Las Vegas Sun

March 29, 2024

Where I Stand:

Trump’s threats will not make our schools safe

There is a reason we call our colleges and universities institutions of “higher learning.”

It means that after we have all finished high school — but for a few exceptions, an absolute minimum for minimum success in life — we can go on to an institution of higher learning so we can, you guessed it, learn more. And so we should take our clues about learning and such from those who know more. I know that sounds too logical but in today’s world sometimes we have to reiterate.

So what are universities doing that K-12 public school systems around the country are not when it comes to making plans for dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic?

Mostly, the same thing ­— but without the ridiculous interference from the White House that is making a mess, yet again, of its pandemic response.

Educators are trying to find a way to strike a balance and make effective a plan to teach students while keeping them safe, their families safe and our teachers and their families safe. After all, there is no higher calling for a parent and a community than to educate the next generation — without jeopardizing the community’s health at the same time.

As we know all too horrifically, that has been a difficult challenge in the age of school shootings. So now we layer on top of that the need to educate and keep students and their families safe in the midst of the novel coronavirus, which is proving to be a stubborn and deadly adversary.

Add to all of that the fiscal challenges that every state is facing when it comes to paying for whatever plan is adopted around public schooling, and it is easy to understand the difficulty governors like Steve Sisolak are facing. Nevada’s special legislative session seems to be doing little more than looking at cutting budgets, which is exactly the wrong approach — but it may be the only one available to a state that is forced to balance its budget and has no viable source of tax revenues at the moment.

And that is where the federal government comes in. Under our Constitution, the federal government is the only government — not states, cities or hamlets — that can print money, which makes Washington, D.C., the go to place for relief and understanding during these historically difficult times.

You can define “relief and understanding” as the ability to print the billions of dollars needed to allow every state — just like Nevada — to institute plans to bring our kids back to school in the fall. And that isn’t hard for the feds to do.

Congress and the president just sent some $2.5 trillion of brand new money out the door to help people and businesses cope. It hasn’t been nearly enough to do the job, but it has proved the case that it can and must be done. That means they can do the same to allow school districts to do what has to be done to teach our kids and keep them safe.

Instead of leading the country toward a viable solution — one that allows parents the comfort of knowing their kids are in school while they have to work — President Donald Trump is issuing tweeted mandates that are designed to force schools to open up completely.

While Trump sees the opening of schools as a plus for his flagging reelection campaign — if kids are in schools, parents can work and the economy may be able to function as before (a pipe dream in the time of COVID-19) — every other sane American sees this as a move to spread a so-far unstoppable virus that is raging its way through most of the United States.

He issues a tweet and the school districts must jump for fear of losing whatever money they currently get from the federal government. If you think we are in tough shape in Nevada now, just imagine what happens when Trump pulls back the money we are supposed to get for our education system.

What Trump should be doing is leading Congress toward making sure school districts have the money they need to open schools in the safest and most effective way — the way colleges and universities are making their decisions — as opposed to the president’s insistence on some magical mystery tour through the world of coronavirus.

But, of course, that isn’t Trump and his Republican chorus. They choose to go boldly and blindly where no man should ever go again — having gone there in the Middle Ages and learned the lesson from the Black Plague. He has chosen to order schools to reopen fully while refusing to pay for the effort.

A few years ago the Republican Party would have been railing against such an order. They would have called it an “unfunded mandate” and they would have fallen on their political swords to defeat it.

Instead, the GOP has gone missing with no action. And Trump is free to threaten parents — through the school districts — into deciding whether to risk their jobs and their sanity against the education and safety of their children.

Had Donald Trump actually learned anything in that university that he cheated his way into, he would have had a dose of “higher learning” and this country would not be suffering from its plague of ever-lowering expectations from the White House.

Brian Greenspun is editor, publisher and owner of the Sun.