EDITORIAL: No excuse for schools to remain closed to students

Teachers unions continue to block school reopenings in many parts of the country. Meanwhile, the White House has meekly capitulated to those same special interests and has all but repudiated its promise to get kids back in the classroom within the administration’s first 100 days. The result will be untold damage to millions of children for years to come.

And there’s no excuse for it.

“The nearly yearlong suspension of in-person schooling is exerting a toll the scale of which we can only begin to fathom,” wrote Jonathan Chait this month in New York Magazine. Mr. Chait is a pedigreed progressive but has little patience for members of an education establishment who are demanding the impossible before they’ll agree to come back to work. “Under any sane calculation, whether school poses a small risk or an extremely small risk hardly matters,” he writes, “because the alternative is a social catastrophe that dwarfs any public health effect.”

The self-serving union obstructionism is even more indefensible given that it defies real world experience and assurances from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that schools can be safely reopened. Many private schools across the country — including in Las Vegas — are well ahead of the public counterparts in terms of in-person instruction. And consider new data from Florida, where schools have been open for seven months and 80 percent of students are now attending classes full time.

“As school districts around the U.S. continue to grapple with whether to reopen classrooms amid the coronavirus pandemic,” the Wall Street Journal reported this week, “data shows Florida started in-person learning without turning schools into superspreaders.”

Notably, the Florida Education Association attempted to scuttle the state’s reopening plans but failed in court. The president of the union admitted that the move back to class “ended up being safer than many feared,” the Journal noted. In fact, data reveals that “Florida consistently has had lower rates of COVID-19 in schools than in the community at large,” the paper reported. Researchers have found similar results for students in New York and Massachusetts.

The Clark County School District has limped toward a partial reopening this month, which is better than nothing. Experience in Florida and elsewhere, however, should lead local officials to consider a more ambitious approach.

The pandemic will eventually pass, but the long-term social and academic harm to schoolchildren — particularly the underprivileged — will be long-lasting. So too should be the realization for parents that, on the teachers union priority list, the children rank darn near last.