President Biden, escalating his fight with Republican governors who are blocking local school districts from requiring masks to protect against the coronavirus, said Wednesday he has directed the Education Department to intervene in states — including taking possible legal action — that have moved to bar universal masking in classrooms.
Mr. Biden said he directed Miguel Cardona, his education secretary, “to take additional steps to protect our children,” including against governors who he said are “setting a dangerous tone” in issuing executive orders banning masks mandates and have threatened to penalize school officials who defy them.
“Unfortunately, as you’ve seen throughout this pandemic, some politicians are trying to turn public safety measures — that is, children wearing masks in school — into political disputes for their own political gain,” Mr. Biden said in remarks from the East Room of the White House.
He cited a recent school board meeting in Tennessee where school officials and masks proponents, including doctors and nurses, were heckled and threatened after a debate about masking.
“We are not going to sit by as governors try to block and intimidate educators protecting our children,” he said.
The move puts the federal government at the center of bitter local debates over how to mitigate against the virus in schools, just as the highly infectious Delta variant is fueling a spike in pediatric cases. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends that everyone in schools wears masks, regardless of vaccination status, so that schools can more safely resume in-person instruction. A vast majority of counties across the United States are experiencing either “substantial” or “high” transmission rates that call for indoor mask-wearing even among the vaccinated, according to the C.D.C.
In an interview Wednesday, Dr. Cardona said he, like the president, was, “appalled that there are adults who are blind to their blindness, that there are people who are putting policies in place that are putting students and staff at risk.”
“At the end of the day,” he said, “we shouldn’t be having this conversation. What we’re dealing with now is negligence.”
Invoking the Education Department’s civil rights enforcement arm marks a major turning point in the Biden administration’s effort to get as many students back to in-person schooling this fall, and the urgency felt nationwide about blunting the impact of a pandemic has wreaked havoc on students’ educational careers since March 2020.
The nation’s most vulnerable students, namely students with disabilities, low-income students and students of color, have suffered the deepest setbacks when districts pivoted to remote learning, and their disproportionate disengagement has long drawn concern from education leaders and civil rights watchdogs.
Under Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, students are entitled to a free, appropriate public education, known as FAPE, and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits discrimination based on race, color and national origin.
The department could initiate its own investigations into districts, if state policies and actions rise to potential violations of students’ civil rights. It could also review complaints from parents and advocates who make the case that prohibiting masks mandates is, in effect, a civil rights violation because it could deny a student their right to an education by putting them in harm’s way in school. Such investigations could result in resolution agreements, as many investigations by the office often do, and in the most extreme cases result in revocation of federal funding.
Dr. Cardona said conversations with parents of children with autism, respiratory illness or weak immune systems, “who rely on school for socialization and the important building blocks of learning,” had contributed to his sense of urgency.
“I’ve heard those parents, saying ‘Miguel, because of these policies, my child cannot access their school, I would be putting them in harm’s way,’” Dr. Cardona said. “And to me, that goes against a free appropriate public education. That goes against of the fundamental beliefs of educators across the country to protect their students and provide a well rounded education.”
The administration will also send letters to six states — Arizona, Iowa, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee and Utah — admonishing governors’ efforts to ban universal masking in schools.
Last week, Dr. Cardona sent similar letters to the governors of Texas and Florida, reminding them that districts had both the funding and the discretion to implement safety measures that the C.D.C. recommended for schools. The secretary also made clear that he supported district leaders who defied the governors’ orders.
In his letter to Texas, Mr. Cardona warned that the state was jeopardizing its federal relief funding. The state’s attorney general, Ken Paxton, doubled down in response, suggesting on Twitter that he would take the state’s ban on school mask mandates to the Supreme Court.
Dr. Cardona, who has been traveling around the country to promote the administration’s school reopening efforts, signaled he had lost his patience with students and desperate parents being at the mercy of partisan politics, even in places where the virus is surging.
He said that students being denied access to their right to an education as a result of unsafe school conditions was “unacceptable,” and that “if you look at the hospitalization rates, if you look at the full ICUs, it’s not working.”
“The fact that they’re not adjusting based on the illness, and the outcry from medical experts, is astonishing,” Dr. Cardona said. “But we cannot sit around. We have to do everything in our power, including civil rights investigations and even referring matters to the Department of Justice for enforcement if necessary.”
He said he has also communicated by phone with education leaders in Texas and Florida. In the conversations, he said, “we agree on vaccinations, we disagree on the use of mitigation strategies to keep students safe.”
The federal intervention comes as school districts face a monumental task of trying to get students back to in-person learning and reverse the devastating setbacks experienced by a range of students.
A report released by the department’s civil rights office this summer provided a snapshot of the suffering experienced in the year since schools abruptly shut down in March 2020.
Suzanne B. Goldberg, the acting assistant secretary of the Office for Civil Rights, warned in the June report that the challenges students faced could run afoul of civil rights laws
“Although this report provides a data-driven account of Covid-19’s disparate impacts on students, rather than a legal analysis, it is important to recognize that disparities can sometimes be evidence of legal injuries under federal civil rights laws, even when policies and practices do not directly single out a group of people for harm,” she wrote.
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