Do not forget who kept schools closed.
With predictably awful NAEP data being released today – and the White House press secretary attempting to rewrite history about who did & didn’t want schools to open in fall 2020 – I want to remind readers where Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker stood on July 9, 2020.
Soundbites:
- “This a very complex challenge, getting our kids back to school and doing it safely.” (No, it wasn’t.)
- “We didn’t do this starting out with the idea we everybody have to get everybody back to school. We started with the idea, “Does the science and the data allow us to send kids back to school and, if so, in what manner, and how would that work..?” (Yes, it did, and you knew in March 2020. Plus, Sweden.)
- “I wish that we could have a federal government that was out partner in this endeavor. That’s why I was so frustrated to see the President pronounce, “Well, everybody should open their schools.’ Well, great! Please, please provide us the kind of guidance that will help us do that.” (There was guidance.)
J.B. Pritzker was a coward (as were other governors). He should have said, “UNLOCK THE FREAKING DOOR AND LET THE KIDS IN!” – especially since he’d admitted, “The benefits of in-person instruction can’t be overstated,” in June 2020.
Lori Lightfoot was no better.
Donald Trump screwed up quite a bit (in his covid-19 response & otherwise), but he was adamant about schools needing to reopen, going so far as to threaten removal of federal funding if schools didn’t get their act together. How the current administration can pretend most Republicans, Independents, and Libertarians weren’t calling for open schools in summer 2020 is beyond me.
That August, Betsy DeVos highlighted my response to our district’s decision to pretend that screenschool was an acceptable, equitable substitute to *actual school*: I pulled them out & homeschooled.1
I was fortunate to be able to make that choice. Many parents could not.
A few friends and I started a Twitter account in September 2020, called Kids in Crisis, with the purpose of “giving voice to concerns about the effects of the COVID19 response on kids of all ages.”
The profile pic was staged, but it captures exactly what was happening across Illinois and many parts of the U.S.
Our first tweet was about the impact of the University of Illinois’ [illegal] covid mitigations.2
Scroll the feed, and you will see people who were standing up for children – and being ridiculed for doing do.
As for me and my house, we will not forget the truth.
And we will not let a White House press secretary- or anyone else – rewrite history.
UPDATE: Excellent receipts from Justin Hart & Tom Elliot about school closures.
Post-Script (26 March 2026)
Regarding the Betsy Devos tweet: I don’t recall being aware of the DeVos tweet in 2020 when it occurred but I can’t say for sure. Critics later alleged that this was evidence I was somehow connected to or knew then-Secretary of Education DeVos, which I did not and do not.
DeVos was apparently quoting what I said to the Chicago Tribune (discussed in the WH76 article here; direct link to Tribune piece here.) A PDF of all of my tweets and replies that included the handle DeVos tagged is appended below.
Being mentioned by or “reacted to” by a major influencer, politician, journalist, et al on Twitter/X is, in my experience, a function of various political and media strategists feeding content to whomever operates the accounts. Especially in 2020, I was less aware of how that landscape works than I became over the course of six years – and which I discussed here.
My advocacy for open schools was consistent, persistent, well-documented, and rooted in personal and professional convictions.
Footnotes
- Evanston/Skokie District 65 did not open its doors to students until February 2021. Evanston Township High School District 202 didn’t reopen (with a hybrid model) until April 2021. With our older child starting high school in fall 2021 – and District 202 still pledging allegiance to a ZeroCovid agenda – we decided to sell our house in spring 2021 and moved to a place we knew schools would be open. ↩︎
- Believe it or not, some professors at the U of I still cannot let go of covid. Editorial from today: https://www.news-gazette.com/opinion/town-hall-the-state-of-covid-19-in-champaign-urbana/article_4ed2c2b3-6a7f-58ce-9b80-a08ddce2e84d.html ↩︎
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