Teachers, Parents, Doctors Have Different Concerns about Reopening Schools, but Congressional Passage of HEROES Act Remains Top Priority
The U.S. House of Representatives passed a second COVID-19 relief package—the HEROES Act—on May 15. At the end of last week, however, without taking up the HEROES Act, the Senate began a two week recess. Congressional consideration of assistance for states and local school districts can’t possibly happen until the third week of July, and yet the school year in most places is supposed to get underway in mid-August.
Senator Mitch McConnell, has been in no hurry to bring the bill up for a vote in the U.S. Senate despite documentation from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and the National Education Association that a COVID-19 recession is ravaging state budgets. McConnell has said he wants to wait and see if more federal relief is really necessary. One wonders if he grasps or cares about the needs of America’s schoolteachers, children, and families.
In U.S. public schools 3.2 million teachers educate over 50 million children and adolescents. Last Friday, the Washington Post‘s Valerie Strauss published a column from New Jersey schoolteacher and school finance expert Mark Weber, who worries about very real practical concerns for public school teachers themselves: “Children, especially young children, cannot be expected to stay six feet away from everyone else during an entire school day… Children cannot be expected to wear masks of any kind for the duration of a school day… The typical American school cannot accommodate social distancing of their student population for the duration of the school day… School staff do not generally have isolated spaces in their workplaces where they can stay when not working with children… School buses cannot easily accommodate social distancing, nor can they easily adjust to accommodate staggered school sessions… Like every other workforce, school staff have many people who have preconditions that make them susceptible to becoming critically ill when exposed to COVID-19… Unsupervised adolescents cannot be expected to socially distance outside of the school day if CONTINUE READING: Teachers, Parents, Doctors Have Different Concerns about Reopening Schools, but Congressional
