Thank You for Your Comment

The man called me a Nazi. I stared at his spitting lips, pale white skin, and black hair, sitting in his bland home office framed in the small Zoom box in the upper right corner of my computer screen. I tried to keep my face passive, but I blinked and knew my eyes widened. I’d been called a lot of things during my time on the school board: stone-cold, vindictive, inhuman, insensitive, self-promoting, self-serving, and elitist, but Nazi was a new one. It was a slap in the face, both scary in its delivery and ramifications, yet funny in its absurdity. Did he even know what a Nazi was? Or was he parroting the right-wing media pundits–going for vitriol and shock value, the stuff of TV ratings?

I slowly exhaled through my nostrils and forced my face to return to immobility, to take the abuse like a seawall takes a crashing wave. A quote from Newsmax or OAN about COVID being a lie spewed from his mouth, followed by a contorted argument about facemasks being the first step in the leftist takeover of our country, a symbol of submission and control, he was not a slave, goddamn it, this was a violation of his human rights, his American rights, his freedom. As a parent, he gets to choose what his kids do! And, by god, they will not wear masks! By the time he finished, he was screaming from his suburban white-collar home.

“Thank you for your comment,” I said into my cold, darkening bedroom, fulfilling my duty as School Board President with the only legally recommended response I could give. It was getting late. The sun had set, and I didn’t want to leave my computer to turn on the room’s overhead lighting while I ran the meeting. The light would have been too bright in the background of my Zoom view box anyway, blinding my audience. I reached over the card table wedged into the corner of my bedroom, which created my makeshift office, and pulled the chain to turn on the wall sconce.

The gift of Zoom is that this man’s anger was miles away from me.

I spent four years as School Board President, ascending to the unwanted position in September 2019 after the person planning to take over decided not to renew his term. I was the only one in a position to take up the post. With six years under my belt on the charter school’s Board of Trustees, five of which I served as Secretary, I had been looking for a means of descending, not ascending, to service. Fate and an intense feeling of obligation to the school had other plans. I was knowledgeable and had devoted myself to this cause; I wasn’t going to leave board service in a time of need.

I fell squarely into what Orrin Woodward would call a reluctant leader, forced to plod into the murk because no one else was willing or able to. I wasn’t on the board for power, glory, or control. I didn’t have an agenda. I’d joined the school board even before my kids were old enough to enroll in kindergarten because Allentown was my community, and helping advance good causes via public service was part of putting down roots. It embodied the American dream I had longed for graduate school: a house with a white picket fence. By engaging with my community, I allow myself to connect with the place and accept that this might be home. I also believed in the power of transformative education and wanted to do my part to ensure that all of the schools’ kids, including eventually my own, received it. Standing fully behind the school’s mission, I was willing to be its oversight. I squared my shoulders to the enormous task of leadership before me, and I rolled up my sleeves.

Six months after I was elected to lead, the world screeched to a halt as a deadly respiratory virus forced us all to hunker inside our protective walls, eye our neighbors as contaminated, point fingers at distant lands, and, in our more frenzied hysteria, theorize about biological warfare.

SARS-CoV-2, the scientific name for the virus that causes COVID-19, is a little ball of proteins encasing a single strand of genetic material. It forces its way into our body’s cells, hijacking the cell’s molecular machinery and causing the infected cell to build viral parts instead of performing its normal functions required to stay alive. Like a parasite, an abusive partner, or the right-wing media with its incessant lies being inhaled by a large portion of society and spewed back at public servants during a school board meeting, the virus is in control, bending the cell’s function to its design. Ultimately, the newly replicated viral offspring burst through their co-opted cell’s membrane and infect new targets.

I longed for the days of board service before the pandemic, when we would hold our monthly meetings in the school’s multipurpose room, a lavender-colored former cafeteria transformed into the only flexible space in the building. Three white folding tables would be set up in a U, lined with chairs for the board, our financial manager, and the CEO/Principal. Across from our U, twenty chairs were set up in neat rows, with a stack of printed agendas on a table by the door. At most, one to three people would show up, usually moms. They sat quietly as we worked through the agenda, then spoke during public comment, asking why spring break wasn’t in the middle of the semester but late in April, whether we would consider adding a fine arts program, or once, if we could address the tick problem because her son was bitten by three ticks last week. They were refreshingly reasonable comments that showed interest, comments we passed on to the school administration and addressed at the next board meeting. During those mundane days of board service, our meeting lasted ninety minutes.

