Read more at sojo.net ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ [[link removed]] American Families in Crisis
[[link removed]] Jim WallisI am not the first one to say this, and it is less prophetic than just observably true: Donald Trump is consistently putting his calculus of
how he can win reelection over any commitment to protect the nation’s public
health. The president clearly has no coherent strategy for addressing the
COVID-19 pandemic, now surging again across the country, and it’s clear that the
health and lives of the people of the United States matter much less to him than
his own political fortunes. This shameful and alarming truth clarifies the
stakes of this chaotic time. Trump’s latest political ploy is demanding the
opening of all schools in the fall, threatening to pull funding from those that
refuse. Just like he turned mask wearing into a political litmus test, he’s
using our children’s futures as a political tactic to try and put the pandemic
behind us, get the economy going again, and help him win reelection.

In the meantime, families are anxious to hear whether, when, and how schools
will reopen, how to keep our kids, their teachers, and ourselves safe, and how
in the world they can keep caring for and homeschooling their children while
working full time. They can’t. And it’s because of a failure of leadership.

Donald Trump, along with Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, have decided to
weigh in as strongly as they can in favor of reopening schools across the
country for full-time, in-person learning, despite the fact that cases of
COVID-19 are surging across the South, and hospitalizations and deaths are
rising again across the country. The American Academy of Pediatrics, just weeks
after issuing a statement much touted by President Trump in support of as much
in-person learning as possible this fall, reversed course this week,
acknowledging that the decisions on whether to reopen schools must be guided by
the health and scientific data on the spread of the virus in any given
community.

Decisions on how to provide education and child care in the context of a global
pandemic that has already killed more than 135,000 people in the United States
are terribly complex and emotionally fraught. It’s been apparent for some time
that there are no easy answers or quick fixes, and the widespread failure in the
United States to lower the spread of the virus to levels that many European and
Asian countries have now achieved only makes these personal decisions more
wrenching.


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