“There is nothing like being with the teachers, other than on a computer board. It’s proven, it’s much better, “Trump said at a news conference.
White House officials blame the campus outbreaks on party undergrads. High school students are ignoring the Trump administration’s guidance on wearing masks and exercising social distance, White House adviser Kellyanne Conway said Wednesday.
“They showed a lot of themselves at parties that have nothing to do with the curriculum,” Conway told Fox News. “We need to keep everyone awake.”
The outbreaks come on the heels of the cancellation of a lot of college sports last week, another blow to Trump’s demand for a sense of a return to pre-pandemic times.
Infection groups and quarantines are already plaguing K-12 schools. Neist outbreaks at schools in the majority of Mississippi counties, hundreds of students in a single district in Georgia are started in careers two weeks after starting school. Two high schools in the district of Cherokee County, Ga., Have switched to online education, and about 500 students at a third school are out of class after 25 of their peers tested positive.
“This has gone from a natural disaster to a man-made disaster, and the negligence and dishonesty of the Trump administration have been devastating,” said former Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. ‘That’s where we’re. But we can not deny that we are here, and we must treat it as safely and wisely as we can. We refuse to do that. ”
However, schools “MUST” reopen this, the president has prodded, supporting his plea with threats to cut funding from schools that do not reopen and betting against the warnings of many health experts who said students return to classes would spread infection clusters and prolong coronavirus spikes throughout the country.
Some of the president’s supporters suggest that teachers’ unions are responsible for classrooms that cannot safely reopen at the beginning of the school year.
“Where things are off the rails are the teachers’ unions, which have everything they can to reopen schools,” said Lindsey Burke, director of the Center for Education Policy of the Heritage Foundation.
Those unions have “tried to gain some political gains,” she said, in order to “fulfill a liberal wish list” by making demands for safe reopening of schools during the pandemic.
But many union requirements are central to security. The Detroit Teachers’ Federation on Wednesday authorized its leaders to strike a “security strike” because local officials called on at least some of the district’s educators going back to class despite outbreaks at schools across the country.
There is no federal snapshot of coronavirus cases in schools. The only known tracker of outbreaks of K-12 schools was made by a teacher in Kansas, whose roundup shows that almost every state has a school-based outbreak.
Trump, who has been calling for a reopening of schools since the spring, began making unworthy demands on Twitter beginning of July that “SCHOOLS MUST OPEN !!!” He and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos soon began threatening to yank federal funding of schools that does not physically reopen.
The printing campaign did not work, and the administration saw one city and province after another opt for virtual education or just a few days a week at school.
But the administration has continued to push. The CDC published additional recommendations for reopening schools late last month, according to Trump criticized previous guidance for reopening CDC if too difficult.
DeVos is more nuanced in its requirements. “Secretary DeVos has made it very clear that as public health conditions dictate, schools may have to move to distance education – and it does, despite the delivery model, students deserve a full education,” said spokeswoman Angela Morabito.
However, the president has also pledged virtual learning, tweeting that it ‘proved to be comparable to In School, as On Campus, Learning. By no means! “
High school officials felt the pressure late last month when the administration re-enrolled international students entering the US if they did not take personal courses. That came after the administration leaving a plan to deport international college students who are using only online courses to study this fall.
A group of Senate Democrats, including Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Pressed the Trump administration on Wednesday to track outbreaks at colleges, warning that the lack of federal guidance on reporting coronavirus infections among students “is likely to patch up of inconsistent information about states. “
“I have news for President Trump and Republicans who are trying to politicize the safety and well-being of our students,” Warren said, “we can not just finger our fingers and open schools.”
Michael Stratford, Jennifer Scholtes and Max Cohen contributed to this report.
