As governor during the Covid pandemic, Walz kept schools closed and hamstrung youth sports.
As governor during the Covid pandemic, Walz kept schools closed and hamstrung youth sports.
K amala Harris wants you to think that Tim Walz could be your teacher, or your coach. “To those who know him best, Tim is more than a governor,” Harris said at the Philadelphia rally at which she introduced Walz as her running mate. Listing his many roles — a husband to his wife, a dad to his kids, a sergeant major to the soldiers he once served with, a congressman to his former district — Harris emphatically concluded the introduction by saying that “to his former high-school students, he was Mr. Walz. And to his former high-school football players, he was Coach.”
“This guy has dedicated much of his life to helping kids, so you can trust him to help you, and to help the country,” was the intended message. Teachers and coaches are both important roles in American life. But they’re important because of what they can do for students. And the Covid-19 policies Walz implemented as governor were an immense disservice to students in Minnesota.
On school closures, Walz was typical of blue-state governors. Along with virtually all of the rest of the country, Minnesota closed schools in late March 2020. But under Walz, the state made no serious attempt to return to in-person learning the following fall, as many other states did. Not until late in 2020 did Walz outline a plan that would allow a staggered return of students to schools if school districts met certain safety conditions. According to this plan, the first students could begin returning to school on January 18, 2021. “The desire to get those children back in the classroom is so intense,” Walz said at the time. He had an interesting way of showing it: Only by March 2021 did in-person learning return to Minnesota on a large scale.
The prolonged absence from the classroom had its predictable (and predicted) effects on students, in Minnesota as elsewhere. A 2022 survey reported that nearly a third of Minnesota students were facing mental-health struggles, and that suicidal ideation among students had increased by four points. A 2023 assessment found that state test scores in math, reading, and science had declined about ten percentage points since 2019.
Most would not boast of such a record. But Walz is not most. Proud at having prioritized lower Covid transmission (among a Covid-resistant demographic), Walz spun the obstacles his government placed in front of children as a positive for them. “I’m not minimizing standardized testing,” he said. “But as a teacher, these kids learned resilience, these kids learned compassion for one another, these kids learned problem-solving. They had to figure out how to get online and do this.” For his next initiative, will Walz try tying weights to student-athletes?
He would have precedent for hamstringing them. Minnesota, again like most of the rest of the country, ceased youth sports along with school in March 2020. Practices returned in limited, modified fashion by mid summer 2020. Official guidance for them encouraged “coaches, staff and spectators to practice social distancing and to wear a face covering at all times” and recommended that players “wear a face covering when possible.” (It’s not possible.)
At first, only some sports would get fall seasons. Football was excluded. Parents statewide were incensed, particularly as it appeared that collegiate and professional leagues had worked out seasons of their own. Dawn Gillman, mother of two Minnesota high-school-football players (and now a Minnesota state representative), formed Let Them Play MN, a parents-led organization to restore youth sports to normalcy. Minnesota did end up with a modified high-school football season that fall.
But Walz was not done tinkering with youth sports. In late 2020, supposedly in response to a Covid surge, he unilaterally suspended all youth sports activities again, in addition to restricting access to bars, restaurants, and gyms. Subsequent emails Let Them Play MN obtained revealed that a contractor working for the governor’s office hoped to give youth sports a super-spreader taint. Referring to long-term-care (LTC) patients, the contractor said that “we need to more explicitly tie youth sports to LTC. People are going to youth sports, sitting in bleachers, eating popcorn and talking with people around them, cheering, then maybe stopping at a restaurant or bar on the way home, then going to jobs in LTC the following day.” Let Them Play MN sued to stop the pause, but the suspension ended up lasting just a few weeks. (The suit was dismissed months later.) It was a classic Covid-era restriction: pointless and imposed ham-fistedly, with a dollop of ulterior motive.
Kamala Harris will no doubt continue to present Tim Walz as the embodiment of comforting Midwestern paternal authority, emphasizing his former roles as teacher and coach. But when Walz was governor during the Covid-19 pandemic, this onetime teacher kept students out of the classroom for nearly a year; this onetime coach forced youth sports, even his beloved football, through needless bureaucratic obstacles. We’ve seen some of the damage this inflicted on students’ test scores and psyches. Some of it we can’t see but can at least infer: the young people who became chronically absent, who lost regular social outings and athletic motivation, who disappeared into the background social anomie that besets modern life. Someone who not only enabled these outcomes but also continues to defend the actions that facilitated them clearly has lost whatever useful perspective his past as teacher and coach once may have given him.