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I 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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