Fort Worth parent sending kids out of Texas amid COVID surge to ‘give them better odds’
After Jason and Meaghan Helms dropped their daughter off for her first day of school Monday, they had a PTA meeting, greeted new parents in the district, and then went home, laid on the floor and cried.
The tears were not because their 6-year-old daughter had her first day of first grade. Instead, the breakdown came from weeks of uncertainty and fear over how to keep their children safe as COVID-19 rises once again across the country.
At the end of the tears came the decision that now seems inevitable — Meaghan Helms will take their two daughters and leave Fort Worth, and Texas, entirely. Jason Helms will stay in Fort Worth to continue in-person teaching at Texas Christian University. The family will split up so the 6-year-old can attend school in North Carolina, where Meaghan Helms’ parents live, without the looming fear that their 3-year-old will get sick and not have access to an ICU bed.
The Helms’ youngest daughter, Harper, was born in 2017 and diagnosed with a serious heart condition. For Harper, a simple cold can — and has — led to a trip to the emergency room.
Jason Helms’ daughters’ health has always been his priority. In 2020, he requested to work from home because of his daughter’s heart condition, and his tweet about TCU’s denial of his request went viral. His anxiety ebbed slightly as a vaccine for children seemed imminent, but over the past month, he watched with growing concern as ICU beds dwindled and COVID-19 cases rose in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.
“What if she gets a cold and that happens?” Helms said. “That’s how we are looking at things. Things are scary and sad. Things are dire.”
On Thursday, the DFW Hospital Council announced that there were no available pediatric ICU beds in North Texas. COVID-19 cases and an outbreak of respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV, leave hospitals packed with patients. The number of beds has fluctuated slightly over the past few days, but the bottom line remains the same — there is no guarantee a child will be hospitalized in DFW if they need to be.
Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins drove the point home in a news conference Friday morning.
”That means if your child’s in a car wreck, if your child has a congenital heart defect or something and needs an ICU bed, or more likely if they have COVID and need an ICU bed, we don’t have one. Your child will wait for another child to die,” Jenkins said.
Helms’ family is not willing to take that chance. The decision was emotional and Jason Helms knows he will miss his family — the past 18 months of quarantine have brought them closer than ever — but the choice seemed obvious by the end of the day Monday.
“I love them, I will miss them, but what I felt most in the moment was relief,” Helms said about the moment he and his wife made the final decision to send the kids out of state. “Because I have spent so much time worrying about them and trying to protect them. The idea that we can get them out of this situation and give them better odds, it really did feel like a no-brainer. I’m going to have decades with them, I’ll miss out on a few months to get those decades.”
Would a mask mandate help?
When they broke the news to their first-grader that she would be leaving Fort Worth, the Helms’ asked her if she still wanted to go to school Tuesday.
She said no. While she and nearly every child in her class wore a mask on Monday, Helms said, the teacher did not wear one. His daughter told her parents some other students did not wear a mask either, and it made her uncomfortable.
The Fort Worth school board plans to meet Tuesday night to discuss mask requirements at the school. The district said in a statement that it “strongly recommends” everyone wear masks at schools. The board could decide to follow the lead of other major school districts, such as Dallas ISD, and require masks despite Gov. Greg Abbott’s executive order against mandates. But Helms said his family’s decision might not change, even if the board requires staff and students to wear masks.
The pediatric bed availability could remain scarce, he said, even with a school mask mandate. He still has to teach at TCU in person — which is a whole other issue, Helms said. And, Helms said, “if they imposed a mask mandate on Tuesday, it’ll be overturned by Thursday.”
“It’ll just be back and forth and back and forth,” he said. “Which is just as bad as no mask mandate.”
Last week, Helms was glad to see Superintendent Kent Scribner order a mask mandate on Aug. 10 for FWISD. But, within days, the order was struck down after a group of FWISD parents filed for a temporary restraining order against Scribner’s mandate. A judge sided with the parents, halting the mask requirement. A hearing is set for Aug. 26 when a judge will consider a preliminary injunction.
School board president Tobi Jackson did not directly say whether the board would vote on whether to issue another mask mandate. Jackson said in a text message the board is meeting with the district’s legal counsel to “see what our options are with respect to mask mandates” and how District Judge John Chupp’s temporary restraining order “prohibits us from mandating masks temporarily.”
In North Carolina, Helms said his 6-year-old will be able to attend school because the district has a mask mandat and she will also have access to virtual learning. His 3-year-old will have access to an ICU bed, if needed. While Tarrant County’s COVID positivity rate is 23%, the area they’re headed to has only an 8% rate. Helms said the area is smaller and less populated than Dallas-Fort Worth, but he also blames the surge of COVID-19 cases on state leadership and Abbott’s ban on mask mandates.
Helms would likely only rethink his decision, he said, if the Fort Worth school district could guarantee a mask requirement until children can be vaccinated.
“We are months away from children being able to get vaccinated,” he said. “We have kept our kids safe for 18 months ... I don’t know how I am going to live with myself if we make it this far, and trip over the finish line.”
This story was originally published August 17, 2021 at 5:00 AM.
