How the Seattle Times' COVID coverage missed the mark

A parent’s account of how the relatively well-staffed education team at the Seattle Times failed to hold the school district accountable.

By Alexandra Olins

On March 11, 2020, a few months after the COVID-19 pandemic arrived in the United States, Seattle Public Schools (SPS) was the first large school district in the country to close. First, we were told there would be no school during the closure because the district couldn’t distribute laptops to everyone — despite being in the tech capital of the country. Next, we heard there would be online class meetings but zero instruction.

For the rest of the school year, my 11-year-old son had four one-hour Zoom check-ins a week. That is all. Like many parents, we wrote off the year and hoped like hell that fall would be better.

Over the summer, SPS asked families to choose between hybrid and remote options for fall. For those ready to send their children back in-person, it felt hopeful. But when former President Donald Trump weighed in to say kids should be 100% in person in fall, SPS — along with hundreds of other districts — reversed course. Despite Seattle having a relatively low number of COVID cases, the district announced plans for 100% remote learning for fall. The hybrid option was off the table.

As fall 2020 wore on, my normally gregarious son became increasingly silent, sedentary, and disengaged during remote school, watching Fortnite on YouTube during “school,” despite my best efforts to stop it (while trying to keep my own job), creating a nasty parent/child dynamic. It soon became clear that SPS had no plan for how — or when — to transition back to in-person school.

Some parents, growing weary of seeing their kids stare into a screen for hours on end, began to ask questions of SPS and the SPS board. We got no answers. And we began to wonder, where was our local paper, the Seattle Times, when it came to covering the impact of prolonged school closures on kids and parents?

As the following months would reveal, the Seattle Times could not — or would not — cover the situation by asking the hard questions about why Seattle started the reopening conversation later than other districts and took so long to reopen. A lifelong Democrat, former teacher, and union member, I became increasingly enraged at both the failure of the school system and the inadequacies of the education team to cover what was happening with the hard questions and critical analysis that the situation demanded.

To get daily education headlines and education news events, follow @thegrade_.

As the following months would reveal, the Seattle Times could not — or would not — cover the situation by asking the hard questions about why Seattle started the reopening conversation later than other districts and took so long to reopen.

In early December, I emailed the Seattle Times’ education editor, Katherine Long, to ask if they could provide more coverage of the reopening debate in SPS. By then, schools in Europe and red states had been open for months, and the data indicated that schools were not associated with an increased transmission of COVID.

To her credit, she responded. We went back and forth via email, with Long concluding there “were no easy answers.”

That struck me as strange, given that other districts were finding ways to serve especially vulnerable kids or even to open for anyone who wanted to attend. Seattle was the among the last districts in the nation to release a reopening road map.

Wasn’t that a story?

Around the same time, another parent and I started a Facebook group for parents and teachers supporting a safe, science-based option for in person school. Membership quickly swelled to 1,100. Despite our numbers, parents had no voice in the discussion over reopening because decision-making authority lay solely with SPS and its board. I marveled over how mayors like Lori Lightfoot in Chicago and London Breed in San Francisco fought to get their school systems to open, while in Seattle, the Mayor and city council had zero influence.

I suggested the Times cover how local control left families out of the discussion. In our emails, Long acknowledged the importance of this issue and said she wanted to cover it, but the Times never did.

Also in early December, Superintendent Denise Juneau announced her resignation after just two and a half years on the job. Families with concerns about the harms of remote school were caught in a perfect storm of local control and a lame-duck superintendent who had no incentive to fight for schools to reopen.

Again, the situation seemed like a big story, but the Times was silent.

Editor’s note: Reached for a response, The Seattle Times declined to respond until the column was available to review.

Seattle was the among the last districts in the nation to release a reopening road map. Wasn’t that a story?

Over time, my frustrations with the Times’ coverage would only grow. On December 20, the Times ran an Op-Ed by the president of Seattle Education Association (SEA), the local teachers union, making the case that it was too dangerous to reopen schools and that emergency funds were better invested in making improvements to online school.

I submitted a response, arguing that remote school could not be improved, but it wasn’t published. The Times gave a platform to the well-funded teachers union and to a student urging greater input from students, but not to parents in favor of reopening.

