POLITICO NIGHTLY: Parents give pandemic school dirty looks

 

Oct 01, 2020   BY RENUKA RAYASAM With help from Myah Ward BREAKING — Hope Hicks, a close Trump aide who flew on Air Force One on Tuesday with the president, has tested positive for coronavirus. GRADING THE SCHOOL YEAR — After POLITICO sent home its workforce in March, I got an invitation to a companywide Slack channel for parents: #remotewithkids. What started out as a place to share cute pictures, notes about baking projects or tips about entertaining children while they quarantine at home quickly turned into real talk: It’s hard to juggle working with parenting when school is out and everyone is stuck at home under one roof. As the fall approached, the room’s chatter turned to the new school year and how to wade through a menu of terrible options. We know we’re more privileged than most: mostly college-educated, lots of two-income households. But we’re still parents. Everyone at POLITICO follows politics and policy very closely, and on this topic, there’s no consensus: We’re not sure how to weigh the health risks of sending kids to school against, to be charitable, less than perfect virtual schooling. So this morning, I sent up a flare in the #remotewithkids channel asking POLITICOs to talk about what they’ve learned from the first month of Covid-2020 education. Almost everyone agreed that the school year has been a mess. A huge part of the problem has been the politicization of school reopenings. Many school districts have opened up even though they were in a community with high Covid spread, while others are staying shut when they should consider reopening — and there’s even a study to prove it. Some parents are settling into a remote school year. “The school district is screwing this up,” said Tanya Snyder, a transportation reporter who has children in kindergarten and the third grade in the Washington, D.C., schools. The district is not being upfront about health data or improving school buildings or hiring more teachers or working with the union, Tanya said. For now, the district is virtual through Nov. 9. She’s worried about the things her kids are missing: swim lessons, parkour class. But for the most part her homebody kids are getting along fine at home. She said it’s “bananas” that the city opened up other businesses before community transmission was under control, a key determinant of whether a school district can open up safely. Jessica Cuellar , editorial director for production and operations, has a third grader and a kindergartner in the public schools in Virginia’s Fairfax County, as well as a six-month-old at home. She and her husband opted for remote learning even though they knew the copious screen time would be a challenge. Then the district went all remote anyway. Her kids are doing OK, she admits, but “it’s not easy. I am relieved when we get to dinner.” Other parents are relieved to have the chance to send their kids to school in person. Jack Smith, our executive director for audience solutions, has four kids — 8-year-old twins, a 5-year-old and a 3-year-old — and a beach house in New Jersey. The family retreated to their beach house when Covid first hit, but had planned on sending the kids back to school in Arlington — until the school district started leaning toward a virtual school year. “The prospect of having four kids in the house doing virtual school, my wife managing this chaos, me working full time, it fundamentally would have broken our family,” Jack said. So they opted to send their kids to school in Avalon, N.J., where the district had orders of magnitude fewer kids and a plan to keep them socially distanced. Fernando Rodas, an operations manager, has been thrilled about his kindergartner starting in-person public school in New York this week, but adds that he’s “cautiously pessimistic.” As he put it, “I wouldn’t be surprised if we went fully virtual next week.” Two of Julie Kennedy’s older kids, in the fourth and second grades, are doing virtual public school in Charlottesville, Va. But her youngest is in an in-person pre-K program. Kennedy, executive director for product, and her husband struggled with whether to send the youngest to a school building, but decided it was worth the risk given the area’s low Covid prevalence rate and the school’s precautions. “Honestly every day when he walks out the door I have two feelings: I hope this is a good decision, and we are all jealous of him for being able to go to school,” she said. Parents of teens are coping differently with how the pandemic has shattered their year: Angela Greiling Keane , managing editor of states and Canada, has a 16-year-old in a Washington, D.C., public charter school. Given community spread, virtual education makes sense for her daughter’s school, Angela said. But she’s worried about college prep and all the social aspects of high school that her daughter is missing. Traci Schweikert, chief talent officer, has a middle schooler and a high schooler in Fairfax County schools, which are currently remote. The lack of social interaction has been hard on her kids. She worries about their mental health. The debate over school reopenings has opened up a broader discussion across the country: What’s the point of school? The pandemic has made it painfully clear, if it wasn’t already, that school isn’t just a place for education. It’s a place where they get fed, where they learn social skills, where they get counselling and screened for abuse. And without a plan for keeping teachers, staff and students safe, it can be a place where Covid spreads in the community. Sign up for the new Weekly Education: Coronavirus Special Edition newsletter, where we explore the debates of the day, and talk to movers and shakers about whether the changes ushered in to American education by the pandemic, from pre-K through grad school, are here to stay. Welcome to POLITICO Nightly: Coronavirus Special Edition. Reach out rrayasam@politico.com or on Twitter at @renurayasam.   