Chris Powell: Perfect safety is impossible! Reopen schools

Hard as he tries, Connecticut Gov. Lamont can't guarantee safety to anyone as he undertakes to get the state operating normally again with the virus epidemic diminishing. Largely because of the governor's use of emergency powers, Connecticut is doing far better than other states, but some people are still scared -- and some seem to see financial advantage in staying scared.

So the governor's plan for reopening schools with conscientious precautions is meeting much resistance from the Connecticut Education Association -- the big teacher union -- as well as U.S. Rep. Jahana Hayes, D-5th District, a former national teacher of the year and teacher union member. While young people are far less susceptible to the virus than others and most medical experts endorse resuming school, the teachers want a guarantee of perfect safety before going back to work.

The governor can't provide such a guarantee because there isn't any, and if teachers require one, they should stay home -- under their beds even, forever even.

Connecticut's teachers are well paid, enjoy summers off and great job security, and lately have been working much less if at all while still getting paid as usual, even though "distance learning" has been a flop. So their insistence on a guarantee of safety before returning to work is beyond arrogant while, quite without guarantees, supermarket employees work every day to keep them fed, postal workers work every day to keep them supplied, and police officers work every day to guard them against predators, whose numbers are growing as society steadily disintegrates.

If education is as crucial as the teacher unions maintain when they demand raises, it's just as crucial when children have lost a semester and many parents have incurred big daycare costs. So the CEA should stop distributing those lawn signs congratulating its members as if they are hospital workers fighting the virus and instead urge teachers to do something worth congratulation.

KEEP COPS IN SCHOOLS: Accompanying the clamor to "defund the police" or at least order them to stop enforcing laws the underclass doesn't want to obey is clamor to eliminate what are euphemistically called "school resource officers," These police were placed in schools so someone besides a burly gym teacher could respond quickly to violence and other disruption by students, since, short of murder, disrupters no longer can be expelled from school. Instead, as a matter of what is imagined to be "social justice," disrupters must be allowed to impair everybody else's education.

Has perfect safety somehow been restored to schools by the Black Lives Matter movement and the vandalism of statues of Columbus and other historical figures? Of course not. This clamor against "school resource officers" is just another manifestation of hatred for police -- and, more than that, hatred for any rules of order, which now are presumed to be racist or otherwise oppressive, especially as government officials lose the self-respect necessary to defend order.

As Connecticut should know bitterly, schools are soft targets, threatened not only by their own incorrigible students but also murderous crazies, so having a cop on hand is some protection against external dangers too.

While the state is recovering well from the epidemic, its residents seem to be becoming crazier, apparently from the epidemic's constraints on life. Shootings now are more frequent, even in suburbs, and they're not being committed by the police, though only misconduct by police seems to be of interest to anyone in authority.

Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.