SATURDAY, AUGUST 8, 2020
Baker City, Oregon
4A
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EDITORIAL
The right call
on school start
The Baker School Board made a
disappointing decision Thursday.
That it was also the right decision
— indeed, the necessary decision —
doesn’t ease the disappointment.
The Board decided that all classes
will be conducted online when the
school year starts Sept. 8. The school
district’s goal was to have in-person
classes for grades K-6, and a hybrid
model for students in grades 7-12,
with those students attending classes
in school two days a week and online
the other two days.
But based on the requirements that
Oregon Gov. Kate Brown announced
July 28 — metrics related to CO-
VID-19 cases that counties must meet
to make schools within their borders
eligible to offer in-person classes —
Baker schools can’t currently qualify.
And although a task force of local
offi cials from rural counties, including
Baker County Commissioner Mark
Bennett, has been lobbying state
offi cials to ease those requirements
for counties including Baker, there is
no guarantee that the campaign will
result in Baker schools being able to
welcome students into classrooms in
September.
Meanwhile, hundreds of local
families are trying to fi gure out their
fall schedule. And with only a month
before school starts, parents need to
know whether their kids will be learn-
ing in a classroom or at home.
The bottom line is that the Board
needed to make a decision. And
because it seems unlikely, based on
recent trends in the number of CO-
VID-19 cases and the rate of positive
tests, that the district will meet the
state’s requirements for in-person
classes by Sept. 8, a completely online
curriculum was the only plausible
option.
This is hardly ideal.
Online school creates challenges
for the district’s 1,700 students, their
teachers and their families. The
district has used federal COVID-19
money to improve its online teaching
system. But now offi cials will need to
strive to ensure that all students have
the computer and internet access
necessary to participate in classes.
Some parents probably will have to
give up jobs, or substantially change
their work schedules, to be home with
elementary school students.
The metrics the governor an-
nounced July 28 aren’t quite as strict
when applied to allowing in-person
classes for K-3 students. Baker super-
intendent Mark Witty said Thursday
that he expects to review the situation
for those students after a month, to
see if it’s possible to resume in-person
classes, and undertake a similar
review for grades 4-12 around the
middle of October.
State offi cials are scheduled to an-
nounce potential changes to the July
28 metrics on Tuesday, Aug. 11. Those
changes could make it possible for
smaller school districts in the area,
including Huntington, Burnt River,
Pine Eagle and Powder Valley, to
have in-person classes for some or all
students.
State offi cials have said the overrid-
ing goal is to have students return to
classrooms as soon as it’s safe to do so.
Offi cials need to acknowledge that
conditions in counties such as Baker,
where test results suggest the virus is
not widespread and where no out-
breaks have happened, warrant the
resumption of in-person classes sooner
than in counties with signifi cantly
higher rates of COVID-19 cases.
OTHER VIEWS
Editorial from Bloomberg News:
In a country where COVID-19 remains out
of control, it’s wrong for anyone not to wear a
mask on a commercial airplane. Increasing
evidence shows that good cloth face coverings
signifi cantly lower the spread of the novel
coronavirus at close quarters — and that not
wearing them is risky, because this germ is
so often breathed into the air by people who
don’t yet know they have it. One passenger on
a fl ight from Singapore to Hangzhou, China,
was infected by neighboring passengers when
he merely let his mask slip below his nose
while talking with his family.
It is one thing for people to take chances
with their own health. It’s quite another when
their reckless behavior also puts others at
risk. The evidence clearly shows that this is
the case with masks during the pandemic.
In fact, people who choose to risk their own
health this way are exposing others to poten-
tially worse danger. Smoking is banned almost
everywhere — including on airplanes. During
the pandemic, all air passengers should be
required to wear masks, and face legal penal-
ties if they don’t.
Most Americans have come to understand
the need to mask up. Seventy-two percent
usually do. But 18% rarely or never do, and
some of these objectors apparently want to
remain maskless on airlines. This imperils the
health of innocent strangers, including fl ight-
crew members for whom the cabin is a work-
place. Airplane ventilation systems remove
almost all germs from the air, but it takes
a few minutes for exhaled virus particles to
reach the fi lters.
Major airlines already require passengers
and crew members to wear masks, but their
— Jayson Jacoby, Baker City Herald editor
rules come with exceptions (one airline ex-
cuses children under age 8, for instance) and,
most important, aren’t always enforced. In a
couple of instances airlines have refused entry
to unmasked passengers or removed someone
from a plane after boarding, but as things
stand there’s not much they can do to keep
irresponsible passengers from removing their
masks during fl ight.
An FAA rule could set penalties for noncom-
pliance — just as some governments do. Many
cities where the coronavirus is uncontained
are levying $100 fi nes for going without a
mask near other people in public places. Re-
search has shown that such mandates work.
Enforceable mandates increase the number
of mask wearers and reduce new infections. If
95% of Americans were to wear masks, more
than 30,000 lives could be saved over the
next few months, according to the University
of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics
and Evaluation. When masks do not prevent
transmission altogether, they make infections
less severe. And they do so without apprecia-
bly limiting people’s intake of oxygen.
Air travel is still a fraction of what it was
before the pandemic. For airlines, as for the
U.S. at large, it will be impossible to return
to normal unless COVID-19 is contained.
Masks are one of the most effective strate-
gies. Democrats in the House have introduced
legislation that would authorize the Federal
Aviation Administration to require masks on
all U.S fl ights and impose criminal penal-
ties for failure to comply. It should be passed
without delay.
Real heat prompts a search for cool relief
I spent a goodly portion of my
lunch hour the other day searching
in vain for a sheet of plastic.
This is not as refreshing as a
nap.
Or reading a book, or eating
Cheetos, to cite two other things I
especially enjoy doing during the
mid-day break.