GET THE SCOOP FROM THE MILKEN INSTITUTE GLOBAL CONFERENCE: POLITICO's Ryan Heath and Ben White are teaming up to write a special "Global Translations" newsletter and bring you exclusive coverage and the top takeaways from the 23rd annual Milken Institute Global Conference, featuring 4,000+ participants and 500 speakers representing more than 70 countries. Don't miss out on insights from the most influential minds and thought leaders reinventing health, technology, philanthropy, industry, and media. This year's conference will center on the theme "Meeting the Moment," and will address the dual crises of a global pandemic and social injustice. Sign up today for everything you need to know direct from #MIGlobal.     People visit the exterior of the Washington Monument on the first day the landmark has reopened for interior tours after months of closure. | Getty Images FIRST IN NIGHTLY McCAIN REPUBLICANS BECOME McCAIN DEMS — Cindy McCain is about to test how much weight her surname still carries in Arizona. Some Republicans think the answer might be: Just enough to matter for Joe Biden. Endorsements rarely provide more than a nominal boost to the candidates they’re bestowed upon. But the McCains are a special lot in Arizona, national political reporter Laura Barrón-López writes. Though it’s well known the late Sen. John McCain wasn’t a fan of President Donald Trump, his wife’s endorsement last week of Biden — who enjoyed a decades-long friendship with the Republican that outlasted the 2008 presidential race — made waves in the state. The Biden campaign was already feeling good about flipping Arizona, where polling averages show him with a lead of over 3 points. Cindy McCain’s backing could be particularly valuable in massive Maricopa County surrounding Phoenix, and especially its enormous swath of independents and moderate Republicans. In other words, among McCain Republicans. The Republican Party of Arizona is no longer the one John McCain presided over. Its apparatus is solidly behind Trump, as evidenced by the rise of far-right Republican Kelli Ward from a fringe member of the party to head of the state GOP. But no one’s arguing Cindy McCain could sway Trump diehards — it’s all about independents, of which there are many. ON THE HILL HOUSE PASSES BILL AS TALKS FALTER — The House passed a $2.2 trillion coronavirus relief measure in the Democrats’ latest bid to pressure Republicans into a massive bipartisan deal before the election. The bill, approved almost entirely along party lines, comes as Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin have spent all week trying to negotiate an agreement. Without a breakthrough, no aid bill is expected to be signed into law before the Nov. 3 election. FROM THE HEALTH DESK HHS HEADS TO C-LIST — Lady Gaga. Garth Brooks. Billy Joel. Those are some of the celebs the health department wanted for a taxpayer-funded advertising campaign to “defeat despair” about the coronavirus. Instead, they got Dennis Quaid and some lesser-known musicians. In the latest POLITICO Dispatch, health care reporter Dan Diamond breaks down the sputtering ad blitz and why it’s getting scrutiny from lawmakers. Listen to the latest POLITICO Dispatch podcast NIGHTLY INTERVIEW FIRE DRILL — The West Coast fires have dropped from the headlines, but they aren’t extinguished — and they look to be a permanent feature of life. Fires do more than burn down houses. They harm human health, one of many ways climate change is starting to take its toll. Executive health editor Joanne Kenen called Howard Frumkin, the former dean of the University of Washington School of Public Health, a leading expert on planetary health (and, disclosure, a friend of Joanne), to talk about how climate change is affecting our health, and what can be done about it. Their conversation has been edited. We know fires and smoke are respiratory hazards. How else are they harmful? The upending of people’s lives by fires — with or without displacement, the loss of belongings, the fear, the anxiety — are very, very corrosive to mental health. It’s cascading disasters. When you get displaced, bad things can happen to your health. We don’t have a national electronic medical record system. So if you are elderly, or are mentally ill, nobody knows what medications you are taking or what your health problems are. If you are on dialysis or chemotherapy, continuity of care is a big issue. Is the changing planet imminently threatening our health? Severe events — hurricanes in the Gulf, the fires, the droughts in the Southwest — cause physical injuries, displacement and so on. Air quality gets worse. Ozone levels increase. From Los Angeles to Atlanta, allergies are worsened. Poison ivy is worse. Dengue fever is now occurring in this country. Lyme disease is expanding its range. It’s harder to maintain water purity, which affects a whole bucket of infectious diseases — those spread by mosquitoes and those spread by water. What about food and nutrition? When climate events interrupt the production or distribution of food, prices go up. People who are food insecure buy calorie-dense, nutrition-poor foods. You get unhealthy diets — the kind of diets that promote noncommunicable