President Donald Trump said Wednesday that the federal government is sending 125 million recyclable face masks to school districts in the United States because schools are considering whether it is safe to reopen this fall amid the coronavirus pandemic.
“We need to open our schools and open our businesses,” Trump said during a White House press conference on the coronavirus, adding that all school districts should make plans to resume personal training for students “as soon as possible.”
“To support the reorganization of America’s schools, we have provided $ 13 billion in elementary and middle schools toward the CARES Act and CARES Act funding,” he told reporters. “We will supply a maximum of 125 million giant masks to various school districts around the country.”
Trump also announced new recommendations for reopening schools, including ensuring that all students, faculty and staff understand the symptoms of the virus and encourage frequent hand washing.
Whether and how to reopen these schools in the U.S. this fall has become a hotbed issue in recent weeks. The U.S. has the worst outbreak in the world with more than 5 million cases to date and at least 165,328 deaths as of Wednesday, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University. Researchers say the role children play in spreading the disease is not yet clear.
Trump has called for schools to reopen as fall approaches regardless of the state of the outbreak in the U.S., saying last month that keeping schools closed “also causes death.”
“The lower they are in age, the lower the risk,” Trump said in a July 30 White House newsletter. “We need to remember that there is another side to it. Keeping them out of school and keeping work closed also causes death. Economic damage, but it causes death for several reasons, but death. Probably more death.”
Earlier in the day, Trump suggested that if some state or local officials decide not to reopen schools, he thinks the funding of schools should be reassigned to parents or other school districts.
Last week, Gov. New York Andrew Cuomo announced that all school districts in the state are authorized to reopen for the fall semester, including New York City, the nation’s largest school district.
Cuomo said Monday that he allows personal training to resume because plans for school districts do not allow students to be surrounded by “hundreds of people like you would be in a museum.”
In a museum or shopping center, “you walk past a continuous group of new people,” he said. The schools will “take protections, they are in an isolated place [and] in controlled conditions. ”
Cuomo requires school districts to provide details to the New York State Department of Health for distance learning, testing and tracking of contacts before reopening. Schools must also set up a minimum of three training sessions with parents to proceed with their plans. Larger school districts, however, need five sessions for parents, he said.
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