This month, most of the youngest students in the St. Louis region will have a chance to go back to schools for in-person learning.

You don’t have to be any kind of expert to know that 6-year-olds are not getting what they need by sitting in front of a computer for hours. The same could be said for students of any age with special needs. And it is especially true for students who live in the poorest areas and whose families face the biggest hurdles to virtual learning.

These children absolutely need to be back in schools.

This transition requires careful logistical maneuvering, but the major obstacles to getting students back in classrooms go beyond data trends and mask policies. School officials will have to deal with rampant fear and mistrust. Schools have to convince parents, and the teachers and staff, that they can mitigate the risks from the coronavirus.

That’s something Missouri’s state leadership hasn’t been able to do.

While there are plenty of parents loudly agitating for schools to reopen, many parents whose children would most benefit from returning are still unconvinced. Parents in St. Louis Public Schools, where nearly 80% of the students are Black, have told me they worry about their children bringing home the virus, especially if they live with older relatives or have preexisting health conditions putting them at higher risk for complications. COVID-19 has killed a disproportionate number of Black and Hispanic people in America.

Their fear is understandable.

The concerns I hear from teachers are largely the same: How will schools maintain social distancing and enforce rules about masks? How will they fix poor ventilation systems? What happens at lunchtime when kids can’t wear masks? How can we keep ourselves and our families safe from exposure during cold and flu season?

A teacher recently told me she felt “expendable” in the return-to-school discussions. She works at a private school, most of which have had teachers back in the classroom while the pandemic rages on in Missouri. Her school has enough space and resources to make sure safety protocols are strictly followed, and they haven’t had any outbreaks. It’s been a lesson in how loudly money talks.

We know public schools -- especially large urban districts -- don’t have those kinds of resources. These same worries carry over to those who work in large suburban districts, too.

Sandi King teaches in an elementary school in the Parkway School District. She is turning in medical records documenting her comorbidities -- conditions that put her at higher risk for COVID-19 complications -- to avoid returning for in-person instruction later this month. When I tell her the data about low infection rates in younger age groups and the relatively low risk of transmission from younger children, she is skeptical.

“I’m not sure I trust all that data,” she said. King said she knows someone who got infected from a child, and cited problems with testing and reporting in the state.

Other teachers fear that parents who dismiss the risks from this pandemic will send sick children -- or those who have been exposed to the virus, but are asymptomatic -- to school.

This is what societal breakdown looks like: teachers who don’t trust their school districts, which can’t persuade parents to trust them, either, and loads of people who don’t trust data, government, scientists or their fellow parents.

This was the dangerous collision course our country was headed down even before the pandemic. When large groups of people can’t agree on what is real, true or believable, the state loses its ability to perform basic functions like educating its children. If everyone in the state had chosen to wear masks and keep socially distant from one another from the beginning of the outbreak, we wouldn’t be in this prolonged nightmare.

The unfortunate reality is that there is no way schools can promise completely safe environments; returning will be a calculated risk. A superintendent inside a central office may perceive that risk differently than a teacher supervising dozens of children in a crowded cafeteria. But there is also no way we can continue to deprive the most vulnerable children of an education.

This month, schools will try to reconcile these competing needs.

Our success will be tied to how well we earn one another’s trust.

Dana Anderson prepared to take her three young children to a vigil in her affluent, mostly white town after George Floyd was killed earlier this year.

She was shocked to see the reaction in the suburb of Chicago where she lives.

“It was boarded up like the whole place was going to be bombed,” she said. “Instilling that white fear.”

Anderson, who is white, only saw one familiar face at the peaceful protest of about 300 people.

It made her even more grateful for the community she’s found in We Stories, a St. Louis-based nonprofit that recently expanded its efforts nationwide.

Adelaide Lancaster and Laura Horwitz began the organization five years ago as parents of young children looking for a way to respond to the unrest in Ferguson, Missouri. They wanted to give white parents a way to talk to young children about race -- primarily through reading and discussing diverse children’s books, and later by working through a curriculum they developed.

They didn’t expect that they would also change hundreds of parents along the way and possibly alter the way young white children think about race around the country.

Lancaster said families outside of St. Louis have long wanted to join the program, but that the primary hesitation in expanding was their tiny organization’s bandwidth. They finally decided to add a small cohort of remote families to launch this summer. The pandemic led We Stories to transfer their program to completely virtual operations. Then Floyd’s killing created a surge of interest among parents around the country, so they brought in more families.

In all, We Stories added 110 families this summer, who participated remotely from 28 states and the District of Columbia.

A little more than 80 percent of those families are white.

Anderson, whose children are 9, 6 and 4, says the experience has been positive for all of them. She grew up in a home where race was not openly discussed. The mentality back then was to take a “color-blind” approach and treat everyone the same, she said. “Now we are realizing we need to understand and acknowledge people’s differences and lived experiences in regards to race,” she said.

