Recent Missouri editorials

The Kansas City, May 21

In roughly 90 days, nearly 20 million students will begin classes on college campuses across the nation, including dozens of schools in Kansas and Missouri.

Will it be safe? That isn’t clear.

Will coronavirus tests be given? How often? Can students be quarantined? Can professors and staff, along with their families, be protected? Will masks be offered, required or used?

Will lecture classes be held? Will schools open dormitories, or regulate larger groups living in fraternity and sorority houses? Can off-campus social activities be curtailed?

What about sports - for participants and spectators? How will lab classes be conducted? Can classes be small enough to accommodate social distancing? Will tuition be lowered for online courses?

College officials, regents and curators don’t really know. “We’ll figure it out over the course of the summer,” University of Kansas Chancellor Douglas Girod told the Kansas Board of Regents on Wednesday during a remote meeting.

He doesn’t have long. School officials should be able to answer these questions by the end of June at the latest. That’s six weeks away.

Girod said Kansas institutions are talking about these issues; those talks must accelerate.

Students and parents can’t make critical decisions unless the schools are fully transparent about their plans in the changed COVID-19 environment.

Health and safety should be the top priorities. Shockingly, the president of the University of Notre Dame recently said some students are bound to get sick, and … so what?

“Some students may get COVID. That may happen,” said Fr. John Jenkins. “But we have the facilities to treat them … for young people, this is not a highly dangerous disease.”

That’s wrong on the science, and potentially terrifying for parents and students alike. Colleges and universities can’t expect students to pay tens of thousands of dollars for the privilege of risking an asymptomatic, potentially fatal illness - or potentially infecting family members during weekends or breaks.

Almost all of the major colleges and universities in our region have generally pledged to reopen in August with at least some in-person learning. “We expect to return to in-person operations and classes this fall,” Mun Choi, who is serving as University of Missouri chancellor and UM System president, said last month.

“We are #RooReady for fall semester classes,” says the University of Missouri-Kansas City, although offering only online courses remains a possibility.

In Kansas, “all of our institutions anticipate face-to-face classes in the fall in some form,” Girod said.

Johnson County Community College released an updated reopening plan Wednesday; it calls for some students to begin returning to campus, with restrictions, June 22.

“The majority of classes for fall currently are planned to be online, online hybrid or hybrid,” spokesman Chris Gray said in an email. “This step will start to allow us to provide some face-to-face instruction for those requiring it.”

College campuses are not like barber shops or restaurants. Thousands of people are crammed together in classrooms, dorms and cafeterias for hours at a time. The chance of explosive growth of the coronavirus — particularly in cooler fall temperatures — remains high. Administrators must keep this in mind.

The financial pressure for schools to fully reopen will be intense. Despite some federal funding in the coronavirus relief measures, four-year universities face the possibility of lower enrollment and less tuition revenue if they fully return to in-person teaching. Support from taxpayers in Kansas and Missouri is likely to drop dramatically at the same time.

Liability is also a concern. If schools open without firm disease protocols, the chance of sickness - and litigation - will be high.

Schools will want to maintain tuition levels if they return to online courses. This is problematic. In-person learning and social opportunities are a key component of the college experience, promoted by the schools themselves. Closing campuses to protect health is imminently reasonable; charging full tuition for online classes is not.

The Kansas Board of Regents will discuss tuition in June.

The coronavirus has changed much of America, but few institutions face as many challenges as colleges and universities. Time is not on their side. They must release coronavirus guidelines as quickly as possible.

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The Jefferson City News-Tribune, May 21

The abbreviated 2020 legislative session had its share of hits and misses. But unfortunately, one practice continued unabated: piling smaller bills onto each other to create mega-bills.

They’re called “omnibus” bills, and they’re often not good for the democratic process.

When a bill makes progress toward passage, lawmakers seek to tack their stalled bills onto the one that’s moving forward to give their bills a better chance of passage. While the bill that’s making progress is being debated, lawmakers add their entire bills as amendments. Soon, the bill snowballs into a mega-bill.

