Taking away the power and universality of the law, for any reason, is always a terrible danger to everyone, not least of those the people you’re trying to benefit. Part of the grand bargain that keeps society together and functioning is the agreement to grant the government a monopoly on violence. So people no longer have to worry about defending their family with direct retributary violence. Both perpetrators and victims benefit from a system that applies consistently across all dimensions of life. But if you take away the mechanisms of the law, make any large social institution exempt from it, so it has immunity and its own different set of laws, you create opportunities for abuse by both criminals who might take advantage of the situation for aggression and victims who take advantage for revenge.

This law will only make public schools a less and less desirable place for people to send their children, a situation that is already under threat from all sides due to covid, violence, falling performance, social stress, and a dozen other factors. People won’t send their kids to schools purely out of a sense of public duty. People are hardly willing to send their kids to school when there’s the threat of a disease that has only a vanishly small chance of affecting them.

I understand the need to not criminalize normal child behavior. Coming from a small town where people were expected to take more responsibility for their own lives and were not able to rely on a large public or government mechanism to watch over them, and I liked that. People treated you with respect and didn’t get upset over minor shenanigans and were pretty tough.

But structural exemption from the actual law of the land is a danger to everyone. If we hope to maintain trust in public institutions, they must be within the sphere of the law.

Thank you.