She found people trying to do the same thing in her We Stories group.

“The cohort connected me with white parents who are working through this in their own homes, which I feel like I didn’t have in my own community,” said Anderson, adding that there hasn’t been a lot of talk in her kids’ school about race or racism.

Lancaster hopes the expansion will help the group also make a contribution to the field of scholarship. They have developed partnerships with professors doing research at Washington University in St. Louis, New York University and the University of Pittsburgh.

“We have a large ‘laboratory’ of white families wanting to incorporate anti-racist practices in parenting,” she said.

Lori Markson, associate professor of psychological and brain sciences at Washington University and director of the school’s Cognition and Development Lab, developed tasks and tests to try to see if there was any measurable impact on the children who participate in We Stories.

Her team tested hundreds of children -- a We Stories group and a control group -- on five to eight tasks. In one of the coloring exercises, they discovered a statistically significant difference.

Children who had been through the We Stories program and were exposed to books with diverse characters were more likely to color the faces of the outlined children using different skin tones. The exposure to diverse books through We Stories may have made them more open to differences, Markson said.

“That was really fascinating,” she said. “I’m excited about the research potential.”

She said she’s also encouraged by the change she’s seeing happen in a broader context of racial equity.

Anderson, who wasn’t sure how to involve her local community before doing We Stories, is now trying to start a parent equity group in her school.

“When I’ve spoken up in the past, I’ve felt like the lone person,” she said.

That might finally be changing.

One of these days, I plan to tell you the whole sordid story -- the details of how my healthy, active husband battled COVID-19 for eight days at home and then nearly a week in the hospital, and about the road to recovery ahead.

I’ll tell you about my own COVID infection, which seemed to be a million times milder than his, but still gave me a litany of uncomfortable symptoms and days of dread and fear. I’ll try to capture the crushing anxiety of the past month.

I’ll also tell you about my beloved aunt and uncle --like second parents to me -- who both contracted COVID. As I type, my uncle is fighting for his life in isolation in a hospital.

I plan to share these personal stories once we are past the worst of all this.

But right now, the wounds are too fresh and the endings still unsettled. At least 200,000 Americans have died with COVID-19, and the fall surge of cases has begun.

So for now, I’m going to talk about the weirdness of it all.

At first, I couldn’t wrap my mind around how my husband, who had followed safety protocols above and beyond, could have contracted the virus. It reminded me of all the conscientious people who follow all the “rules” for healthy living and still get cancer.

Unfairness and bad luck are as much a part of life as serendipity and good fortune.

But the difference between this terrible disease and other ones is that no one is out in the streets protesting that cancer is fake. I haven’t seen viral videos of people calling cancer a political hoax. You don’t hear too many sane people saying we need to defund cancer research or ignore doctors when they talk about it. You certainly don’t hear political leaders saying barely any people have died from cancer.

We all know these bizarre reactions are largely political. But the virus itself is weird, too: Why did I get off relatively easy and my husband get hit so hard? How did our children manage to avoid infection? Why was my aunt spared while my uncle suffers?

When many people get over an illness without major consequences, it’s tempting to write it off as no big deal. But you don’t know who the unlucky patient will be -- it could be you, or someone you love dearly. It’s virus roulette.

That brings me to the strangest part of the whole deal.

A few weeks before getting sick, I took Frankie to the dog park. A man a few years older than me struck up a conversation, which soon came around to the virus. He said a close friend had inadvertently infected her father, who recently died from it. She was devastated, and he felt very sorry for her.

This all seemed like normal human thinking, so far.

Then, he said that he’d been exposed at work, but he didn’t want to get a test because he “didn’t want to be cooped up for two weeks.”

Now I was bewildered. Having just told me about his friend’s father, he clearly knew the virus was real, deadly and easily transmitted. But for him, two weeks inside was too big a price to pay to possibly save someone’s life, or prevent long-term disability or suffering.

Now, for those without paid sick days or the ability to work from home, I can understand the hesitation about getting tested: Two weeks at home means bills won’t get paid.

But that wasn’t this gentleman’s concern. He just didn’t want to be “cooped up.”

I wondered if he realized he sounded like a selfish sociopath.

My kids -- teenagers with busy, active lives before everything was upended -- know about “cooped up.” They had to quarantine for 24 days when their parents were sick, and haven’t been inside their school building since March.

I know this pandemic has dragged on for far too long. Many people have dropped their vigilance about social distancing and masking, especially around family and friends. We want to believe we are safe around these people.

But we’re not out of the woods yet. Not even close. And it seems like a lot of people who accept the reality of the virus, like the man at the park, don’t seem to care about doing their part to get us there.

And that’s the weirdest part of all.