In an ironic twist on the old Republican claim to be the protectors of “local control” in schools, Republican politicians across America are trying to prohibit school districts from mandating that students mask up against the coronavirus. And who is rising to protect the right of local districts to make that decision for themselves? None other than the Biden administration.
President Joe Biden last week suggested federal pandemic relief funds could be given directly to school districts to “backfill” the salaries of school officials facing punitive salary cuts from red-state leaders over their mask mandates. The administration is also raising the possibility of using federal civil rights laws to defend schools’ power to protect their most vulnerable students. It’s a sad commentary that the health and very lives of students are now under assault from red-state politicians — most recently Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt — to the point that the federal government has to defend them.
Even as the delta variant of the coronavirus is hitting younger victims in record numbers, politicians in at least eight red states, mostly notably Florida and Texas, have moved to prohibit local school districts from enforcing mask mandates among students.
Schmitt announced Tuesday that he is suing to prevent schools from imposing mask mandates. Children under 12 aren’t yet eligible for vaccination, which means masks are the first, last and only line of defense for them. GOP officeholders here and nationally are stripping away that defense.
Who prohibits a basic, simple, proven health mandate intended to protect children in the middle of a pandemic that has killed millions worldwide? Republican politicians intent on pandering to the extremists of their base, that’s who.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, his eyes firmly on a presidential run that will require hard-right support, is now presiding over case spikes higher than his state saw during the worst of the pandemic last year. Schmitt, an announced candidate for the U.S. Senate, needs rural Missouri to win — and rural Missouri has become synonymous with resistance to both vaccination and masking. Not coincidentally, it has also become synonymous with spiking caseloads and overflowing hospitals.
For generations, Republicans have touted the concept of local control as it relates to school districts, on the premise that local school boards, administrators and others on the ground know better than bureaucrats in state capitals or in Washington how to best serve their own kids. Why is that concept valid for lesson plans but not for a virus that could literally kill some of those kids?
Biden is right to offer federal help to school districts under assault from their own states’ politicians in their quest to protect students. The contrast should be clear: The federal government has kids’ backs. Red-state Republicans like Schmitt and DeSantis are siding with the virus.