“Our children are sad, confused and isolated,” they wrote, as though describing the charges of a Victorian orphanage. Shortly after the physicians weighed in, more than 70 parents with children at the lower school signed a petition asking for the school to open. And they dropped heavy artillery: “From our understanding, several of our peer schools are not just surviving but thriving.” “Please tell us what are the criteria for re-opening fully in person,” they wrote. A group of 20 physicians with children at the school wrote that they were “frustrated and confused and better hope to understand the school’s thought processes behind the virtual model it has adopted.” This was not a group with a high tolerance for frustration.
In early October, stern emails began arriving in Best’s inbox. But she isn’t supposed to fall victim to one. She is supposed to care about savage inequalities she is supposed to murmur sympathetically about savage inequalities while scanning the news, her gentle concern muffled by the jet-engine roar of her morning blowout. The Dalton parent is not supposed to be on the wrong side of a savage inequality. How long could the Dalton parent-the $54,000-a-kid Dalton parent-watch her children slip behind their co-equals? More to the point, how long could she be expected to open The New York Times and see articles about one of the coronavirus pandemic’s most savage inequalities: that private schools were allowed to open when so many public schools were closed, their students withering in front of computer screens and suffering all manner of neglect? Ditto the fearsome girls’ schools: Brearley, Nightingale-Bamford, Chapin, Spence.
This might have gone over better if the other elite Manhattan schools were doing the same. The school would not hold in-person classes in the fall. So it was a misstep when Jim Best, the head of school-relatively new, and with a salary of $700,000-said that Dalton parents couldn’t have something they wanted. “Next it’ll be a heliport,” said a member of the local land-use committee after the school’s most recent remodel, which added two floors-and 12,000 square feet-to one of its four buildings, in order to better prepare students “for the exciting world they will inherit.” Today Dalton tomorrow the world itself.
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