First lady Jill Biden and freshly sworn-in Education Secretary Miguel Cardona are touring reopened schools in their home states flanked by teachers’ union bosses.
The duo is visiting Benjamin Franklin School in Meriden, Connecticut, and Fort LeBoeuf Middle School in Waterford, Pennsylvania, on Wednesday as the White House works to reopen as many K-8 schools as it can within President Biden’s first 100 days in office.
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Jill Biden was met in Connecticut, where Cardona was the state’s education commissioner, by Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers. The first lady and Cardona will then be greeted in Pennsylvania, Biden’s home turf, by Becky Pringle of the National Education Association.
“It’s so nice to be here. I’m Jill. Hi,” the first lady told a class of socially-distanced and masked kindergarten students in Connecticut who have been back in school since last summer.
After promising that its coronavirus pandemic response would be guided by science, the White House has been pulled in different directions by students, parents, teachers, and their unions regarding school reopenings. That tension was most clearly evident in President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris’s initial refusal to publicly say teachers could safely return to their classrooms without being fully inoculated against COVID-19, despite Centers of Disease Control and Prevention guidance.
On Tuesday, Biden announced he wanted teachers, school staff members, and child care workers to receive at least one shot of a COVID-19 vaccine by the end of the month. The new target was rolled out after his administration secured enough vaccine doses to inoculate every adult by the end of May.
“Let me be clear: We can reopen schools if the right steps are taken, even before employees are vaccinated. But time and again, we’ve heard from educators and parents that they have anxieties about that,” he said.
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The president used the announcement to push for his $1.9 trillion spending package, which he said would help cover the cost of employing more teachers to reduce class sizes, setting up socially-distanced classrooms, buying masks and other protective gear, and having schools properly cleaned.
He also ordered the 20 or so remaining states that weren’t prioritizing teachers waiting in their vaccine lines to do so. To support that effort, the federal government would deploy its pharmacy vaccine program to prioritize pre-K through 12th-grade teachers and staff, as well as child care workers, for a month, he said.
