President Donald Trump continued Sunday to push for schools to reopen this fall despite the growing coronavirus pandemic in the United States and cited the New Jersey child mortality rate during an interview on “Fox News Sunday” support your position.
“Let the schools open,” said Trump. “Have you ever seen statistics for youth under the age of 18? The state of New Jersey had thousands of deaths. Out of all these thousands, one person under the age of 18, across the state, one person and that was a person who had, I think he said diabetes. A person under the age of 18 died in the state of New Jersey during all of this, you know, they had a hard time. And they are doing very well now, so that’s it. ”
The actual number was two children, both under the age of 5, according to the state Department of Health. In May, a 4-year-old boy with an undisclosed underlying medical condition was the first child in New Jersey to die of complications related to the virus. A second child, described only as a “very young individual”, died in June.
New Jersey has had 15,706 confirmed and probable deaths, the second in the nation after New York, and 176,783 cases since the outbreak began in March, state officials said Sunday. Of the total cases, more than 4,700 were under 18 years of age.
New Jersey coronavirus cases by age group as of Saturday.
Trump, who pressured governors to reopen their economies only to see coronavirus cases rise in states like Florida and Texas that followed his advice, urged school districts to do the same, even threatening to withhold federal funding from schools that don’t.
“When they don’t open their schools, we’re not going to finance them,” he said on Fox. “We won’t give them money if they don’t go to school, if they don’t open.”
The president, while minimizing the risk to students, did not discuss the safety of reopening schools for teachers and adult staff. New Jersey has more than 116,000 full-time classroom teachers in more than 2,500 public schools, according to the latest available statistics from the state.
In a Fox News poll released Sunday, only 15% of respondents said that schools should reopen as usual, while 21% said they should reopen with social distancing and masks, 25% said that all learning should be remote, and 31% favored a hybrid of person and distance learning.
The Fox poll and an ABC News / Washington Post poll also released Sunday gave the president low marks for his handling of the pandemic. He had 60% disapproval in the ABC / Post poll, with 38% approval, and 56% disapproval and 43% approval in the Fox poll.
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New Jersey closed its schools on March 18 and required students to continue their education remotely until June.
But with the spread of COVID-19 dwindling in Garden State, Governor Phil Murphy has asked the state’s 577 school districts to develop plans to reopen their classrooms this fall.
“We have come up with very strong parameter principles,” Murphy said Friday during his coronavirus briefing. “Now it is up to the districts to get back to us and their constituents, their children, most importantly, parents, educators, administrators, and us with their plans.”
It also left open the possibility that schools will not reopen on time.
“The strong bias, the hope, the expectation, the plan is to open up,” he said. “If we get close and see something, not just on any given day, but in a trend that is causing enormous concern, we are not going to put people’s health at risk.”
New Jersey Education Association President Marie Blistan warned last week that “it was not possible” to “have schools open on the regular calendar.”
And NJEA spokesman Steve Baker said Sunday that Trump “was not a reliable source of true and honest information about this deadly pandemic.”
“When it comes to the well-being of New Jersey students and educators, that is a decision we will make in New Jersey based on our values and our scientific, medical and educational analysis of the situation,” said Baker.
“Perhaps the president has a certain acceptable number of deceased students and staff. In New Jersey we are going to prioritize the health and well-being of every student and every educator. “
Both surveys were conducted from July 12 to 15. Fox’s poll of 1,104 registered voters had a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points. The ABC / Post survey of 1,006 adults had a margin of error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.
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Jonathan D. Salant can be reached in [email protected].
