The Washington Post National Weekly. November 24, 2019

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 24, 2019

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In Brooklyn s c h o o l s, making diverse pieces Fit PAGE PAGE PAGE 12 88

Politics Sondland’s vivid testimony 4 Nation Woes of indoor farming 8 World A futile flooding effort 11

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Politics Perspective

Dramatic testimony shakes inquiry

Matt McClain/The Washington Post

Sondland implicates the president and Republican allies in the alleged quid pro quo BY

D AN B ALZ

T

here have been many dramatic days during the Trump presidency but perhaps none as consequential as Wednesday’s testimony from Gordon Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union.

In clear and unequivocal language, Sondland implicated the president and other senior officials in the effort to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr

Zelensky. He made clear that Trump was withholding military aid and a coveted Oval Office meeting until Zelensky announced investigations into Ukraine’s role in the 2016 election as well as former vice president Joe Biden and his son Hunter.

Sondland’s testimony probably accelerates the moves by House Democrats to impeach the president and send the issue to the Senate for adjudication, though at this point the odds of conviction remain long, absent a significant

shift in public opinion away from the president.

Sondland became the latest in a line of witnesses who have said that any effort to pressure a foreign government to investigate a potential political rival is, at a minimum, improper and perhaps worse. That raises the question of whether Republicans, who have been unified in arguing that nothing improper took place, will now modify that position in any way to acknowledge wrongdoing by the president while arguing that it

Gordon Sondland, U.S. ambassador to the European Union, appears before the House Intelligence Committee during an impeachment hearing on Thursday.

does not constitute an impeachable offense.

At a minimum, Sondland knocked down some of the defenses that Republicans have been offering during the hearings and outside the hearing room, particularly with his assertion that the terms the president was demanding of Zelensky for an Oval Office visit amounted to a quid pro quo.

He recounted a September phone call in which the president said he was not asking for such a quid pro quo, a call that Republi-

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Politics perspective cans have cited repeatedly as proof that Trump was not seeking such a thing from Zelensky.

But Sondland offered a bit of context to what has been said before about that statement from the president. He explained that whatever the president’s words, he did not know whether Trump was being truthful in their brief conversation, and, regardless, that he still believed there had been a quid pro quo that had held up vital military aid and a sought-after Oval Office visit for the Ukrainian president.

The president had based his defense on the rough transcript of a July 25 phone call with Zelensky, arguing that there was no explicit demand made during the conversation and described the call as “perfect.” But Sondland described a systematic and long-running effort, directed by the president and led by his personal attorney, Rudolph W. Giuliani, to make clear to the Ukrainian leader what he was demanding of him in order to get what he was seeking from the president.

“We followed the president’s orders,” Sondland told the House intelligence committee.

Rather than calling this a rogue effort by Giuliani or an end run around the existing diplomatic and national security apparatus of the administration, Sondland said everything was well known across the senior levels of the administration, in part because he personally had communicated regularly with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and others about what was happening.

“Everybody was in the loop,” he said.

Unlike many of the others who have testified over the past few weeks, Sondland is not part of the executive branch bureaucracy. He is a wealthy businessman who contributed $1 million to the president’s inaugural committee and ended up as the ambassador to the European Union. In that sense he is an ally of the president and indebted to Trump for putting him where he is today.

Wednesday’s testimony was the third time he has offered evidence in the impeachment inquiry — once behind closed doors, then in a written statement in which he revised some of his original statements. On Wednesday, he said, his memory had been further refreshed by the testimony of others

During his testimony, Gordon Sondland expanded the circle of people who were aware of the Ukraine effort, including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, top, and Vice President Pence, seen seated in front of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

Olivier Hoslet/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock

Alexey Vitvitsky/Sputnik/Associated Press

and a review of some of his own and other’s emails and text messages, although he said he had been denied access to many of his documents by the State Department.

He arrived for Wednesday’s hearing facing an obvious dilemma, which was to risk a charge of lying to Congress by significantly disputing testimony that had taken place after his prior statements, or openly disputing the president’s version of events and thereby risking the wrath of the president’s allies as well as many with whom he serves in the administration. He chose to take on the president.

With each new statement to the intelligence committee, Sondland

has been more explicit about the president’s role. That culminated with his appearance on Wednesday. But what made his testimony as significant as it turned out to be was that he expanded the circle of those who he said were aware of what was going on. He said Pompeo, Vice President Pence, acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney and former national security adviser John Bolton were all aware of what was going on.

If Sondland provided any lifeline to Republicans, it was his acknowledgment that Trump never personally told him he was demanding investigations into 2016 and the Bidens in exchange for an Oval Office meeting or the re-

KLMNO Weekly

sumption of military aid. But he was explicit that he and others were told to follow the lead of Giuliani on dealing with the new government in Ukraine and, he said, that the former New York mayor was asking a quid pro quo of the Ukrainians — an Oval Office meeting in exchange for announcement of investigations.

“Mr. Giuliani was expressing the desires of the president of the United States, and we knew that these investigations were important to the president,” he said.

It was later, he said, that he concluded that military assistance to the Ukrainians was part of that quid pro quo.

Sondland took issue with aspects of the testimony by other administration officials who have been critical of the president. And some of his assertions were disputed by those he named as in the loop, including by a spokesman for Pence. But none of those at the most senior levels of the administration identified by Sondland as being aware of the pressure campaign have been heard from in sworn testimony in an open hearing room.

That includes Giuliani, who was the president’s point person on Ukraine, as well as Pompeo, who has been notably silent as career officials in his department have offered testimony that has outlined the pressure campaign that Sondland says was directed by the president.

Trump sought to distance himself from the weight of Sondland’s words, claiming he did not know the ambassador well. Nonetheless, Sondland described a friendly and jocular relationship with the president based on a shared use of salty language.

Sondland also confirmed that he was able to call the White House on an open phone line from a restaurant in Kyiv on the day after Trump had spoken with Zelensky and speak directly to the president. While he said he could not remember the full contents of the conversation, he did not dispute other testimony that he told the president that Zelensky would do anything he asked.

Sondland has significantly weakened Trump’s protestations and put the president’s Republican defenders in a far more difficult position. In that way, Wednesday was far from just another day in Washington. n

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POLITICs commentary

Who won the Democratic debate?

BY

A ARON B LAKE

nominee for president of the United States, who during the Obama administration spent four years full time on Fox News criticizing President Obama,” she said. She said Gabbard “buddied up” to Stephen K. Bannon to get an audience with Trump and that she “fails to call a war criminal” — Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, whom Gabbard controversially met with — “what he is.”

