White House escalates battle with Republican governors over masking in schools
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WASHINGTON — The Biden administration said Tuesday that school districts across the nation should follow federal masking guidelines, even if that means resisting Republican governors who have enacted measures prohibiting districts from establishing mask mandates.
During a Tuesday press briefing, White House press secretary Jen Psaki praised the “courage” and “boldness” of school officials across Florida who have imposed mask mandates despite being ordered not to do so by Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican with presidential ambitions and little patience for pandemic restrictions. He has threatened to cut off funding to districts, and to individual educators, who defy his ban.
Psaki said the Biden administration was looking for ways to “support districts and schools as they try to follow the science, do the right thing and save lives,” including by possibly using federal funds to compensate districts or officials penalized for imposing mask mandates, as an increasing number of districts are now doing in Florida and Texas. The latter state has also enacted a ban on mask mandates in schools.
Her words were an implicit signal that other districts following suit would not be abandoned by Washington, though the exact nature of federal support for embattled districts remains unclear.
“We are certainly encouraging any officials, and local leaders, to follow public health guidelines to save lives,” Psaki said.
The lone Democrat in the DeSantis administration, Agriculture Commissioner Nikki Fried — who has announced that she will seek the governorship next year — praised that announcement while blasting the governor for creating what she deemed a “leadership void” in Tallahassee. DeSantis has been sharply criticized, including by at least one prominent Republican, for an approach to the pandemic that has seemed at times to cater to political conservatives while dismissing the dictates of public health.
DeSantis has maintained that lockdowns and other restrictions have done little to stop the spread of the coronavirus. The rise of the Delta variant has not led him to rethink that defiant stance.
Schools have become a particularly contentious issue. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said late last month that everyone in schools should wear masks, an announcement that was met with varying degrees of assent. The recommendation was intended as a preventative measure to keep schools from closing, as they did for much of the 2020-21 school year.
The new guidance, coming as the school year is about to begin, has reinvigorated the face mask culture wars, which had grown quiescent for much of June and July. President Biden has tried studiously to avoid cultural battles, but given the efficacy of face masks in preventing the coronavirus from spreading, and the need to keep schools open, the issue has been all but impossible for the White House to avoid.
During a question-and-answer session with journalists following his remarks on the Senate passage of a $1.2 trillion infrastructure package, Biden chided governors intent on politicizing school mask mandates. It was “a little disingenuous,” the president said, for proponents of limited government (a presumable reference to outspoken conservatives like Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and DeSantis) to use government power to keep localities from acting as they see fit in response to the pandemic.
The president then made a more personal appeal, invoking the tragedy of seeing “little kids — I mean, 4, 5, 6 years old — in hospitals, on ventilators. And some of them passing.”
Pediatric deaths remain rare, but cases among children are increasing.
The confrontation over masking in schools has become especially heated in Texas and Florida, where the imminent return to school has coincided with a sharp increase in COVID-19 hospitalizations. The highly transmissible Delta variant of the coronavirus has proliferated through those and other low-vaccination states. Those are also often states with intense resistance to masking, though nowhere is that resistance as pronounced as it has been in Florida and Texas.
Although the vast majority of American educators are vaccinated, children under 12 are not yet eligible to receive coronavirus immunizations. Vaccines remain exceptionally effective in preventing serious illness or death from any variant of the coronavirus, including Delta. But masks do appear to protect against Delta, which proliferates more rapidly than other variants, and can break through the protection offered by vaccines with slightly more frequency than previous strains of the pathogen.
Miami-Dade County Public Schools, the largest school district in Florida, is moving toward requiring masks in schools for all teachers, students and staff, regardless of vaccination status. Dallas, the second-largest district in Texas, has said masks will be required in schools. Education officials in Houston, the state’s largest district, will vote on a mask mandate later this week.
Florida’s DeSantis has become the most vociferous opponent to masking at the state level, even as the state he governs continues to be the epicenter of the latest coronavirus surge. He has continued to insist that mask mandates not be imposed on Florida schools, telling school superintendents on Monday that they could lose pay if they contravened his anti-mask decree.
The White House is looking to vitiate that threat by using funds from last winter’s coronavirus relief package to pay educators penalized for mask mandates. The package included more than $130 billion for schools nationwide. Psaki noted that Florida has not yet disbursed those funds, implying that they could be used to pay superintendents and other education officials who incur DeSantis’s ire. “They’re federal funds,” she said. “They’re under federal discretion. They just need to be distributed to these schools. We are looking at what’s possible.”
But asked later about offering such assistance, Biden expressed hesitation about how, and to what degree, the federal government could support school districts resisting DeSantis.
“We’re checking that,” the president said.
A White House official would only say that the Biden administration was exploring options about how funds from the coronavirus relief package could be potentially used to bolster school districts or individuals deprived of funding for imposing mask mandates, but declined to provide specifics.
The possibility — however real or remote — of the federal government stepping in to assist districts that defy DeSantis could lead to more districts ignoring the governor’s ban. Psaki reiterated the White House position that governors unwilling to take public health seriously should “get out of the way.” It remains unclear, however, just how much power the White House is able — or willing — to use to push them aside.
DeSantis’s communications director Taryn Fenske said it was “surprising that the White House would rather spend money for the salaries of bureaucratic superintendents and elected politicians, who don’t believe that parents have a right to choose what’s best for their children, than on Florida’s students, which is what these funds should be used for.”
Gov. Abbott of Texas has not said he would withhold pay from educators, but he has shown no willingness to back down from his anti-mask position. “We are all working to protect Texas children and those most vulnerable among us,” his communications director Renae Eze told Yahoo News, “but violating the governor’s executive orders — and violating parental rights — is not the way to do it. Gov. Abbott has been clear that the time for mask mandates is over; now is the time for personal responsibility. Parents and guardians have the right to decide whether their child will wear a mask or not, just as with any other decision in their child’s life.”
The White House has been careful not to turn its confrontation with DeSantis and Abbott into a broader partisan battle. On Monday, President Biden spoke on the telephone with Asa Hutchinson, the Republican governor of Arkansas.
Last week Hutchinson admitted regret at preventing schools from imposing mask mandates. He had called lawmakers into a special session to amend the mask ban they’d signed months before, but a court struck down the mask ban before the state legislature reached any conclusions of its own on whether to make any changes.
Many parents, educators and students had hoped to begin this year without masks, but the Delta variant has frustrated those hopes. Yet masks also offer the best option for safe in-person teaching, according to medical experts.
In an op-ed published on Tuesday in the New York Times, associate professor of pediatrics Dr. Kanecia Zimmerman and pediatric infectious disease specialist Dr. Danny Benjamin Jr. warn that in “schools that choose to open without mask mandates and with limited vaccine uptakes, increased Covid is likely.”
Those schools could then be forced to close, relegating children to computer screens once again.
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