Only frighteningly big topics like a pandemic requiring school closures, social distancing, and mask mandates were enough to stir community interest and turn the ho-hum of the board’s workings into conspiracies and devilish schemes. With a single agenda item, I went from a servant leader to an evil Bond villain in the eyes of some members of our community. Public comment alone could stretch on for hours.

In many ways, I was the right leader at the right time. How many school boards in Spring 2020 were led by people with advanced degrees in biology? I might not be a medical doctor or a virologist, but I knew how to research and evaluate data. I had enough knowledge of molecular biology and diseases to read and comprehend COVID-19-related scientific publications. I also understood the scientific process unfolding in real-time before the
public. The shifting health guidelines based on emerging “best available data” led to discomfort and eventual hostility in a significant portion of the American population, many of whom were influenced by Fox News and the president, or just plain pandemic fatigue.

For so many people, science is “facts,” but this is a fundamental misunderstanding of the field. Science has few “facts.” Rather, science, especially biology, is composed of patterns currently supported by observational and experimental data. As more observations are made and more data collected, the patterns of our understanding may shift, and consequently, the “facts” will also shift.

Leaning into my scientific training, I combed through the CDC guidelines, downloading scientific publications on transmission rates, mask effectiveness, social distancing, ventilation parameters, growing mental health issues, as well as math and reading skill attrition. I analyzed p-values and scoffed at small sample sizes, was glued to every word Dr. Fauci said, read between the lines of his careful and exasperated responses, and tried, really tried, to understand the bumbled messaging of public health guidelines, made so much more bumbling by the executive branch of the US government and conservative media. Our country had several opportunities to respond to the pandemic more effectively, and under a different administration, we might have. Instead, hospitals were overflowing, nursing homes were death traps, and people were hoarding toilet paper and uselessly wiping down their groceries with bootlegged 90% alcohol sanitizer churned out of distilleries trying to help the cause. By May 2022, the death toll from COVID-19 in the USA alone was a million people.

There were weeks I spent more time drenched in my Board President responsibilities than in my paid job as a professor, and I was trying to figure out how to educate college students in lab biology without a lab or a classroom. There were no good answers, but in the eyes of some parents, many children, some teachers, and our extended school community, the precautionary measures the board enacted were terrible and designed with hurtful intent. When did following the scientific guidelines make me an enemy of the school, the state, and freedom? Never mind that their asthmatic grandmother hadn’t contracted COVID-19 from their school kids and died. No one marks the death that did not happen.

We were either too cautious or not cautious enough, depending on who you asked. Nothing could ever be perfect in such a divided country, with such personal health and family concerns as the education of children. We did occasionally hear a thank you for the policies we implemented during public comment, to which my “Thank you for your comment” response was more than just a legally recommended reply; it was the heartfelt gratitude to those who understood the challenging tight-rope line we walked and were willing to support our pacing.

I was pulled into executive sessions with our lawyer and had endless brainstorming meetings with school leadership. I moderated special board meetings and emergency board meetings during which I was often told I was a heartless, cold bitch who didn’t care about the kids or teachers, that I’d drunk the leftist Kool-Aid and was destroying everyone’s children. The vitriol and hate that coursed under the skin of our country had surfaced with the infection, making some people feverish with a need to blame someone for the situation. We were not a united set of States working to solve the pandemic, but a fragmenting society breaking into factions and fighting one another. I lost count of how many times I said, “Thank you for your comment.” My hair grayed, and it wasn’t only because I couldn’t find an open salon to dye it.

I conducted most board meetings during the pandemic from the confines of my bedroom, the most vulnerable and private location within my house, because I had nowhere else I could do my job without interference. My bedroom’s walls and paintings were broadcast across the region as I spoke into my computer’s microphone. Looking closely, you could see my grandmother’s quilt covering my bed behind my right shoulder. I took the punches and shattered compliments of a disgruntled and fractured community, feet from where I would try and fail to sleep at night. My mind ceaselessly replayed the meeting. Falsehoods lobbed my way like grenades, trying to take out an enemy in a bunker. It was always the most hateful comments that I festered over, not the reasonable ones. I couldn’t even close the bunker door and hide. Public comment, as long as it followed our public comment policy, was allowed to happen, and in our free-speech-obsessed country, that meant I could be called a Nazi.

The threat came as a TikTok video. A parent, angry at the school and emboldened by the political landscape, sat in front of a monochrome tan wall, jerking his fingers like he was shooting a gun to the lyrics of the final stanzas of Boney M’s Rasputin. Names scrolled along the bottom of the screen in time with his gun finger’s recoil as if he were delivering a death blow to each named person he perceived as interfering with his children’s education. We were the reason his daughter would have to repeat kindergarten, not a global pandemic.