T

he Democratic presidential candidates momentarily sidelined the impeachment inquiry Wednesday night when they met in Atlanta for the November MSNBC-Washington Post debate.

Here are some winners and losers.

Winners Pete Buttigieg: Buttigieg has been good in the debates, and now he’s got real momentum in the first contest in Iowa, where a Des Moines Register-CNN poll showed him up nine points recently. The question has been how he would handle the newfound pressure — and answer questions about whether a young smalltown mayor has the gravitas to win the presidency. “We need somebody who can go toe-to-toe who actually comes from the kinds of communities that [President Trump has] been appealing to,” he said, adding: “I know that from the perspective of Washington, what goes on in my city might look small. But frankly, where we live, the infighting on Capitol Hill is what looks small.” On a night he seemed likely to be the target of many rivals’ attacks, his most tense back-and-forth was with Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii).

That’s about the best he could have hoped for, given her limited constituency in the Democratic Party.

Amy Klobuchar: She’s shown perhaps less momentum in Iowa, but she’s rising slightly. She repeatedly, and effectively, argued that she has won in a swing state, including in red areas, and her sometimes-corny jokes finally seemed to land. And in a key moment, she turned what could have been a dicey question — about her suggestion that a woman with Buttigieg’s experience wouldn’t make the debate stage — into a crowd-pleasing response about a female president. She said Buttigieg was qualified but that “women are held to a higher standard; otherwise, we could play a game called Name Your Favorite Woman President.” Then she brought

Losers

Toni L. Sandys/The Washington Post

Buttigieg and Klobuchar have strong showings, while Biden’s shaky performances continue down the house with this: “If you think a woman can’t beat Donald Trump, Nancy Pelosi does it every single day.”

Marijuana: It took most of the debate, but Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) ultimately seized upon an issue that was there for the taking: marijuana legalization. Former vice president Joe Biden said recently that he wasn’t ready for it because marijuana might be a “gateway drug.” Booker responded, “I thought you might have been high when you said it. …

Marijuana has already been legal in our country for privileged people.”

The wealthy: Don’t look now, but the wealthy are suddenly getting a little bit of defense on that debate stage. The first big confrontation came when Booker differed with Sen. Elizabeth Warren (DMass.) on her 2 percent wealth tax on the top one-tenth of 1 percent of income. Booker said he sympathized with the goal of creating more revenue and a fairer tax code, “but the tax the way you’re

putting it forward, I’m sorry, it’s cumbersome. It’s been tried by other nations. It’s hard to evaluate.” It was an interesting choice from Booker, who has been criticized as being too close to corporate interests. Later in the debate, billionaire Tom Steyer was asked to respond to the idea that he has bought his way into these debates by spending tens of millions of dollars of his own money. Businessman Andrew Yang responded, “I want to stick up for Tom.” He added: “Tom has been spending his own money fighting climate change. You can’t knock someone for having money and spending it in the right way.”

A delayed clapback: In July’s debate, Gabbard attacked Harris, and Harris didn’t really hit back.

Apparently she was ready this time. After Gabbard attacked the modern Democratic Party and Hillary Clinton for its foreign policy, Harris hit back — hard. “I think that it’s unfortunate that we have someone on the stage who is attempting to be the Democratic

Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), left, and South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg talk during a commercial break during the fifth Democratic presidential primary debate on Wednesday.

Buttigieg defended against attacks on his experience, while Klobuchar argued that a woman with his qualifications wouldn’t make the debate stage.

Joe Biden: His shaky debate performances haven’t really cost him thus far, but that doesn’t change the fact that they are almost unfailingly shaky. After Klobuchar’s Buttigieg answer, he assured awkwardly, “I think a woman is qualified to be president.” At another point, while talking about violence against women, he said we need to “keep punching at it and punching at it and punching.” Eek. Late in the debate, he played up his African American support, saying he was backed by the “only African American woman that had ever been elected to the United States Senate”: Carol Moseley-Braun (D-Ill.).

Except he was standing a few people down from another one, Harris (which she and Booker were happy to point out). Biden insisted that he had said the “first” black female senator, but he was wrong.

The “just beat Trump” ethos:

On a day in which the president’s Ukraine scandal took a serious turn, the debate actually included plenty of talk about how the party needs to not focus so much on Trump. “We cannot simply be consumed by Donald Trump,” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said, ticking off important issues such as health care, climate change and homelessness. “What the American people need to understand is that Congress can walk and chew bubble gum at the same time.” Buttigieg also emphasized, as he has before, that the party needs to vote according to what happens after the “tender” moment when Trump is gone. Added Sanders later: “We need to bring our people together not just in opposition to Donald Trump.” n

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World

KLMNO Weekly

Venice flood plan became a disaster B Y C HICO H ARLAN AND S TEFANO P ITRELLI

in Rome

I

t is among the most ambitious works of civil engineering in modern Italian history: an underwater fortress of steel designed to rise from the depths during high tides to protect the lagoon city of Venice.

But decades after being conceived, the project remains incomplete and unusable, little more than a refuge for the clams and barnacles that have made the machinery their home.

Venice, in the meantime, remains vulnerable, as demonstrated by the tides that inundated the city, flooding piazzas, churches and hotels, depositing layers of salt that eat away marble.

The city’s 6 billion euro flood barrier has been under construction since 2003 and was originally supposed to take eight years.

Now, the best guess is that it will be ready by 2021 or 2022. Some experts say that, given the pace of sea-level rise, it may be obsolete just decades after it starts operating. Others wonder, given its sorry history, whether the system will ever be ready. Parts of the underwater project are already corroding.

There are multiple explanations for the periodic and sometimes catastrophic floods in Venice: the inherent fragility of a city built across 118 islands; the rising seas and erratic weather associated with climate change; the shifting tectonic plates believed to be causing the land to sink; the dredging conducted to make way for tankers and cruise ships.

Many Venetians, though, also blame the deeply flawed effort to save their city.

Venice Mayor Luigi Brugnaro said that if the planned barrier had been in operation, the recent damage could have been avoided.

The project is known as MOSE — an Italian acronym for Experimental Electromechanical Module and a reference to the biblical Moses who parted the sea.

Simone Padovani/Awakening/Getty Images

Italian city’s ambitious barrier project has been plagued by delays, cost overruns and corruption It consists of more than 70 massive, yellow underwater gates positioned across the three inlets that separate the Adriatic Sea and the Venetian lagoon. The gates are designed to rise during abnormally high tides, sealing off the lagoon.

That’s the theory, at least. The project has been set back by successive delays, cost overruns and political corruption.