Meanwhile, those of us who wanted the option for our kids to return to in-person school — including families of color — were being vilified in SPS social media groups. We were concerned about obesity, screen time addiction, mental health, and our kids losing any interest in learning. But we were accused of wanting to kill teachers, or of being extremists with ties to the Koch brothers.

When we asked the Times to dig into data on big increases in failing grades in SPS, we were ignored. The Times did not ask the hard questions. For example, why was SPS among the last districts in the country to offer in-person school despite having the lowest COVID deaths of any major city in the US? Why did SPS lag behind other cities like Boston, Chicago, and Baltimore, which also have strong teachers unions and old buildings?

The Times’ February article, As other school districts open, Seattle remains split on returning to classrooms, illustrates the superficial analysis that I and others in favor of the option to return to in-person school found so frustrating from the Times. In the article, the story notes that SPS was 200^th in the state in early February in terms of weekly averages for students being taught in person, which is a shocking number. It also notes that “Seattle started the reopening conversation later than other districts” and that Superintendent Juneau was hoping to avoid having to close again after reopening.

I was flabbergasted that the article wouldn’t note that the reopening then closing again issue was surely a concern for other districts, but they managed to figure it out. But this story failed to ask why Seattle was so late to plan for reopening. It — and subsequent coverage from the Times — failed to delve into the news that 37% of SEA members believed a return to in-person schooling should not have happened last spring, regardless of teacher vaccination status. And it highlighted racial disparities reflected in surveys about a return to in-person school, reporting but not addressing the reality that 38% of parents of color, and 33% of parents of black male students were in favor of returning to in-person school. It seemed like the Times was so eager to emphasize the racial disparities in preferences that they opted to ignore the fact that one-third of parents of black males wanted them to return to in-person school.

As the parent of a Black son, who was not learning after months of remote school, I felt caught in the vortex of local control. I, and many other parents in favor of the option for a return to in-person school, believed the Seattle Times could have had a significant impact on the reopening debate, yet its coverage was timid and primarily toed the party line that reopening was too risky, without acknowledging the real harms. We saw that our kids were suffering; we saw that other districts were reopening; we had no voice.

The Times could have given us a voice, but the education team did not.

We saw that our kids were suffering; we saw that other districts were reopening; we had no voice. The Times could have given us a voice, but the education team did not.

Along the way, there were some glimmers of hope. The paper did good early reporting on the fact that Washington state’s return to school guidelines were more cautions that other states and on SPS’ dismal failure to provide in-person services to special education students during the pandemic. It also covered SPS’ important early efforts to distribute meals to kids and to provide childcare in some of the city’s schools.

And over time, the paper’s editorial board became more critical of the prolonged failure to reopen. But its editorials concluded by urging parents to email the school board and the district — a strategy that many of us had tried and found ineffective. And the news coverage remained a source of deep frustration.

On March 12, 2021, a year after he declared the emergency that closed our schools, Gov. Jay Inslee issued an emergency proclamation that all kids had to have the option of in-person school by mid-April. It required districts to offer a minimum of 10 hours of in person instruction, on average, each week for the remainder of the school year. Yet again, the district dragged its feet and shortchanged kids, and the Times failed to cover the story.

Looking back, there were so many stories that the Times failed to cover adequately – many of which were being addressed in other news outlets in other parts of the country: Why it was safe for childcare providers to work but not teachers, or how prolonged school closures led to suicidal ideation in many teens, or how local control of the school system meant that parents had no voice, and, in the absence of a strong superintendent, how SEA controlled the terms of reopening. There was no reporting on the disparate impact of school closures on low-income families, families of color, dropout rates and missing students, and working women.

By comparison, The San Francisco Chronicle’s Jill Tucker asked hard questions when San Francisco was stuck in the same debate. She – working pretty much alone on the education beat – named names and held people accountable. She gave voice to the families that believed that kids need in-person school.

The Times did not hold SPS accountable. It is time for the Times to hold itself accountable.

Related from The Grade:

How the Seattle Times education team covered the COVID-19 crisis

How the SF Chronicle’s Jill Tucker tackles the uncertainty & fear surrounding the reopening debate

The case for the Ed Lab model

Reporters share advice on how to get out of the remote learning rut

The promise and peril of “solutions” journalism

The case for more aggressive national education reporting

Progress — and challenges — at the Washington Post