandemic precautions add teaching about our race history, and school boards are on the hot spot. Meetings that lasted an hour or two run into the wee hours.

Any number of people are running for school boards, fueled by right-wing advocates who used to ignore school issues, other than to plump for public money for private schools, but who started fielding slates of candidates for board seats all over the country.

Some of them ran in Maine, and most lost, though I can’t find a comprehensive list. It appears that in Hampden, Ellsworth and Windham voters rejected candidates who wanted to ban mask mandates or teaching of “critical race theory,” which isn’t taught in public schools. It’s a law- and grad-school approach to examining our race history. That’s all.

In this fray, leave it to a Democrat to say something both stupid and tone deaf. Terry McAuliffe, who lost an election last week to regain the governorship of Virginia, said in a debate, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.”

In context that mightn’t have been outrageous, but it’s easy to hear him saying parents have no role in their kids’ education. Surprise, surprise, the winner, Glenn Youngkin, took McAuliffe’s soft pass and ran with it. And a machine of right-wing operatives ran with him. One of them, Christopher Rufo, even contacted Michelle Goldberg, a New York Times columnist, to boast of his success influencing school elections.

“I’ve unlocked a new terrain in the culture war and demonstrated a successful strategy,”  Rufo told Goldberg. “We are … preparing a strategy of laying siege to the institutions.”

The Democrats’ response? They said Youngkin, a conservative but not a radical, was “dog whistling” on race by saying parents had a role in their kids’ education. I can count on one finger the number of people they persuaded. Without moving the finger.

On the somewhat brighter side, Amy Fried, a University of Maine political science professor, wrote in the Bangor Daily News about a poll this month by the Public Religion Research Institute, finding that “The vast majority of Americans (84%) agree that, ‘We should teach American history that includes both our best achievements and our worst mistakes as a country.'”

Only 13% said, “We should teach American history that focuses on what makes this country exceptional and great.” If the so-called woke segment, which sometimes seems to believe that everything America has ever done was evil, is also only about 13%, then roughly three-quarters of Americans favor teaching our real history, warts and all.

That could be a mandate for school folks to dig into the history again, find the Benjamin Bannekers and the Claudette Colvins and write them back into the history books.

As a School Administrative District 9 director, Bob Neal asked voters to bring school issues to him. Few did. Boy, has that changed. Now we’ll see if boards are up to managing the change. Neal can be reached at [email protected].