With some politicians, you can tell when the political becomes personal.

While listening to Nicole Galloway’s stump speech at a recent campaign event, I noticed the moment when her steady Midwestern demeanor took on a stronger tone.

Galloway, running for governor of Missouri, was talking about meeting mothers whose children were turned away from routine doctors’ appointments because their kids had been dropped from Medicaid during incumbent Gov. Mike Parson’s tenure. In Missouri, about 100,000 children lost state health insurance coverage between January 2018 and December 2019 -- more than anywhere else in the country.

Any decent person would be upset about children unable to see a doctor when they need one, but these stories seemed particularly personal and urgent to Galloway. When I talked to her about it later, she told me about her oldest son, William, now 8, and the difficult labor and delivery she had with him. On the day she and her husband were supposed to take him home from the hospital, the doctor told them their baby needed to see a pediatric cardiologist instead. William was born with a fairly common congenital heart defect called a bicuspid aortic valve.

“Honestly, it was terrifying,” she said, especially as a new mom. They learned that William, while otherwise healthy, would have to avoid certain sports and activities that could put too much of a strain on his heart. He would also need annual visits with a cardiologist to keep an eye on things. At one of these follow-ups, they discovered he had another heart condition -- Wolff-Parkinson-White syndrome -- which will require a surgical procedure in December to correct.

The importance of William’s early diagnosis -- and of her family’s ability to get him the treatment he needs -- isn’t lost on her.

“What if we couldn’t take William to the doctor for his heart?” she said to me.

When someone in your family has had any kind of health scare, other people’s stories about their health struggles hit differently. Galloway said she has felt tears come to her eyes when talking to parents whose children have been denied health care. She knows what it feels like to fear for your baby’s health.

Then, her empathy turns to anger.

“They didn’t do anything wrong,” she says of the kids’ parents. “They feel like they have failed their children, when really, it’s someone in a position of power they have never met who made a decision on their behalf without even considering how it would impact them.”

Galloway, a CPA and fraud investigator who won her second term as Missouri’s state auditor in 2018, has taken on an uphill battle for governor with three young boys at home. There are times when campaigning during a pandemic, while her older boys are doing virtual school, can be exhausting. In those moments, she said, she remembers the reasons why she got into the race.

She goes back to her conversations with those moms.

Galloway would become the state’s first female governor -- the first mother to hold that office, if she wins. The race for the office has become increasingly competitive. When she talks to voters, she focuses on her professional experience, her priorities and her criticisms of the current administration. But she hasn’t shied away from how her experiences as a mother shape her political outlook.

She knows firsthand how badly parents want children back in schools, as safely as possible. Her mom is a nurse who works at a St. Louis-area hospital, so she knows too well the toll this pandemic has taken.

She has a mother’s righteous anger when she talks about the most vulnerable kids in the state.

“If you mess with my children, I will have a word with you,” she said at an outdoor campaign event in Ballwin. “But if you mess with Missouri’s children, I will build an army. I will run against you, and I will win.”

For this mom, it sounds personal.

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.