Harford County school officials insist that their decision Monday to rescind a ban on field trips to Baltimore's cultural institutions had nothing to do with the public attention to the issue since the prohibition was first reported in the Aegis last week, nor with the outcry from public officials, including County Executive Barry Glassman's voiced hope that the system would revisit the issue. Instead, they say, it was the result of routine re-evaluation of the likelihood of riots in the city. Yeah, right. Just like the decision a week before to allow Harford students to participate in sports games and tournaments in the city had everything to do with a well-grounded determination that such events have better security than, say, the Baltimore Museum of Art and not the fact that parents went nuts when they found out the previously unpublicized policy might keep their kids from qualifying for the playoffs.

Harford County, like many others in the region, canceled student trips to Baltimore in the wake of the riots in April. Likely few would quibble with that. Harford, like other jurisdictions, resumed those activities once it was clear that tensions had calmed in the city. It wasn't unreasonable, either, for Harford and other counties to again suspend trips during the trial of the first of six police officers.

But what Harford parents and school board members need to start asking questions about is why the system didn't resume the trips after the trial came and went with no civic disturbances whatsoever. In a statement, Harford Superintendent Barbara Canavan said that district officials had conferred with law enforcement officials weekly and had been acting on their advice. Now, she said, those law enforcement sources had provided new information, which changed district officials' minds.

Really? Just what, other than public disclosure and scrutiny of the policy, had occurred since the previous Monday? At present, the next two officers' trials are on hold pending appeals that could take months to resolve, and appeals involving the remaining cases are underway and likely to result in further delays. None of that is new information.

We understand that the district's first priority is and should be keeping students safe, but there's a point at which caution becomes hysteria, and Harford officials crossed it. It would have been nearly as reasonable for Baltimore City schools to cancel field trips to Harford County because of runaway blimps, black bear sightings, rapidly increasing heroin overdoses, and so on. The fact that Harford was alone in enacting this prohibition says enough by itself. Harford County parents need to ask whether the school board was really representing the best interests of their children's education or reflecting a parochial, city-phobic mindset that risks distorting students' views of the world.

It's not just that these students were being denied enrichment opportunities that are unparalleled in this area. It's that they are being taught that the city is something to be feared and shunned as opposed to being the cultural and economic heart of the region.

Unfortunately, that's not an attitude limited to the Harford school system. Six weeks after the riots, the regional Opportunity Collaborative issued a report suggesting shared strategies to address segregated housing, poorly connected transportation and other issues that have contributed to Baltimore's problems over the decades, and the response from suburban leaders (with the notable exception of Baltimore County Executive Kevin Kamenetz) was near total silence. Mr. Glassman's spokeswoman dismissed the effort at the time, saying he was focused on local issues rather than regional ones.

Mr. Glassman, fortunately, seems to have come along in his thinking about regionalism since last June. He is now the chairman of the Baltimore Metropolitan Council, and Monday he cited the need for all parts of the region to support one another in saying he hoped the school system would change its position. “The children benefit from ... seeing different environments,” he said.

Thankfully, the school system came to the right conclusion in the end. But parents and school board members shouldn't let this drop because it reflects on the judgment and transparency of the system. The cultural enrichment Harford students can get in Baltimore is an essential part of education, and Harford's students were being deprived of it for no good reason whatsoever.