Unsurprisingly, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is 100 percent on board with schools reopening fully come fall, even as covid-19 continues to wreak havoc in several states across the country. While children rarely exhibit serious illness if they contract covid-19 and may not show symptoms at all, this is not the case for their teachers or the families they live with, and children can still be carriers of the virus. But, hey, fuck it, says DeVos (basically). On Wednesday during a press conference with the coronavirus task force, DeVos said that distanced learning and limited in-person school days would cheat both America’s children and America’s taxpayers.
“It’s not a matter of if schools should reopen, it’s a matter of how,” DeVos said.
There’s much to critique about distanced learning and how it is insufficient for children, especially low-income children with limited access to the internet and other technology. But DeVos’s insistence that sending children back to school en masse in a matter of weeks would make any reasonable parent hesitate.
During a heated interview with Fox News’s Neil Cavuto later that day, DeVos doubled down on her “OPEN SCHOOL! OPEN SCHOOL!” rhetoric.
“The fact is that kids have to get back to schools and schools have got to reopen,” DeVos said. “We can’t sit around while everything else is opening back up again and have a huge segment of the population—our kids, our future—biding their time and not going back and learning.”
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