My failure to fi nd the plastic
was particularly vexing because
it is a substantial piece, measur-
ing maybe 3 feet by 2 feet. It’s not
as if I could have inadvertently
kicked it under the bed, which is
the long-term repository for books,
maps and a variety of other items I
vaguely remember and sometimes
lament.
The plastic also happens to
be transparent, or nearly so, but
I don’t see as how that much
changes the matter. I can’t very
well argue that the thing is cam-
oufl aged, the reason being that its
edges bristle with several fi nger-
length swathes of black velcro.
I needed this sheet because it’s
what I wedge into the window
frame in our bedroom, where
it temporarily stands in for the
screen. This is after I have wrestled
an air-conditioner into the gap, a
task that my fi ngers consider an
act of criminal stupidity.
(And one that my back, the past
few years, has treated with increas-
ing suspicion.)
Since it was already 93 degrees
at noon, at least according to the
most ambitious instrument in my
network of some half a dozen ther-
mometers, I considered this a quest
of considerable importance.
JAYSON
JACOBY
Our other window A/C unit was
droning away but I could sense that
its chilly exhalations were not up to
the task on a day when it was apt
to still be stifl ing even after the sun
slid behind the Elkhorns.
Real summer had arrived, and as
is my custom I was ill-prepared to
deal with it.
It’s not that I was wholly un-
aware of the heat, which is of course
the characteristic that defi nes the
season.
I had hefted the other air-
conditioner into its slot back in
early June, after the temperature
reached the upper 80s on a couple of
afternoons.
But that was a different sort of
heat.
A hot day in early June lacks
malevolence. You know the torrid
temperature will last for just a few
hours, that the evening breeze will
blow with a face-soothing coolness.
But come late July, and the broil-
ing air has more weight. There is a
tangible treachery in a thermom-
eter that reads 95 at dinner time,
and any wind that blows then is an
ill wind, the fevered and fetid breath
of some bad-tempered brute.
Anyway it was hot.
And although I hadn’t decided to
actually lug the other air-condition-
er from the shed, I was mulling the
idea. Only there wasn’t any point in
it if I couldn’t hunt up that sheet of
clear plastic.
I fi nally found it propped against
the wall near our front door. I hadn’t
the slightest memory of putting it
there, although I suppose I must
have done so.
With that minor mystery solved
I drove back to work, sweltering be-
cause 1 mile is too short a commute
for the car’s A/C to get up much
momentum.
But even so I felt a palpable sense
of relief.
It was gratifying to know that
later, if I exhausted my patience
with the oppressive air, I could take
meaningful action.
A slightly smashed fi nger is noth-
ing against the refreshing caress of
artifi cially cooled air.
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It has been a particularly sunny
summer, it seems to me.
This is hardly shocking, of course,
in our arid valley sheltered within the
concentric circles of two rain shadows,
those cast by the Cascades and the
Elkhorns.
Even the soggiest period here-
abouts is frequently interrupted by
clear days. And July and August are
rarely soggy.
During a run of nearly cloud-free
days my thoughts drift back to
another summer, one distant both in
time and in space.
The summer of 1914 in Europe was
forever after celebrated as the apothe-
osis of the season, a span of brilliant
afternoons fading to the warm golden
dusk, soft and comforting.
Climate records largely confi rm
this.
But that summer’s reputation has
little to do with statistics.
Europeans deified that summer
because it was the last in a long era
of general peace on the continent.
But only in part — the summer was
scarcely a month old when, on July
28, World War I started.
It was natural for people, during
and after the catastrophe of the first
modern industrial war, to remem-
ber that summer with particular
fondness. It was the epitome of the
“before” — before society had to
confront the havoc wrought by rapid-
fi ring artillery and phosgene gas and
Maxim guns. Before Verdun and the
Somme and Ypres, heretofore mere
place names, became synonyms for
slaughter.
The summer of 2020, the sum-
mer of the coronavirus, is a different
season, to be sure. Most notably, the
pandemic, unlike the war, arrived
well before the solstice.
But we are living through another
great upheaval, another milestone.
And I can’t help but wonder, in the
years and the decades ahead, how
we will think of this summer, an-
other sun-drenched season when it
seemed at times that nothing would
ever again be as it was before.
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The technology of 1980 is in many
ways laughably archaic.
Compared to a cellphone loaded
with thousands of mp3s, a Sony
Walkman cassette player seems
about as complicated as a hatchet.
But in one narrow measure I
believe we reached a pinnacle of
achievement 40 years ago that we
have yet to surpass, and so far as I
can tell probably never will.
By “we” I mean AC/DC, the Aus-
tralian rock band.
On July 25, 1980, the group re-
leased the album “Back in Black.”
Never before, and not since, has
the electric guitar sounded better
than it does in that recording.
The brothers Angus Young (lead
guitar) and Malcolm Young (rhythm
guitar) crammed “Back in Black”
with a series of riffs, played through
Marshall amps, that managed to
sound even crunchier than on their
previous record, 1979’s “Highway to
Hell.”
The Youngs’ guitars — Angus
played a Gibson SG, Malcolm a
Gretsch White Falcon — combined
the heavy distortion of hard rock
with a precision that to my ears no
band has ever equaled. The bril-
liance of their work is best appreci-
ated by listening to the songs with a
good pair of headphones.
The straightforward music that
AC/DC played long since went out
of fashion. And sadly, Malcolm died
in 2017.
But I suspect that guitar-
ists today who tried to replicate
the sound that infuses “Back in
Black,” even with the dubious aid
of computers, would fail, and by a
wide margin, to accomplish what
the Young brothers did without
employing a single microchip.
Jayson Jacoby is editor of the
Baker City Herald.