Vice President Kamala Harris and her spokeswoman appeared to dodge questions about the timeline on school reopenings during interviews on Wednesday.
Harris, who appeared on NBC’s Today Show, was asked about the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s latest guidelines tying safe school reopenings to community infection rates. When asked if the latest guideline was a mistake, Harris didn’t give a direct answer.
“Well, let’s first say this, that in the last four weeks, schools are opening every week. More schools are opening,” she said. “It is because we are supplementing what needs to happen around the vaccinations getting to states, but also because folks — we’re seeing progress. When folks are wearing masks, when they’re getting vaccinated, when they’re social distancing, we’re seeing progress there. But we all want the schools to reopen. All of us who have children in our lives. They want to go back to school. We want them to go back to school. Teachers want to teach.”
Harris later played down the guidelines as merely “recommendations” and not requirements, a talking point often used by the Trump administration regarding public health practices like masking.
“Well, so here’s the thing. What the CDC, what they have recommended are exactly that, recommendations, about how to reopen safely if they’ve been closed. How to stay open if they’ve been opened,” Harris said. “So the recommendations include what, again, needs to happen around social distancing, hand-washing, mask-wearing. But the point is that we all want our kids to get back to school as quickly as possible and as safely as possible.”
The vice president also reiterated President Biden‘s commitment to reopen schools within the first 100 days of his administration, a promise he made prior to being inaugurated.
Harris’s uncertainty was mirrored by Symone Sanders, the vice president’s spokeswoman, during an interview on CNN. After host John Berman accused the administration of treating school reopenings like a “trick question,” Sanders avoided saying whether vaccines for teachers should be a necessity for schools to reopen.
“I think the president has been clear, the vice president has been clear, and I think I was really clear just now,” Sanders said. “It is the administration’s position, the president and vice president believe that teachers should be prioritized for vaccinations.”
Berman cut Sanders off, asking for a direct answer on whether the president believes teachers have to be vaccinated.
“The president believes that teachers should be prioritized for vaccination,” Sanders said. “His wife, Dr. Biden, the first lady, is a teacher. He knows the importance of teachers being in the classroom. The president and vice president also know that teaching for many people is not just what they do. It is who they are. It is a calling and teachers want to be in the classroom. Parents want students in the classroom. And we want to do so safely and operating according to the science.”
The delayed return to in-person instruction has angered many local officials who have urged unions to return teachers to classrooms. In Chicago, Mayor Lori Lightfoot battled the city’s teachers union for weeks, at one point threatening to lock teachers out of online learning software if they did not return to classrooms. This week, Chicago Public Schools announced that in-person classes would resume Wednesday for the city’s tens of thousands of students.
In San Francisco, city officials sued their own school district after they failed to provide a reopening plan in the 11 months since the coronavirus first made its outbreak. Schools are demanding transportation to and from work, upgraded ventilation for their buildings, and vaccines for all staff members before teachers will return to educate the more than 50,000 students in the district. The school district postponed talks on how to reopen classrooms safely this week, despite the lawsuit.