disease like obesity, diabetes and so on. Farmers’ ability to grow food plummets. Drought is very bad for the mental health of farmers, and when they can’t produce food, it’s bad for all the people who need to eat food. Experts predict climate-driven migration as sea levels rise. That may take years, but what might it look like? There isn’t a single city that has planned for a major population surge. Nobody has excess affordable housing. Nobody has excess schooling. Nobody has excess transit capacity. Nobody has excess employment. So once the moving starts, on that scale, there will be a lot of pain for a lot of people who try to relocate. That will in turn aggravate affordable housing shortages. Homelessness is bad for your health too. Not everything Frumkin had to say was so grim. Read Friday’s Nightly for his views on how tackling climate change could improve human health. ASK THE AUDIENCE Nightly asks you: Have you adopted a new pet during the pandemic? Send us a picture of your new furry, scaled or feathered friend to nightly@politico.com, and we’ll include select photos in our Friday edition. THE GLOBAL FIGHT OFF THE RAILS — A Scottish MP apologized today for traveling to London by train while waiting for the results of a coronavirus test — and making the return journey after testing positive. Margaret Ferrier of the Scottish National Party had a test for coronavirus after feeling unwell but still made the trip from her constituency south of Glasgow to London on Monday. She spoke in parliament and on Monday evening found out that the test was positive. Despite that, Ferrier still made the train journey back to Scotland on Tuesday, Andrew McDonald reports. Official U.K. guidance says people should self-isolate immediately if they have any symptoms of coronavirus or have received a positive test result. Ferrier apologized in a statement she tweeted out today, saying there “was no excuse” for her actions and that she had notified the police. She confirmed she had also notified the House of Commons authorities — any MPs she was in contact with will now have to self-isolate. Ferrier had been critical of Boris Johnson's top adviser Dominic Cummings when he broke lockdown rules in May, and called for him to resign. She said at the time that Cummings’ actions “have undermined the sacrifices that we have all been making in lockdown to protect each other from coronavirus.” “His position is untenable and he must be removed from his post now,” she added. The SNP’s Westminster leader, Ian Blackford, tweeted shortly after her statement to confirm that the whip had been removed from Ferrier — effectively removing her from the party. FOUR SQUARE SQUARING UP ON THE DEBATE — POLITICO’s Four Square panel, featuring Eugene Daniels, Tim Alberta, Ryan Lizza and Laura Barrón-López, talks about the wild debate Tuesday and how it will affect the election. The group also covers Trump’s comments on election security and white supremacist groups with White House reporter Tina Nguyen. NIGHTLY NUMBER $4 billion The price tag for USDA’s Farmers to Families Food Box program, which has distributed more than 100 million boxes to those in need since May, with the aim of redirecting meat, dairy and produce that might normally go to restaurants and other food-service businesses. The Agriculture Department last week began mandating the boxes of surplus food for needy families include a letter from Trump claiming credit for the program. (h/t senior agriculture and food reporter Helena Bottemiller Evich) PARTING WORDS ‘DISAPPOINTED’ — The CEO of Pfizer — one of the frontrunners in the coronavirus vaccine race — said in a staff memo today that the company wouldn’t cave to political pressure to rush its vaccine to market, while at the same time decrying “those who argue for delay,” health care reporter Sarah Owermohle reports. “Tuesday night I joined the millions of Americans who tuned in to the Presidential debate. Once more, I was disappointed that the prevention for a deadly disease was discussed in political terms rather than scientific facts,” Albert Bourla said in an internal memo obtained by POLITICO. Trump said Tuesday during the first 2020 presidential debate that the country is “weeks away from a vaccine,” contradicting federal health officials who project a shot will be available at the end of the year or early 2021. Democratic candidate Joe Biden countered that on “the whole notion of a vaccine — I don’t trust him at all; you don’t either.” Bourla has repeatedly said that Pfizer could apply for emergency authorization from the FDA sometime in October, the most ambitious target laid out by any of the vaccine developers whose shots are now in late-stage U.S trials. His memo to staff today sticks to that goal while also asserting Pfizer’s independence in the face of strong pressure from the White House to deliver a shot before Election Day.   NEW EPISODES: LISTEN TO POLITICO'S GLOBAL TRANSLATIONS PODCAST: The world has always been beset by big problems that defy political boundaries, but in 2020 many of those issues have exploded. Are world leaders and political actors up to the task of solving them? Is the private sector? Our Global Translations podcast, presented by Citi, unpacks the roadblocks to smart policy decisions, and examines the long-term costs of the short-term thinking that drives many political and business decisions. Subscribe now for Season Two, launching Oct. 21.     Did someone forward this email to you? Sign up here.   Follow us on Twitter Renuka Rayasam @renurayasam   FOLLOW US

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