One problem is that the process can be a way to successfully add bad legislation - or controversial bills, at least - to good bills. Controversial bills are often added to bigger bills without the scrutiny they normally would receive.

Rep. Travis Fitzwater, R-Holts Summit, succeeded in getting his House Bill 163 passed. It started as a three-page bill essentially adding “tube transport systems” (Missouri’s Hyperloop project) to the list of projects that could be financed through public-private partnerships.

When it had finally passed, it was a sweeping 13-page bill that also partially repeals the state’s motorcycle helmet law. Motorcycle drivers 26 years and older could go without a helmet if they have their own health insurance.

We support the further studying of a possible hyperloop, but we have opposed repeal of the helmet law.

Governors deciding whether to sign or veto bills often face dilemmas when bills contain legislation that they support and oppose. In Missouri, governors can only line-item veto budget bills.

Fitzwater’s bill is a small bill compared to many others.

Sen. Mike Bernskoetter’s Senate Bill 662 started as a way to make it easier for venison jerky to be donated through the Share the Harvest program. The two-page bill ended with 182 pages. Among other things, it protects insurance companies and nursing homes from legal liability.

Fortunately, the 1994 “Hammerschmidt” Missouri Supreme Court ruling requires bills be limited to a single subject, but that doesn’t stop lawmakers from pushing the limits on that too.

Combining sometimes dozens of smaller bills into one omnibus bill is nothing new. Congress has done it since most of our country’s existence. An early omnibus bill was the “Compromise of 1850,” a package of five bills passed by Congress to defuse a political confrontation between slave and free states on the status of territories acquired in the MexicanAmerican War.

In the future, we urge lawmakers to use restraint when combining legislation and to allow thorough debate of each measure on its own merits.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, May 24

For all the rhetoric praising front-line medical and support staff in the pandemic, St. Louis-area nursing homes are committing an appalling injustice against them: sending them home when their risky jobs expose them to the coronavirus but refusing to offer paid leave. This puts those workers in an impossible situation.

This is the same nursing-home industry that’s asking Missouri for liability protection as it navigates the pandemic. As we’ve said editorially, such protection is a reasonable ask under these circumstances, provided there are some stringent conditions. Paid sick leave for infected workers should absolutely be among those conditions.

Nursing homes are on the front lines of the pandemic, with the effects of the coronavirus hitting especially hard among the elderly. Outbreaks in facilities are a constant danger. Nursing home workers - already notoriously underpaid - put themselves at risk every time they go to work.

As the Post-Dispatch’s Nassim Benchaabane reported recently, workers at some facilities, upon testing positive for the coronavirus, are being ordered to go home and self-quarantine for 14 days. So far, so good.

But those workers are also being told that, while they’re not working, they must use their own accumulated vacation/sick days. If they don’t have that time coming, they don’t get paid. And since they haven’t been laid off, it’s unlikely they could qualify for either standard unemployment or the $600 federal coronavirus unemployment supplement.

Think about the position these workers are in: Their jobs require them to wade into a known coronavirus hot spot every day. If they catch the virus - even if they’re asymptomatic and don’t get sick - they’re forced out of work for two weeks with no pay. To avoid that scenario, they would have to quit, jumping into a job market that’s experiencing double-digit unemployment while making them ineligible for unemployment benefits.

The Service Employees International Union, which represents those workers, is pushing for at least 15 days of paid sick leave for them. They include Corey Holloway, 28, an area nursing home floor tech who tested positive May 1 and was told to quarantine and use his paid time off. He’d been making $10.50 an hour and had worked two years, which yielded only enough paid leave to cover a few days. “I didn’t argue, because I still need to get paid,” he said.

And there’s Antonio Williams, a nursing home hall monitor who, similarly, didn’t have enough accrued time to cover his mandatory 14-day quarantine - so was contemplating borrowing money from his parents. “I think we’re getting underpaid and underappreciated for the work that we do,” he said. “Being in the nursing homes, we’re putting our lives on the line.”

They are. And if their employers want state help with liability protection, they should start recognizing that sacrifice and extend sick-leave coverage for quarantines.