CV NEWS FEED // While the Biden administration faces mounting pressure to clarify its plan to reopen schools for in-person learning, Gov. Ron DeSantis, R-FL, has been decisive about reopening Florida schools.
DeSantis has also spoken plainly against what he believes to be misinformation about the dangers of school reopenings during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We’ve been open the whole time since August,” DeSantis said this week, “and we’ve been in-person as much as anybody in the country:”
And yet we’re 34th out of 50 states and DC for COVID-19 on a per-capita basis for children. 33 states have more cases per capita than Florida for children … and many of those don’t have a lot of in-person instruction in school.
DeSantis’ comments came just after the CDC — which had previously indicated students would be relatively safe returning to school — released new guidelines that are more in line with Biden’s drawn-out and indeterminate approach to school reopenings.
Biden called the new guidelines “the best available scientific evidence on how to reopen schools safely.”
DeSantis called them “disgraceful.”
“What the CDC put out,” said DeSantis, “was quite frankly a disgrace. It would require, if you actually followed that, closing 90 percent of schools in the United States.”
DeSantis isn’t alone in his opposition to the Biden administration’s slowness to greenlight in-person school reopenings.
Parents across the country are finding it difficult to earn a living while caring for children newly grounded at home, and there is also real concern about the wellbeing of children largely isolated from friends and confined to hours of virtual learning via online conferences with instructors.
Pointing out the proven data on the safety of in-person learning in Florida, where he allowed schools to reopen at the beginning of the 2020/2021 school year, DeSantis argued “there is no evidence to suggest that school kids should do anything else other than be in school.”
“This has been clear for months and months and months,” DeSantis continued:
And the only reason that that is not happening across this country like it is in Florida …[is] because the Democratic Party puts the interests of education unions and special interests ahead of the well-being of our children and our families. …That is a disgrace. That is not science. That is putting politics ahead of what’s right for kids. That is putting politics and special interests ahead of what the evidence and observed experience says.