“The Board” was among those names scrolling across the video.

His finger jerked.

The principal reported the incident to the police. The school’s parent-run Facebook page erupted with infighting. Thankfully, many of the comments were in support of masking and against the threat. Our community, a reflection of the country, exploded to the song lyrics of Boney M: Ra-ra-Rasputin / Lover of the Russian queen / They didn’t quit, they wanted his head / Ra-ra-Rasputin / Russia’s greatest love machine / And so they shot him ’til he was dead.

The afternoon of the video’s release, I sat in the parent pickup line, slithering through the school’s parking lot, an SUV in front of my Prius and a truck behind. I glanced at the vehicles edging forward and wondered if TikTok Man would climb out of some nearby car, gun clutched in a white-knuckled hand as he stalked the trapped vehicles, looking for his targets. He knew what I looked like, had seen my face at numerous Zoomed board meetings, and had shouted his anger at me during public comment. I wondered if I would see him through my window, raising his gun before he shot me dead. Even the police car monitoring the parking lot didn’t comfort my twisting guts. I could die in my car, my kids watching from the field, the blast spraying safety glass over my bloody corpse.

I didn’t die that day. TikTok Man’s threat was deemed “unsubstantiated” after a police investigation. It was a legal term for not finding intent to do more than speak with vitriol and hate, something deeply embedded in this country’s nature and rising to the surface as some people cued off our Commander-in-Chief. TikTok Man eventually withdrew his kids from the school and sent them to be educated somewhere with laxer public health policies. In his wake, he left the unsettling knowledge that we were not safe in our community. The ripples of hearsay, the political toxicity of America, and the hemorrhaging societal divide had infected our school.

I’m not sure what was more destructive in late 2020/early 2021: the SARS-CoV-2 virus or the permission to torment others bestowed by the federal government. The othering so ingrained in our country’s foundation as racism and sexism had extended into politicized public health issues: maskers and unmaskers, vaccine-supporters and anti-vaxxers. Maybe it was good that I was looking over my shoulder in fear. The moment gave me a tiny hint at what so many in our country do every day because they do not share a privileged religion, skin color, or sexual orientation.

In August 2020, we held an emergency board meeting. Only one item was on the agenda: “Consideration of administration’s recommendation that all students start the 2020/2021 school year fully remote.” I led the Zoom meeting that summer evening from the picnic table on my back deck, needing to feel the warm breeze on my skin as I shivered at the reality before me. Although we technically had to vote, there wasn’t a choice. The teachers were unvaccinated and scared. Many said they would resign if we asked them to teach in person— they had a sick wife, a parent they were caring for, they had asthma, they loved their students, but not enough to die for them. You don’t have a school without teachers.

With no vaccine, hospitals overflowing, pictures of fatigued doctors with N95 masks rubbing their nose skin raw, and the death count in New York City astronomically high, I couldn’t in good conscience send my kid, any kids, into our poorly ventilated school building to learn. The science hadn’t had enough time to produce the answers we needed to create safety. Public comments lasted two hours and started angry and accusatory, but bled into something akin to communal mourning. We were holding a vigil for the dream that the pandemic might be over and that “normal schooling” could commence again. A community linked through a Wi-Fi connection, hunkered in their own spaces but adhered together by grief. So much of 2020 forced us apart. So much of 2021 would continue to do the same. But as I sat shrouded in the thick summer humidity, daylight seeping from the sky, and the weight of our non-choice laid bare to the community, we connected. Zoom provided us the gateway, but our honesty and willingness to listen, hard-earned and only manifesting after an hour of angry rants both for and against remote learning, was our link.

I thanked everyone for their comments that night. When the meeting was over, I sat at my picnic table, my thighs sticking to the wooden bench, the night hugging me, a streetlight glowing in the distance. I watched the Zoom boxes dwindle as the public logged off, going from nearly two hundred rectangles to only a handful, then to none. I closed my laptop and inhaled the night air. A few stars shone through the halo of urban light pollution, and they twinkled.

 

Kimberly W. Heiman is a Senior Lecturer of Biology at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pennsylvania. Her pandemic response coping strategy was to take up writing. She is enrolled in the Wilkes University Maslow Family Graduate Program in Creative Writing and is querying her first non-fiction book. Her work has been published in Flash Fiction Magazine and the International Human Rights Arts Movement Literary Magazine, CrayfishMag, and nominated for the Best American Short Stories Anthology.