President Donald Trump hoped schools and colleges would reopen their doors this fall, marking the retreat of the coronavirus pandemic and the start of an economic revival just months before the presidential election.
Metastasizing outbreaks are shattering those hopes.
Thousands of kids and coeds are getting sick, along with their teachers, triggering mass quarantines, campus closures and last-minute switches to online learning. Virus-proof kids who are “virtually immune” to the scourge — that was what the president promised. A few days into the new school year, that prediction hasn’t held together.
“His promises have proven to be false,” said Rep. Bennie Thompson, a Mississippi Democrat whose home state has seen coronavirus infections in 87 percent of the counties as of Monday, thrusting more than 2,000 students and nearly 600 teachers into quarantine.
“Children are getting infected at a greater percentage. Teachers are getting infected at a greater percentage,” said Thompson, who chairs the House Homeland Security Committee, which oversees policy for national pandemic response. “That’s compounded with the common knowledge that this pandemic — with over 170,000 people who have lost their lives — is not going away. You can’t wish it away. You can’t talk it away.”
On Monday, thousands of students at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill were relegated to online classes a week into the semester, after dozens of students living in dorms and a fraternity house tested positive for coronavirus. Come Tuesday, the University of Notre Dame halted in-person classes for two weeks, after the private institution recorded about 150 infections barely a week after starting the semester. Other colleges, including Ole Miss, the Mississippi University for Women and Purdue University have reported outbreaks or hundreds of students testing positive upon entry this week.
Still, the president has kept up the drumbeat for in-person instruction, saying Wednesday that “colleges should take reasonable precautions” and that virtual education “is nothing like campus.”
“There's nothing like being with the teachers as opposed to being on a computer board. It's been proven, it's a lot better,” Trump said at a press conference.
White House officials blame the campus outbreaks on partying undergrads. College students are ignoring the Trump administration’s guidance on wearing masks and practicing social distancing, White House counselor Kellyanne Conway said Wednesday.
“They showed many of them out at parties that have nothing to do with the curriculum,” Conway said on Fox News. “We need everybody to remain vigilant.”
The outbreaks come on the heels of the cancellation of much of college sports last week, another blow to Trump’s quest for a sense of a return to pre-pandemic times.
Infection clusters and quarantines are already plaguing K-12 schools too. Besides outbreaks in schools in the majority of counties in Mississippi, hundreds of students in a single district in Georgia are being quarantined two weeks after school started. Two high schools in the district in Cherokee County, Ga., have shifted 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 catastrophe, and the Trump administration’s negligence and dishonesty have been devastating,” former Education Secretary Arne Duncan said. “We are here because of that. But we can’t deny that we’re here, and we have to deal with it as safely and smartly as we can. We’re refusing to do that.”
Yet schools “MUST” reopen this semester, the president has prodded, backing his plea with threats to cut off funding from schools that don't reopen and betting against the warnings of many health experts who said sending students back to classrooms would spawn infection clusters and prolong coronavirus spikes throughout the country.
Some of the president’s supporters suggest teachers unions are responsible for classrooms not being able to reopen safely at the start of the school year.
“Where things have gone off the rails is the teachers unions, which have done everything they can to block schools from reopening,” said Lindsey Burke, director of the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Education Policy.
Those unions have been “trying to extract some political wins,” she said, to “fulfill a liberal wish list” by making demands unrelated to safely reopening schools during the pandemic.
But many union demands do center on safety. The Detroit Federation of Teachers on Wednesday authorized its leaders to stage a "safety strike” as local officials call for at least some of the district’s educators to return to the classroom despite outbreaks in schools throughout the country.
There is no federal snapshot of coronavirus cases in schools. The only known tracker of K-12 school outbreaks was created by a teacher in Kansas, whose roundup shows that nearly every state has a school-based outbreak.
Trump, who has been pushing for a fall reopening of schools since the spring, began making unequivocal demands on Twitter in early July that “SCHOOLS MUST OPEN IN THE FALL!!!" He and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos quickly began threatening to yank federal funding from schools that don’t physically reopen.
The pressure campaign has not worked, and the administration watched one city and county after another opt for virtual education or just a few days a week in school.
But the administration has kept pushing. The CDC released additional recommendations for reopening schools late last month, after Trump criticized earlier CDC reopening guidance as too burdensome.
DeVos has been more nuanced in her demands. "Secretary DeVos has said all along that when public health circumstances dictate, schools may need to move to distance learning — and no matter the delivery model, students deserve a full-time education," Education Department spokesperson Angela Morabito said.
Yet the president has also panned virtual learning, tweeting that it “has proven to be TERRIBLE compared to In School, or On Campus, Learning. Not even close!”
College officials felt the pressure late last month, when the administration barred newly enrolling international students from entering the U.S. if they aren’t taking in-person courses. That came after the administration abandoned a plan to deport international college students who only use online courses to study this fall.
A group of Senate Democrats, including Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), on Wednesday pressed the Trump administration to start tracking outbreaks at colleges, warning that the lack of federal guidance on reporting coronavirus infections among students "is likely to create a patchwork of inconsistent information across states."
“I’ve got news for President Trump and Republicans who are trying to politicize the safety and well-being of our students," Warren said, "we can’t just snap our fingers and reopen schools."
Michael Stratford, Jennifer Scholtes and Max Cohen contributed to this report.
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