Multiple guests on the Sunday morning political talk shows debated the reopening of schools in the fall amid the coronavirus pandemic.
Education Secretary Betty DeVos stressed the Trump administration’s position that students should return to classrooms while Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said officials are “messing” with the health of children.
Fox News’s Chris Wallace pressed Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos on Sunday on her and President Trump’s threats to withhold federal funding from schools that do not reopen in the fall amid the coronavirus pandemic.
Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos said Sunday that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) guidelines are “flexible” and should be applied as appropriate by school districts, as she continued to push the Trump administration stance for students to return to classrooms in the fall despite rising coronavirus cases across parts of the U.S.
“This is appalling. … The president and his administration, are messing with the health of our children. We all want our children to go back to school, teachers do, parents do and children do, but they must go back safely,” Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif) said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
“I think issuing an ultimatum for schools opening is the wrong approach,” Tom Inglesby, the director of the Center for Health Security at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health said. “There are going to be many challenges to opening schools safely and just kind of asserting that schools now must reopen safely doesn’t make it so.”
Randi Weingarten, president of the prominent American Federation of Teachers (AFT) union, said there’s “no way” schools will reopen full-time in the fall, citing lack of funding.
The U.S.’s top coronavirus testing official, Adm. Brett Giroir, said Sunday that top infectious disease expert, Anthony Fauci, is “not 100 percent right” because he looks at the coronavirus pandemic from “a very narrow public health point of view.”
Adm. Brett Giroir, the White House’s coronavirus testing czar, said Sunday that the U.S. is in a “much better place than we were in April” in regards to the coronavirus pandemic, though the rise in cases is concerning.
“We definitely had a sharp increase in the number of people going to the hospital, the number of people in ICU, the number of people on ventilators,” Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Gimenez (R) said on “State of the Union.” “We still have capacity, but it does cause me a lot of concern.”
Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif) said Sunday that President Trump’s decision to commute the sentence of his longtime adviser, Roger Stone, is a “threat to national security.”
House Intelligence Committee Chair Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) on Sunday said President Trump’s decision to commute the sentence of his former adviser, Roger Stone, “should be offensive to you if you care about rule of law and you care about justice.”
