The American Federation of Teachers warned Congress on Monday that nearly 1.4 million education jobs could be lost if Congress fails to provide adequate education funding in the next coronavirus relief package.
“Our nation is at a critical crossroad, and the decisions Congress and the president make in the next two weeks will be felt for generations to come,” said AFT President Randi Weingarten when releasing the report.
The union’s report comes as the Senate is set to begin negotiations on its next coronavirus relief package.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Republican from Kentucky, wants his chamber to approve the legislation before August. Last week, he said that his colleagues are working to secure more funding for schools to go back in the fall.
“I think all the evidence indicates that distance-learning for kids is not as good. They’ve already lost part of the last semester; we need to find a way to safely get back to work,” he said.
The cost of the Senate bill is expected to be around $1 trillion. It is unclear how much of that total would go toward education.
House Democrats in May approved legislation, the Heroes Act, that would provide more than $100 billion to the Department of Education to support schools in their response to the coronavirus. The Republican Senate is not expected to take up the measure.
For the coming school year, the AFT report identified budget shortfalls of $93.5 billion for pre-K-12 and $45 billion for higher education, which it estimates would result in losses of 962,000 and 394,000 jobs, respectively.
Beyond providing adequate funding to keep schools running, another $116.5 billion would be required to make schools and colleges safe enough to reopen, according to the report.
“To safely reopen schools and address the critical health and safety needs of educators and students — i.e., to provide for safe social distancing, masks, hand-washing stations, cleaning supplies, test kits and other measures to make sure schools do not become incubators of virus spread — schools will need significant federal resources on top of what states can provide,” the report states.
Weingarten warned that failing to provide adequate funding to education would not only increase the number of jobless people in the country but also that a generation of students would be set back.
“If Congress fails to act now, millions more American workers will be relegated to the unemployment lines, and a generation of students will be added to the coronavirus toll,” she said.
