EDITORIAL: It’s past time to get kids back into schools

The question for many parents in certain parts of the country isn’t whether their children will be allowed back into the classroom to finish the current school year. It’s whether they’ll be back to in-person learning when the next year begins in late summer.

That’s no exaggeration given how the situation is evolving.

President Joe Biden vowed to reopen schools as part of his first 100-day agenda. But during his first weeks in office he has instead kowtowed to teachers unions, which in many large cities have dismissed the science and employed COVID scare tactics — body bags filled with children! — to obstruct efforts to get kids back on campus.

The hard-left mayor of Chicago has begged local union leaders to get inner-city kids back to school and has been rewarded with strike talk. In San Francisco, the city has just sued its local teachers union over the reopening issue. In Southern Nevada, the Clark County Education Association has expressed a willingness to reintroduce in-person learning, but so far only young children are slated for a return to school.

It’s a devastating travesty, particularly for less-advantaged students falling further behind as they struggle with distance learning. Let’s hope families remember this the next time education union activists claim to be working in favor of their young charges. The kids don’t pay dues, after all.

On Wednesday, Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, further exposed that the union obstructionism has little to do with safety — for either students or educators.

“There is increasing data to suggest that schools can safely reopen and that safe reopening does not suggest that teachers need to be vaccinated in order to reopen safely,” she said. “So while we are implementing the criteria of the Advisory Committee and of the state and local guidances to get vaccination across these eligible communities, I would also say that safe reopening of schools is not — that vaccination of teachers is not a prerequisite for safe reopening of schools.”

But even allowing educators to go to the head of the line isn’t good enough for many militant labor folk. “Having the vaccine available for teachers … does not solve all the problems,” Washington Teachers’ Union President Elizabeth Davis told The Washington Post. What Ms. Davis and other union leaders seek is to exploit the pandemic to pressure governments to lavish billions more on the public schools under the guise of COVID protection.

Mr. Biden’s press secretary said Thursday that the president “wants schools to open.” Where is he, then? In fact, Mr. Biden and other Democrats have chosen to line up behind their sugar daddies in the education establishment and Big Labor while consigning kids to the corner. Perhaps we’ll discover what parents think of their priorities when public school enrollment figures are released next fall.