A new Politico/Morning Consult poll finds a growing majority of Americans oppose Donald Trump and Kristi Noem’s reckless advocacy of fully opening schools for face-to-face classes this year:
In the survey of nearly 2,000 registered voters, 59 percent said they oppose fully reopening K-12 schools for the beginning of the academic year. Those numbers are up from polling last month that showed 53 percent opposed.
With slightly less resistance to the idea of in-person learning for younger and older students, 56 percent of respondents said this month that they are against fully reopening daycares, in contrast to 53 percent in July’s survey. For reopening colleges and universities, 57 percent said they were opposed, up from 50 percent in the previous poll [Nicole Gaudiano, “Growing Number of Voters Oppose Trump Demand to Fully Reopen Schools,” Politico, 2020.08.12].
Usually sensitive to public sentiment, Noem and Trump continue to peddle their false wishful thinking that we don’t have worry about kids catching or spreading coronavirus. Here’s Trump yesterday at the White House, trying to counter the health-cautious sensibility of the majority of Americans with the archetypically Trumpist argument that money is more important than human life:
Asked about the study, Trump again insisted that since most children didn’t get seriously ill it was fine to open schools and without evidence said children do not transmit the virus to other people.
“It’s a tiny fraction of death, a tiny fraction and they get better quickly,” Trump said in the White House Briefing Room.
“They may have it for a short period of time. For the most part they do very well. According to the people I have spoken to they don’t transport it or transfer it to other people very easily. I think schools have to open. It’s a very important thing for the economy to get schools going,” he claimed [Stephen Collinson, “What the College Football Mess Reveals About Trump’s Leadership,” CNN, 2020.08.11].
I got fired from Madison High School twenty years ago for grabbing a 220-pound bully by the collar and calling him an a–h—. My political opponents have said that action put all children in danger and demonstrated I could not be trusted in elected office.
Donald Trump and Kristi Noem are now advocating action in every school that 59% of Americans agree puts every child, every teacher, and every community at risk of actual sickness and death. My Republican neighbors must thus agree that Donald Trump and Kristi cannot be trusted in elected office.
IOKIYAR.
Fine. Let’s not open schools and start ending public school funding. Teachers aren’t doing jack anyway. Spring showed that. Grades were locked-in regardless of what you did during the shut down. Parents had to do the education. It will save us tax payers tons of money so let’s close the schools and stop paying them. You don’t get paid to do nothing.
Wrong, Steve. Spring showed that teachers were forced into a radical rescheduling and redesign of their curriculum and delivery practices without any preparation time. The solution here is to give teachers more resources to work with to provide effective and safe distance education, not to recycle your community-destroying hatred of public education.