Via The Washington Post: Red-state school leaders resist Trump’s call to reopen schools. Excerpt:
The school year for Greenville County Schools, in South Carolina, starts a little more than a month from now, and officials are still scrambling to figure out what school will look like for the district’s nearly 77,000 students. Will students return to school full time? Or part time? Or will they even open school buildings?
Whatever the plan is, said Superintendent W. Burke Royster, it will be driven by the pandemic — not politics. Royster helped craft a matrix that will guide the school’s reopening plan based on the spread of the coronavirus, and so far, things are not looking good: Greenville County now has more than 1,600 cases per 100,000 people.
“We try to make our decisions and base it on what’s in the best interest of our students and our employees and our community, and try to do that at all times on objective factual information and not on the winds of the political discourse,” said Royster. “And right now, obviously, I think everyone knows they’re extremely strong.”
President Trump this month launched an aggressive campaign to return children to school full time, threatening to withhold federal funding from schools that do not comply — which he does not have the power to do — and lashing out against his own public health agency’s school guidelines. Reopening schools is seen as a linchpin to restarting the economy, making it a crucial part of his reelection bid.
But he’s encountering pushback even in places like Greenville County, where Trump won by 25 points in 2016, by school officials who worry that reopening schools could accelerate the spread of the virus. In interviews, some expressed frustration that the president was pushing schools to reopen but offering little in the way of help, financial or otherwise. Congress allocated $13.5 billion in pandemic relief to K-12 schools, compared with the $100 billion they got in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis.
“Although the administration can apparently absorb the 150,000 covid deaths without care or consequence, we do not have the luxury of even losing one,” said Kristi Wilson, superintendent of Buckeye Elementary School District in Arizona, located in a small Maricopa County town that backed Trump in 2016. “They don’t have the authority to pull our funds. But I think that kind of threat stokes the fire for the teachers who are doing their very best to come back to school.”
Trump has successfully drawn some Republican allies into his fight, including the governors of South Carolina, Florida and Texas. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, typically a champion of local control, has criticized districts for not fully reopening and hinted that she would try to deliver on Trump’s threats to cut funding. And some congressional Republicans, meanwhile, are considering tethering new pandemic relief money to schools being physically open.
But many allies are resisting him. Shortly after the president began his campaign, West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice (R), a longtime supporter of the president, broke rank and postponed the start of the school year.