Investigators determined in 2014 that project leaders were funneling taxpayer money away from MOSE and using it to bribe politicians. Thirty-five people were arrested, including thenMayor Giorgio Orsoni and a former governor of the region, Giancarlo Galan.

“The delays are an all-Italian shame, and we urgently need a solution,” said Alessandro Morelli, the head of a parliamentary transportation committee.

Engineering experts have a bigger worry: that the project,

even after it comes online, won’t function as the savior it was designed to be.

A prototype of MOSE was first tested in the 1980s, and the project was based on drastically outdated projections about how quickly the seas might rise, according to a UNESCO report.

Specialists now speak about MOSE as a stopgap that can buy Venice a few decades while Italy comes up with a different plan.

“The solution of MOSE is obsolete and philosophically wrong, conceptually wrong,” said Luigi D’Alpaos, a professor emeritus of hydraulics at the University of Padova, who has written a book about Venice. “MOSE might work tranquilly and without issues for 10 to 20 years. But then problems will arise, and it will be necessary to take other actions.”

The intention behind the retractable gates was that, when they weren’t needed, they would allow Venice to retain its aesthet-

The MOSE project was originally scheduled to be finished by 2011, but now the best estimate is that it will be completed in 2021 or 2022. And even if the barrier is completed, it may quickly become obsolete as sea levels rise far faster than predicted.

ic feel, and allow for fishermen and other boats to make it in and out of port. More importantly, the Venice lagoon uses the Adriatic as a flushing valve, and its ecosystem would be jeopardized if sealed off from the high seas.

But based on projections of rising sea levels, in the not-toodistant future the floodgates would need to be raised so often that they would function like a near-permanent wall.

D’Alpaos said that with the sea level just 50 centimeters higher, MOSE would need to be used almost every day. In that scenario, the barrier could be used to keep Venice dry. But it would also create a far less desirable city, turning the lagoon around Venice into a stagnant pool for algae and waste.

The latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report said that sea levels by 2100 will rise between 60 cm and 110 cm, or 2 to 3 ½ feet, should gas emissions continue to increase.

The consortium that leads the MOSE project says the barrier is designed to handle sea level increases up to 60 cm.

The flooding in Venice is connected to tides, and in recent days, waters have been pouring into the city once and sometimes twice a day. The repeated flooding, and the projections that it will get worse, has caused some residents to despair about the city’s future. In the first two decades of the 20th century, Venice saw high tides of more than 110 cm five times. Two decades into the 21st century, Venice has seen similar tides more than 130 times.

Pierpaolo Campostrini, the director of a group that manages Venice lagoon research, said that even if MOSE works for “20 or 30” years, it will be worthwhile, given the damage Venice faces whenever it floods.

“We need to take into account that these kind of destructive events are not just material, but they affect the ability of the city to keep on existing, as opposed to being just a museum,” Campostrini said. n

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Nation

Indoor farming confronts head winds L AURA R EILEY in Baltimore

BY

T

he next big thing is here, all girders and concrete pads, glass roofing and gravelly dirt. Viraj Puri, co-founder of one of the nation’s largest indoor farm companies, walks through the construction site, and even without the luminous frills of thousands of butter lettuces, it is easy to see that the building going up where Bethlehem Steel once stood is something ambitious in the world of food.

The Sparrows Point steelworks in Baltimore, once the largest steel-producing facility in the world, was shuttered in 2012, leaving no trace of what once supported 30,000 families with Bethlehem Steel wages. Now the vacated land is dominated by a FedEx distribution center, an Amazon fulfillment center and an Under Armour warehouse.

And by the beginning of December, Puri’s Gotham Greens farm will join them, part of a global craze for decentralized indoor food production.

Food and agriculture innovation have sucked up remarkable amounts of investor capital in recent years and could become a $700 billion market by 2030, according to a Union Bank of Switzerland report.

Millions are being invested globally in indoor urban farms because of their promise to produce more food with less impact, with two dozen large-scale projects launching in Dubai, Israel, the Netherlands and other countries.

Still, the next big thing may be stymied in the United States by high start-up costs, high urban rents and lack of a safety net in a food system that is highly dependent on subsidies and bailouts for a few commodity crops.

And for indoor urban farms, especially those that rely solely on artificial light, there’s another concern: lightbulbs.

In September, the Trump administration announced it would roll back Obama-era energy effi-

Salwan Georges/The Washington Post

Urban agriculture presents a way to feed a hot and hungry planet — but it still faces problems ciency standards that would have effectively phased out the standard pear-shaped incandescent variety. The step is expected to slow the demand for LED bulbs, which last longer and use less electricity than many other types but are more expensive.

For indoor urban agriculture, especially indoor vertical farms, the reversal represents a threat to an already narrow path to scalability and profitability, according to Irving Fain, chief executive of Bowery Farming, an indoor vertical farming company.

“The Department of Energy recognized a lot of our energy was going to lights and that LEDs were a more efficient form of lighting, so they pushed from incandescent to LED in industrial spaces,” Fain said in a phone interview. “Those were the trends that got us here, and we were hoping cost could drop another 50 percent with more innovation and more volume.”

Some indoor farms stack plants vertically nearly to the

ceiling in repurposed shipping containers or enormous warehouses, all of the plants’ photosynthesis achieved via high-tech light emitting diode (LED) bulbs.

Others, such as Gotham Greens, are vast, glass-topped greenhouses, pulling their plants’ needs from the sun and giving a lightbulb assist in low-light times.

But the U.S. Department of Energy’s proposed reversal of energy efficiency standards could hamper this emerging agricultural sector, according to Fain.

Indoor vertical farming became economically viable when LEDs became plentiful, cheap and efficient. Before that, indoor growing lights produced enormous amounts of heat, and thus cooling costs and electricity bills were astronomical.

With the passage of energy legislation in 2007, the Department of Energy required that most general-service lightbulbs emit at a minimum efficiency of 45 lumens per watt by the beginning of 2020. Halogen and incan-

A worker harvests basil in Gotham Greens’ indoor farm in Hollis, N.Y. Millions are being invested in indoor urban farms globally, but they may be stymied in the United States because of high start-up costs, urban rents and energy prices.

descent bulbs don’t generally meet that efficiency standard.

LEDs, which use a semiconductor to convert electricity into light, do.

Within just a few years, LEDs doubled in efficiency and prices fell 85 percent. Widespread adoption caused energy companies to throw money at research and development. Indoor urban farmers, especially those farming vertically, have built their profitability models on projections that LEDs will continue to get exponentially brighter and less expensive, will run cooler and will become more efficient.

