Los Angeles County Health Director Barbara Ferrer said that she doesn't expect schools to reopen until after November's election.
“We don’t realistically anticipate that we would be moving to either tier 2 or to reopening K-12 schools at least until after the election, in early November," Ferrer told education professionals and school nurses in a conference call. "When we just look at the timing of everything, it seems to us a more realistic approach to this would be to think that we’re going to be where we are now until we are done with the election.”
The audio, obtained by California radio correspondent Steve Gregory, led to the hosts of Southern California's John and Ken Show on KFI discussing the possibility of Ferrer conditioning reopening in order to exert political influence.
“She seems to have gone out of the mainstream in the totality of what’s going on in the county, and she’s starting to get very specific on political agendas," Gregory said. "It took her a week or so to admit that protesters were part of the spread of the virus. We had to pressure her to say that.”
John Kobylt, the co-host of the John and Ken Show, said Ferrer had a "real left bent" to her politics.
"She spends a lot of time huffing and puffing over the minority breakouts on the cases. I mean every day she goes through a laundry list and bemoans it, way way out of proportion.”
The Los Angeles Unified School District, the second-largest school district in the United States, stopped in-person schooling in March. The 633,000 students have been taking online classes and using remote education since the stoppage of in-person schooling.
Los Angeles County is currently in the "widespread" tier of California Gov. Gavin Newsom's reopening plan. Schools cannot open fully in person until the county reaches the "substantial" tier for two weeks.
In July, Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser announced schools would be closed until at least Nov. 6, three days after the presidential election.
Los Angeles County has reported 236,459 cases of COVID-19 and 5,746 deaths as of Thursday morning.
