FACT CHECK: Biden Touts Reopening of Faculties After COVID-19, however Republicans Had been a Yr Forward of Him
President Joe Biden opened his State of the Union handle Tuesday with, “Two years in the past, COVID had shut down our companies, closed our faculties, and robbed us of a lot. At this time, COVID now not controls our lives.”
Whereas Biden now celebrates victory over COVID-19 and the ending of pandemic college closures, his appointees and poor management stored lecture rooms closed far longer than mandatory.
The president claimed in a 2021 interview with “CBS Night Information” that closed faculties had been a “nationwide emergency,” however his resolution solely included “well-ventilated rooms” and lecture rooms with only a few college students.
Whereas Biden’s workforce promised “to have the vast majority of faculties, so greater than 50%, open by Day 100 of his presidency,” the administration later walked the definition of “open” again to incorporate lecture rooms solely open in the future per week, hybrid digital choices, and testing proctor websites.
His appointees fared a lot worse.
Biden’s appointee for deputy secretary of schooling fought to maintain the San Diego Unified College District locked down as superintendent. She refused to set a timeline for any faculties to reopen.
Rochelle Walensky, Biden’s choose to go the Facilities for Illness Management and Prevention, collaborated behind closed doorways with the American Federation of Academics to vary the CDC’s advice for college reopenings and different COVID-19 pointers. Unions throughout the nation would vote to maintain lecture rooms digital effectively into 2022.
Moreover, progressive teams like lecturers unions and liberal media shops continually belittled those that desired for faculties to reopen—accusing mother and father and college students of racism, bigotry, and homicide.
Then-New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo urged youngsters who went again to highschool may “kill grandma.”
Chicago Public Faculties’ lecturers union accused the will to reopen faculties as rooted in “sexism, racism and misogyny.”
Republican governors and oldsters’ rights activists fought, then again, to reopen faculties and hold them open. President Donald Trump got here beneath appreciable hearth for suggesting governors “significantly contemplate” reopening faculties in April 2020.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, introduced suggestions to reopen Florida’s whole schooling system at “full capability” in June 2020. He later slammed Biden over the sluggish nationwide tempo of colleges reopening in 2021 as a “pathetic failure of management.”
Together with DeSantis, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, signed government orders to forbid faculties from implementing masks mandates—actions that Biden’s Division of Training overtly condemned.
Corey DeAngelis, a senior fellow on the American Federation for Youngsters, advised The Day by day Sign:
Biden ought to rename himself the gaslighter-in-chief. Academics unions—who personal Democratic politicians—held youngsters’s schooling hostage to safe a number of multibillion-dollar ransom funds from taxpayers. And it labored for them. The federal authorities allotted about $190 billion in so-called COVID reduction to Ok-12 faculties since March 2020. The push to maintain faculties closed was all the time extra about politics and energy than security and the wants of youngsters. Mother and father aren’t dumb. They’ll always remember how lecturers unions harm their youngsters by preventing to maintain faculties closed for therefore lengthy.
Biden might declare that he fought to reopen faculties, however does so omitting the timeline and method through which he advocated. Biden was effectively over a yr behind Republicans in reopening faculties—whereas appointing employees who straight opposed and obstructed the method of placing college students again in lecture rooms.
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