Chris Granda, senior researcher and advocate at the Appliance Standards Awareness Project, says rolling back the efficiency standards will hamper the expansion of LEDs and their continued march toward greater efficiency.

“I think what the efficiency standards rollback will do is slow the rate of consumer uptake,” Granda said. “There’s a cohort of people who just don’t like to try new things. The standards would have nudged them along into LEDs. Even if it delays the adoption of LEDs for five years, that’s a huge loss of energy.”

Efficient bulbs are not the only challenge to indoor urban agriculture, Fain says. To take a small indoor farm and make it a big one requires innovations in robotics and artificial intelligence.

There, too, prices have come down substantially for sensors, processing and data storage. Altogether, these make indoor farming viable but not easy.

Fain talks about Bowery’s operating system, “the brains and central nervous system of our farm, with a plant-monitoring system and proprietary deeplearning algorithms” that help predict what will happen to each crop. He says the operating system, one of the most expensive components of Bowery, runs everything at each farm, with realtime data to improve outcomes over a network of farms. The cost of that operating system has to be amortized over that network.

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Nation And because profitability is so elusive, some of the early promises of indoor agriculture are slow to be realized. Steep start-up costs mean farmers must grow crops that generate major cash: specialty items, such as flowers, or crops that have quick growth cycles, such as leafy greens. The five main indoor crops are leafy greens, microgreens, herbs, flowers and tomatoes, items that are a pull for those of high socioeconomic status but aren’t go-to products for low-income people.

There is an inherent elitism that is hard to avoid, even with school tours, food bank donations and other efforts toward democratizing access to good food.

Indoor urban farming is frequently touted as a mechanism for urban renewal and job creation in low-income neighborhoods. But farms kitted out with sensors and robots often require highly specialized and educated workers. They typically are not huge employers. Bethlehem Steel employed 30,000 at its peak; Gotham Greens’ largest farm yet will have only about 60 full-time employees.

For Puri, Fain and others, the necessity to succeed with indoor urban agriculture is self-evident.

More than 95 percent of head lettuce in the United States comes from two drought-prone states, California and Arizona, and according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, traditional agriculture accounts for 80 percent of the country’s water consumption, as high as 90 percent in many Western states.

After Hurricane Sandy in 2012, news stories reported that local Gotham Greens lettuces were some of the only leafy greens available in grocery stores in New Jersey and New York. Indoor farming gives cities “urban resiliency,” something planners are increasingly concerned about.

Cities are where most of us live, says Sabine O’Hara, dean of the College of Agriculture, Urban Sustainability and Environmental Sciences at the University of the District of Columbia. The conversation now, she says, is how to shrink the food footprint of cities, how to make cities more sustainable and their food systems robust when disaster strikes. n

KLMNO Weekly

Poll: Americans still believe in positive role of religion BY

S ARAH P ULLIAM B AILEY

D

espite public concerns about religious groups and a loss of respect for clergy in general, a poll from the Pew Research Center suggests many Americans still see religion generally having a positive role in their lives.

Christianity has been rapidly declining in the United States while the number of Americans who are religiously unaffiliated is growing. Gallup polls have found a massive, three-decade fall in confidence in “organized religion” from as high as 66 percent in the mid1980s to 36 percent in 2019. Pope Francis’s image has declined in multiple surveys in the wake of new revelations about sex abuse scandals.

But Pew’s survey, published this month, finds that Americans hold more positive views of religion’s role overall than concerns about it declining. Fifty-five percent say churches and religious organizations do more good than harm in society (compared with 20 percent of people who think it does more harm than good). Similar majorities say religious organizations strengthen morality in society (53 percent), and 50 percent say they bring people together.

As mainline Protestantism is experiencing an especially sharp decline, leaders are constantly talking about how to attract young people, said David Zahl, author of the book “Seculosity: How Career, Parenting, Technology, Food, Politics, and Romance Became Our New Religion and What to Do About It.” Many younger Americans aren’t prioritizing church attendance the way their parents or grandparents did, he said, but some people might hold nostalgia for how religious organizations have set up hospitals and other community-based institutions.

Zahl said that when he moved to Charlottesville to be the college and young-adult minister at Christ Episcopal Church, “regular

Michael S. Williamson/The Washington Post

The steeple at the Fosterville Baptist Church in Fosterville, Tenn.

Christianity has been rapidly declining in the United States.

church attendance” usually meant someone would attend three times a month. Now, he said, someone who attends regularly is someone who attends once a month.

“People may be sad that churches are declining, but they’re not going to rearrange their priorities,” Zahl said. “They can say, ‘It’s not for me, but I see it’s good for society.’”

The two largest religious denominations in the country — the Catholic Church and the Southern Baptist Convention — have faced a new wave of sex abuse allegations within the past year. However, when asked about religion as a whole, Americans have more positive views.

And among the 78 percent who think religion is losing influence in American life, 42 percent say that’s a bad thing, compared with 17 percent who say that’s a good thing (19 percent say it doesn’t make a difference).

Some researchers have tried to quantify institutional religion’s economic impact on the nation.

Rodney Stark, a sociologist at Baylor University, estimated in his 2013 book “America’s Blessings” that religion benefits the American economy by $2.6 trillion per year. In 2016, Brian J. Grim of Georgetown University and Melissa E. Grim of the Newseum Insti-

tute analyzed the annual revenue as well as the goods and services that religious institutions provide, putting their estimate of the value of faith to U.S. society at $4.8 trillion.

Pew’s new poll numbers should be encouraging to pastors and other leaders who have been anxiously wringing their hands over the loss of many young people, said Brett McCracken, author of “Hipster Christianity: When Church and Cool Collide.”

“Churches try to game the system and try to find what a demographic wants,” he said. “Rather than being inauthentic and trying to reinvent yourself to be cool, my instinct is young people are going to be interested in a church that makes a difference in people’s lives.”

McCracken said that the poll numbers suggest many Americans still see a community value in religion that connects to larger policy debates. He noted how many religious Americans were alarmed when former Texas congressman Beto O’Rourke in October said churches that oppose same-sex marriage should lose their tax-exempt status. That view was rejected by other Democratic candidates, including Sen. Elizabeth Warren (Mass.) and South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg. n

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COVER STORY

Prioritizing integration

SUNDAY, November, 24, 2019

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New York is among the nation’s most segregated school systems, but it has now become a laboratory for experimentation in fixing that.

BY

L AURA M ECKLER in New York

O

photos by Yana Paskova For The Washington Post

Angel Angon Quiroz, 11, looks out a window at Brooklyn’s Math & Science Exploratory School. The district he lives in implemented a diversity plan, affecting his middle school placement.

n the first day of sixth grade, at his new school in a new neighborhood, Angel Angon Quiroz, 11, sat by himself in the corner of the cafeteria, wondering if he had made a mistake.

