Parents around the country are freaking out and holding their collective breath as a new school year begins. My kid has been back at in-person school for about a month, and we’ve been averaging about two robocalls a week about new cases of Covid at school. What’s worse, the school district’s Covid plans, 20 months into the pandemic, seem to be another fly-by-the-seat-of-the-pants affair.

Our school didn’t post its Covid protocols on its website until three weeks after classes started. Quarantine criteria are opaque, and what you do catch in tidbits from other parents doesn’t exactly fill you with confidence. Parents are pulling together ad hoc efforts on Facebook to crowdfund air purifiers for individual classrooms.

We don’t know what percentage of the school staff are vaccinated. There’s no regular Covid testing of staff or students, and the school board and district administrators seem to be just now starting to really explore that topic. Parents are in the dark on so many fronts, lacking information to even be able to assess whether things are slogging along O.K. or if all Covid hell is breaking loose and we just don’t know it.

If you pay any attention to the state of the journalism industry and the journalism industry’s bemoaning of its state, then you probably have seen some version of the “without journalists, who will cover your school board meetings??” line. Covering school board meetings (and by extension, the schools), the argument goes, is one of those crucial journalistic functions that serves the community.

Reading my local newspaper’s school coverage for the past 20 months, however, has shown me that covering school board meetings doesn’t serve the community if you are not actually covering the things that the community wants and needs to know about its schools.

Read the full article about the state of reporting about COVID-19 in schools by John Zhu at Nieman Lab.