Then, one day in 2020, school was dismissed, and the building across the street didn’t reopen to students for another 13 months. As a parent, this pandemic paralysis was emotionally excruciating. (I ended up writing about it, though for the purpose of maintaining some distance, and also my sanity, I focused my reporting mainly on Maplewood, a nearby town.) Suddenly, it felt like everyone in Montclair was fighting over everything, but most of all about the schools. Some parents were protesting, organizing a pro-reopening group called Montclair FAIL. (The group’s leaders later changed the acronym to the less-polarizing Montclair PAGE.) Some parents were deathly afraid to send their kids back. Some parents were starting to wonder why a district with an annual budget of roughly $130 million was unable to maintain basic systems like ventilation. And everyone was wondering where our Democratic governor was on all of this.

But Murphy was nowhere to be seen. The former Goldman Sachs man had won high marks from the public for his handling of the public-health emergency, implementing McKinsey-tested interventions and offering genial Irish eulogies for the dead, signing off with “God bless ‘em.” But when it came to education, he dodged the argument, delegating all the reopening decisions to beleaguered superintendents and school boards, citing the principle of local control.

There was a brief moment, in the summer of 2020, when it appeared as if Murphy might be edging toward a more proactive role. The scientific evidence was already pretty clear by this time: With masking and contact tracing, it would be possible to resume in-person learning. Other states were already doing so. But many teachers were understandably terrified. Over a few days in August, the state’s largest and most powerful teachers union, the New Jersey Education Association, declared that it was unsafe to return to classrooms, and Murphy immediately reversed himself, saying local districts could continue with remote learning if they provided a “good reason.” Oftentimes, that reason turned out to be the objection of the unionized workforce.