Students at Angel’s old elementary school overwhelmingly come from poor and Hispanic families. Now, a new integration plan in Brooklyn had placed him at a middle school called the Math & Science Exploratory School. It was popular with affluent families, but would he fit in?

“Everyone else knows each other, but I know none of them,” he said. “We are all puzzles, and I’m the only puzzle who doesn’t fit.”

Sophie Rivas, who comes from one of those affluent white families, badly wanted to attend Math & Science or one of her other top choices. Like Angel, she ranked Math & Science first on her school lottery application, but because Angel’s family is low-income, he had priority. Sophie did not.

Instead, Sophie traveled to Sunset Park, where Angel lives, to a school she had not heard of until she found out she was placed there. She arrived to find she was one of the only non-Hispanic children in her class.

Better days would follow for Sophie and for Angel, too. But on the first day of school, she came home and collapsed in tears. “It was just overwhelming,” she said.

Coast to coast, America’s urban schools remain divided by race, 65 years after the Supreme Court declared segregated schools inherently unequal. Schools in many small towns are now more integrated than in most big cities.

New York City, with more than 1 million students, is far and away the nation’s largest school district — and one of its most segregated. Resistance to integration dates to the 1950s, when mothers in Queens staged an early demonstration against busing.

Now, in fits and starts, the city is becoming a laboratory of experimentation, examining whether it’s possible to tackle the stratification that courses through urban districts.

First, Mayor Bill de Blasio (D) tried — and has so far failed — to overhaul the admissions process for eight elite specialized high schools, which admit few black or Hispanic students. He is now considering a recommendation for a citywide plan to eliminate most gifted and talented programs, which

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Cover Story

attract a disproportionate number of white and Asian students.

In Lower Manhattan, an integration plan for elementary schools is in its second year, and another diversity plan is under discussion for seven elementary schools in Brooklyn. The schools chancellor says tackling segregation is a priority. And on Thursday, the New York City Council approved a measure requiring every school district in New York City to create an integration plan.

“New York City is really at the forefront of the school integration discussion,” said Richard D. Kahlenberg, an expert on integration at the Century Foundation, a think tank that promotes integration. Kahlenberg, who serves on a city panel appointed to look at the issue, said the sheer number of ideas under discussion or in development is encouraging. “That’s unusual in a country where separate but equal is the primary education strategy.”

Now, all eyes are on the middle school plan in Brooklyn and a more modest version that took effect this fall in Manhattan. Success could buoy the chances for other, more ambitious efforts. Failure will surely set them back.

It won’t be easy, chiefly because the status quo has worked for the most affluent, powerful families by giving them considerable control over where their children attend school.

Changing the rules is a fraught and emotional proposition that pits the societal imperative of giving all children access to high-quality schools against parents who are seeking the best education for their own kids.

Under the old system, criteria set by each school played a big role in deciding who went where. Certain middle schools required high test scores and excellent behavior ratings from elementary school, and affluent families gravitated to them. Over time, various schools won reputations for excellence, and with each passing year, their incoming classes grew whiter and wealthier.

Take Math & Science, the school Angel entered this fall. Last year, 33 percent of incoming sixth-graders were English-language learners or came from poor families. It was that high because the school had begun a version of the diversity program two years earlier.

Meanwhile, at Charles O. Dewey Middle School in Sunset Park, where Sophie is en-

rolled, that figure was 95 percent.

Last spring, Angel and Sophie were among about 3,700 fifth-graders who entered the middle school lottery and were affected by the new diversity program in District 15, one of 32 districts in the New York City school system.

Their situations are very different, though.

Both children were allowed to rank their choices for middle school, but Angel’s choices were given more weight as the district worked to balance each of the school’s populations.

Under the new plan, family preference still matters, but 52 percent of sixth-grade seats at each school are reserved for children from poor families or for those learning English, reflecting the demographics of the district as a whole.

The city’s goal is for each school to include 40 percent to 75 percent priority-group students by the program’s fourth year.

Preliminary enrollment data released Thursday showed that eight of the district’s 11 middle schools hit that target this fall. The portion of children from priority groups increased at Math & Science and other schools that have been most popular with affluent families. The portion of priority-group students fell at some other schools, including M.S. 88, which Angel’s sister attends. At Dewey and another Sunset Park middle school, the numbers barely changed.

Backers say the change is an improvement for everyone and note that the plan was developed with extensive community input.

In Park Slope, Liz Phillips, principal of the elementary school P.S. 321, said children used to feel enormous anxiety about where they would be admitted. Some parents, she said, spent every parent-teacher conference lobbying for higher grades in hopes of getting their kids into the most selective middle schools.

Her counterpart at Sunset Park School, principal EuJin Tang, said that under the old system, many of her fifth-graders would not even consider applying to the district’s highestranked schools. Two years ago, Tang said, her school sent 10 students to M.S. 51, which some consider the most elite middle school in the district. This year, she said, 55 were admitted.

“I had families in tears [of joy] when they looked at where their children were going,” she said.

This sort of plan is possible only because a significant number of middle-class and wealthy families live in the area covered by the integration plan, Kahlenberg said. If there are too many poor kids, he said, meaningful integration is not possible. By Kahlenberg’s calculations, integration is possible in nine of the city’s 32 school districts.

Others caution that it won’t work anywhere if affluent parents leave the public schools. When Mike Bloomberg was mayor, he worked to attract and keep these families by giving them considerable control over school placement. If you take that power away, these parents may choose private schools or to move, said Joel Klein, schools chancellor under Bloomberg.

“If you look at many urban school districts, you will find they are overwhelmingly minority

The racial makeup of middle school students in District 15 Sophie Rivas lives in predominantly white Cobble Hill and attends Charles O. Dewey Middle School. Angel lives in majority Hispanic Sunset Park and goes to Math & Science Exploratory School.

Cobble Hill

Students, grades 6 to 8 White Hispanic Black Math & Science Asian Other

Red Hook

B R O O K L Y N Park Slope

Prospect Park

Sunset Park

Charles O. Dewey Green-Wood Cemetery

Borough Park

0.5 miles Source: New York City Department of Education

Sophie Rivas, 11, and her mother, Carolyn Rivas, initially were concerned when they learned where Sophie had been assigned for middle school.

KATE RABINOWITZ/THE WASHINGTON POST

because the middle class has already moved out,” Klein said.

In Brooklyn, many families, affluent and poor, were happy with their placements when they were announced last spring. But 45 children were assigned to Charles O. Dewey, the middle school Sophie is attending, who had not included it anywhere on their ranked list of choices. Enrollment figures indicate most of those students did not show, moving to private or charter schools, or perhaps leaving the district. The percent of kids from priority groups enrolled in Dewey’s sixth grade class went from 95 percent last year to 92 percent this year.

Anita Skop, the district’s superintendent, acknowledged the numbers at Dewey fell well short of the goal, but she said she hopes they will improve. “Do I think it’s all going to happen in one year? No, it’s not,” she said. “That doesn’t mean it’s not working.”

Preliminary enrollment data show the overall racial makeup of District 15’s sixth-grade class this year barely changed, with no sign of heightened white flight from the public system.

White children made up 31 percent of all kids

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Cover Story

last year and this year.

Didier Louvet’s son was assigned to Dewey but opted not to go. He had participated in a French immersion program during elementary school, and the family was devastated he was not placed at the middle school with a French program they were expecting him to attend.

Soon after receiving news of his son’s placement, Louvet, like all other parents whose children had been unexpectedly placed at Dewey, received a call from Dewey’s principal at the time, Eric Sackler. Louvet was not persuaded by the principal’s promise to create a French immersion program at Dewey. Rather, based mostly on test scores, he saw Dewey as an unsuccessful school.

His concerns were not related to race or ethnicity, he said. But he said he wanted his son educated with kids more like him in other ways.

“It’s not a question of just the color of your skin.

Some kids are driven. Some kids are less driven.

Some kids are smart. Some kids are less smart.

Some kids are going to make the effort, and some kids are not going to make the effort,” he said.

Louvet enrolled his son in a private school.

It didn’t take long for Sophie, center, and her friend Anna Leale, 10, to her right, to settle into their new school, Charles O. Dewey Middle. Sophie had not heard of Dewey until she found out she was placed there.

Tears and then a decision When she was in fifth grade, Sophie Rivas and her parents debated which of the most popular middle schools to rank first on her application that would be used in the lottery.

They considered which schools would best nurture her love of reading and writing, what sports were offered, whether uniforms were required. Sophie visited seven or eight schools before ranking Math & Science as her top choice.

On April 15, Sophie’s friends were excitedly texting about where they had matched. Sophie began frantically calling and texting her mom to find out her result. Carolyn Rivas, Sophie’s mother, had logged into the system from work and saw her daughter was placed at Dewey, a school they knew almost nothing about.

Carolyn went home to share the news, and when she walked into their Cobble Hill apartment, Sophie burst into tears.

Carolyn then met her husband, Andrew, at a bar to talk through the situation. She feared his emotions might unsettle Sophie even more.

They wanted to present a unified front and

KLMNO Weekly

decided the message to their daughter would be: “You’re a great kid, you’re a great student and you’re going to be fine.”

Carolyn was also a mess. A first-grade teacher at Sophie’s elementary school, she began calling anybody she could think of to try to get Sophie into a different middle school. She investigated the appeals process. She put Sophie’s name on the waiting list for a charter school. Her husband, Andrew Rivas, grew concerned. “You have to stop emailing people, and you have to stop crying,” he told her.

Then, Carolyn got a call from Sackler, the principal, who addressed some of her preliminary concerns. Sackler also came to their elementary school and met with the parents of kids who had been placed at Dewey. He told them about Dewey’s international travel program and its arts and photography classes. He explained that test scores were low because so many families were juggling complex lives in poverty, often with parents who don’t speak English.

As the meeting concluded, Andrew texted his wife: “Maybe we shouldn’t appeal.” They toured the school and were impressed with the

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Cover Story Angel and his father, Alfonso Angon, arrived in September at Angel’s new school, Math & Science Exploratory. They came with hopes and a question: Would he fit in?

teachers. They still had concerns but decided that unless the city granted their appeal, which seemed unlikely, Sophie was going to Dewey.

She had one friend, Anna Leale, going with her.

“We started to think, ‘Why are we living in New York City?’ ” Carolyn said over the summer. “She has an opportunity to have friends who aren’t from her neighborhood, whose lives are different from hers. I want her to see not everyone in New York City lives the way she lives.”

On the first day of school, Sophie dressed in her black polo with the Charles O. Dewey crest in the corner and a khaki skirt, the required uniform she had dreaded, and waited with Anna for half an hour for the school bus the district had promised. It never came. Anna’s mother, Allison Leale, took the girls to school by subway.

That evening, Sophie was unsettled but didn’t have specific complaints. She was still anxious about a Spanish immersion program her parents chose, in which science would be taught in Spanish some days. Her class appeared to be filled with native Spanish speakers, but she knew no Spanish.

On the third day of school, the bus still had yet to come. (It came on day four.) Waiting in a drizzly rain, Sophie’s stomach was hurting. She didn’t want breakfast; she was confused about which bathrooms were open when, and she feared not having one available when needed.

Her mom brought her a Tums and an umbrella to the bus stop, and promised to email the guidance counselor to straighten things out.

“Have a good day,” she said. “I love you so much.”

On the subway ride to school that morning, Allison Leale ran into a father from the neighborhood who railed against the diversity program. “How about focusing on making those schools better as opposed to doing a social experiment?” he volunteered.

Like Sophie’s mom, Allison had toured Dewey and had come around. After confirming Sophie was attending Dewey, she gave up a

last-minute seat she had secured for her daughter at a charter school. “Dewey is a superior school,” she said. “I was just blown away by it.”

In math class, Sophie shot her hand into the air with the right answer. In science, she seemed as befuddled as everyone else by the question of whether all of them eat plastic every day. (Answer: Yes, inadvertently.)

By lunch, Sophie was sitting with Anna and a small group of other sixth-grade girls, munching and smiling.

A journey begins When Angel Angon Quiroz was in fifth grade, his father suggested he apply to the same middle school his sister attended, known as M.S. 88.

Last year, 8 in 10 sixth-graders at M.S. 88 came from low-income families or were learning English. His sister also wanted him to go there, “so she can take care of me,” Angel said.

But Angel had been told there were other schools he might like, and he was determined to learn more. Touring them was hard for his father, Alfonso Angon, 39, who works six days a week for a furniture store and speaks limited English. Angel’s mother, who works in food preparation for a restaurant, speaks almost no English. “We don’t use the Internet too much, you know,” his dad said.

He moved to the United States from Mexico around 2002 and met his wife soon after. They decided to stay after two children were born, hoping to give them a better life.

His living quarters grew larger as his family grew. He first lived in one small room, then a larger room. Now, the family rents one half of an apartment in Sunset Park, up a steep staircase. Money is always tight, Angon said. “You need to pay for everything over here.”

As he considered his middle school options, Angel was a little scared to go to M.S. 88, saying his sister’s phone had been stolen in elementa-

ry school and that he feared the culprits were now at her middle school. He also suggested other far less likely scenarios. “What I’m worried about is people are drug addicts and there’s a lot of kidnappers and a lot of kids near schools. I don’t want to get kidnapped.”

Angel decided his first choice was M.S. 447, the Math & Science Exploratory School, the same school Sophie had ranked first. He was admitted.

Over the summer, Angel said he was most excited about students there getting their own lockers and about learning more math.

“Math is a thing that people use throughout their lives,” he said. “When you go to work, everyone will tell you you need to use math to be a cashier, or those tax people who do taxes and all that stuff.”

On the first day of school, Angel woke up at 5 a.m. to shower, comb his hair just right and pack his backpack with binder, notebook, pencil case, two pencils, an eraser and keys to the apartment. He bounded out of his apartment and confidently walked to one subway line and then transferred to another.

But as he waited for the teachers to divide incoming students into classes, he could hear his new classmates chatting and laughing, and he realized he didn’t know anybody. He wondered if he should have chosen M.S. 88.

Another sixth-grader, a white girl, saw Angel by himself and approached. “Hey, how are you doing?” she asked. He shook his hand to indicate he was shaky but also smiled.

In his classroom, there was evidence the diversity plan was working: 14 of the students appeared to be white, and 14 were students of color, mostly Hispanic and Asian. Angel was quick to raise his hand with answers, and within the first hour was chatting happily with the boy seated next to him.

When a teacher asked the class how they can each ensure a positive experience for everyone, Angel had a ready answer.

“If someone’s looking down, I’ll go up to them and I’ll ask them if they need a friend,” he said. “If they say yes, I’ll be that friend.”

Then, it was time for lunch. Angel was sitting with a group of boys when suddenly they rearranged seats in a way that left Angel momentarily at a table by himself. Some of these nearby boys had opinions about the new middle-school assignment plan. They mentioned friends from elementary school who didn’t get into schools they wanted even though they had worked hard and received top grades.

“You can work hard and it doesn’t matter at all,” complained Reed Magliano.

Isaac Lazaroff said one of the smartest kids in his fifth-grade class was assigned to Dewey but decided to go to a Catholic school instead.

“And she worked really hard,” Henry Bardfeld added. “She won the spelling bee in our class.”

Others had joined Angel’s table, but he was mostly quiet, looking out the window. He had not packed a lunch but said he wasn’t hungry.

“Third Avenue is right here,” he said, orienting himself to the building. “I’m trying to figure out where we are.” n

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Opinions

What the White House should do about vaping Scott Gottlieb a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, was the 23rd commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, from May 2017 to April 2019. He consults for and invests in biopharmaceutical companies.

When regulations are contemplated to address an epidemic of teenagers using e-cigarettes, vaping supporters complain loudly. The restrictions will obstruct adult access to these products, they say, foreclosing the opportunity for smokers to use the devices to quit cigarettes. Another complaint: Regulatory action to ban flavored e-cigs, which appeal to children, could end up forcing the shutdown of small vape stores that cater to adults. ¶ The Washington Post reported this past Sunday that the opposition has succeeded in stalling a Trump administration plan to implement a universal ban on flavored e-cigs as a way to stem the youth epidemic. If the concern is the impact on vape stores, as The Post reported, there are ways to address that while still taking tough steps to reduce children’s access to e-cigs and reduce the products’ appeal to them.

As a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine last winter made clear, vaping almost certainly contributes to accelerating declines in smoking rates. E-cigs are not safe, but when used properly they are not nearly as harmful as lighting tobacco on fire and smoking it.

Yet providing adult smokers with a safer alternative to cigarettes cannot come at the expense of addicting a generation of young people to nicotine with these same products. New data from the Food and Drug Administration shows almost a third of teens now vape. And according to a study published in February in the Journal of the American Medical Association, young people who start out using nicotine through e-cigs are more likely to become long-term smokers.

The solution is to get e-cigs out of the hands of kids but preserve the devices’ potential to help adult smokers fully quit cigarettes.

It starts with differentiating between sleek, mass-produced e-cigs that use pre-filled, flavored pods of nicotine, as with Juul’s products, and hardware that requires nicotine to be poured into open tanks.

The open-tank products typically have larger batteries and are sold at higher prices.

Because they produce sizable plumes of hard-to-conceal vapor, they aren’t popular with teenagers. With data now supporting the distinction between young people’s use of cartridge-based and open-tank vapes, the devices can be treated differently under the FDA’s enforcement policy.

The FDA can immediately remove from the marketplace the cartridge-based e-cigs that kids use. Teenagers like the devices’ sleek form but also the big nicotine buzz they offer. It’s not just about the flavors. Even with Juul recently committing to ending sales of its kidfriendly mint flavor, we should expect teenagers to switch to

Tony Dejak/Associated Press

A man uses an e-cigarette in Mayfield Heights, Ohio, last month. A plan to implement a universal ban on flavored e-cigarettes was stalled.

the company’s mild tobacco flavors.

Once the cartridge-based ecigs are swept from the market, under current law, companies that want to relaunch them would need to file FDA applications showing that they provide a net public-health benefit. The review process would allow the agency to impose additional restrictions to prevent their use by young people.

Meanwhile, open-tank vapes (and flavors mixed for individual customers inside vape stores) could continue to be sold in adults-only vape shops that can prove they effectively enforce age restrictions. These products would have until next year’s existing deadline to file applications with the FDA seeking market authorization; they could remain on the market in adults-only shops while the agency conducts its review.

Next, the FDA could make the process for completing and filing those applications more efficient for small and sometimes individually owned vape stores. The big tobacco companies, with their massproduced cartridge products,

have the money and consultants to meet the regulatory requirements. The vape shops may struggle to do the same.

To address that concern, the agency could allow vape stores that follow a common manufacturing process for mixing e-liquids to pool their data and resources to file a shared application for market approval. If the application is approved, the FDA could issue individual approvals to each vape shop.

These steps would need to be backed with tough enforcement of age restrictions. The vape shops want to cast themselves as victims of regulation. But many shirk their duty to keep these products out of the hands of kids. One recent survey found that among young e-cig users, 14.8 percent obtained them from vape shops, and only 8.4 percent from gas stations or convenience stores.

Political considerations may dictate that vape shops be given some accommodation, but there are public-health arguments for targeting the products most widely abused by young people.

If we delay action altogether, we will leave an entire generation of kids mired in a lifetime of nicotine addiction. n

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KLMNO Weekly

Opinions

BY MATT DAVIES FOR NEWSDAY

A return to tradition and bold ideas Rahm Emanuel a Democrat, is a former mayor of Chicago, congressman from Illinois and White House chief of staff.

Credit where credit is due: Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) have done a masterful job baiting the rest of the field into fighting this campaign on their turf. Many voters inevitably presume today that redistribution of wealth is the Democratic Party’s animating creed.

But that’s simply not true to history: Since the New Deal, Democrats have thrived when championing ideas moored in the belief that rights come with responsibilities and that benefits are earned through work. If we fail to return to that agenda ahead of the 2020 election, we risk squandering a rare opportunity.

Amid all the talk about programs designed to redistribute America’s wealth, the phrase most glaringly absent from the 2020 campaign to this point is “inclusive growth.” With former Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick entering the race a few weeks ago and former New York mayor Mike Bloomberg , joining the race this past Thursday, we can begin to have an ideas primary in earnest. We are stronger as a party when we debate substantive proposals for how to expand prosperity and opportunity. But to meet the far

left’s big ideas, traditional liberals need to show up with bold ideas of their own.

Admittedly, I have been critical of those trying to the steer the Democratic Party further to the left. I think Medicare-for-all is a pipe dream, though I support efforts to expand coverage and control costs. And much as I agree that concentrated power is a threat to American prosperity, I believe a universal basic income runs counter to America’s deepseated belief that people should earn their living by working hard and playing by the rules. As power and money have flowed away from the working and middle classes, government has too frequently turned the other cheek.

Traditional liberals need to begin offering their own bold ideas for three principle reasons.

The first and most important centers on history. Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, John F.

BY LUCKOVICH FOR THE ATLANTA JOURNAL-CONSTITUTION

Kennedy’s New Frontier and Bill Clinton’s New Covenant, all appealed to voters by tapping into the nation’s firmly established belief that people should earn their prosperity through hard work. Social Security and Medicare are not handouts; they are financed by what workers pay through a payroll tax. The GI Bill and AmeriCorps both offer tuition assistance in return for national service. The earnedincome tax credit is designed to boost families working their way out of poverty.

By tying benefits to work, the programs that remain the central pillars of the Democratic Party’s legacy stand apart from the agenda the far left has embraced in this campaign. Our most sweeping successes fighting poverty have emerged when we have offered the American people a core bargain: If you work through the course of your life, the government will help you climb into the middle class. When our party has nominated candidates banging the drum for redistribution — such as George McGovern or Walter Mondale — we have lost.

Second, if you want to help America’s middle class (and those trying to enter the middle class), it is much more effective to give breadwinners the tools to succeed

than it is to hand them a bevy of unearned entitlements.

Washington needs to invest in the nation’s education system, infrastructure, and research and development. But those priorities get lost when voters hear our candidates speak almost exclusively about how they intend to hand out additional entitlements no questions asked.

Third, Democrats need to be clear on the politics. President Trump’s reelection hopes hinge on his ability to scare suburban voters, a key constituency within our Metropolitan Majority, into believing they can’t trust Democrats with their hardearned money. Let’s not be politically shortsighted or give Republicans opportunities to frame us as irresponsible tax-andspenders by championing, for example, proposals to give free health care to new undocumented immigrants.

Beyond harnessing Trump’s abysmal approval rating, we can use this moment to establish a governing majority that lasts well past 2020.

With any luck, Bloomberg and Patrick will spur traditional liberals to reanimate the bold Democratic creed centered on work, responsibility, shared prosperity and equal access to opportunity. n

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Opinions

Sarah Reingewirtz/Orange County Register/Associated Press

Nothing will come of the shooting at my school Gina Painter is a teacher at Saugus High School in Santa Clarita, Calif.

Michelle Bosshard and her 9-year-old son Lucas visit a memorial outside Saugus High School in Santa Clarita, Calif., on Monday. A gunman fatally shot two students and injured others on Nov. 14.

We will be yesterday’s news.

Saugus High School in Santa Clarita, Calif., has joined the list of all-too-familiar tragedies — Columbine, Parkland, Sandy Hook. But in a week, the news cycle will have moved on. The interviews will cease. The sound bites will be replaced. We will be yesterday’s news.

Yet for those of us who lived through the horrific day — for the children who lost their friends and the parents who lost their children — the violence on Nov. 14 will linger over our community forever.

We see images of our school in the national news. Backpacks strewn over the campus where children dropped their belongings and ran for safety. A war zone of lunchboxes and music stands where kids were practicing. Notebooks.

Sweatshirts.

We remember barricading the doors and huddling the kids in the corners of our classrooms.

We remember running with kids

to safety and holding them while they cried. We remember dressing wounds and telling 14year-old kids that they would be all right while being so very unsure of our abilities to save them.

For us, this will never be over.

Politicians will speak about Saugus as they have done about the many other school shootings in this country. We will become a sound bite. A stat. Or, maybe they will avoid it entirely.

And nothing will be done.

School shootings have become so commonplace that our nation has started measuring these tragedies against one another. “It could have been worse. It’s not like Saugus is Sandy Hook.”

Someone actually said these words to me. Beyond the obvious lack of empathy, it speaks to how desensitized we, as a nation, have become.

Two children were killed after a gunman, who died the next

day from self-inflicted wounds, shot them at our school. Our pain is no less searing.

We have now moved to a place where partisan politics rule the headlines at the expense of actually effecting change. While the shooting was unfolding — while my fellow faculty members were performing CPR on students who were bleeding from the .45-caliber rounds that were rattled off in our quad — Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-Miss.) took the floor of the Senate to block a common-sense gun reform bill.

“Legislation that would affect the rights of American citizens under the Second Amendment should not be fast-tracked by the Senate,” she said in Washington — at the same time that our children were being escorted out of their classrooms by the SWAT team, single-file, hands in the air, here in Saugus.

And she won. They always do.

The National Rifle Association machine scored a victory at the cost of two more of our children.

What are common-sense gun laws, anyway? The only thing that makes sense is to not allow people access to weapons of war that kill children. The only thing that makes sense is not to sacrifice kids. I wonder if these same advocates who speak so staunchly about their right to own a gun would be willing to sacrifice their own children and grandchildren.

Even today I see insensitive and ill-timed comments about how “it’s not the guns. It’s mental illness.”

It’s the guns.

It’s the guns that are killing our children.

It is a gun that killed two of our students, injured four more and indelibly damaged our community in the span of 16 short seconds.

But we will be yesterday’s news. And nothing will be done. n

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