Joe Biden is staying on the offensive against Donald Trump—in a world where having a coherent policy vision and being concerned about tens of thousands of needless deaths is part of an effective offense. Biden will address coronavirus and school reopenings on Wednesday, in remarks previewed by senior campaign adviser Symone Sanders.
“Too many classrooms are empty because of President Trump’s continued and willful failure to offer a meaningful plan to address COVID-19,” Sanders told reporters Tuesday night. “He’s barreling forward trying to reopen schools because he thinks it will help his own reelection. It’s very clear, glaringly clear, that Donald Trump doesn’t have a plan.”
The former vice president turned Democratic presidential nominee and his wife, Dr. Jill Biden, a longtime educator, have a briefing with education leaders and public health experts before Biden speaks. That group includes former Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell; Joshua Sharfstein, a vice dean at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and director of the Bloomberg American Health Initiative; Linda Darling-Hammond, the president of the California State Board of Education; and the Harvard Global Health Institute’s Ingrid Katz.
Biden has advocated nearly $100 billion in new funding to make schools safer to reopen, as well as clearer federal standards on when it is safe for schools to reopen and what precautions should be taken.
Jill Biden has been holding a Back to School tour of 10 cities in eight battleground states, including remote events and some in person, talking about both safe school reopening and remote learning.
On Thursday, Biden plans to visit Kenosha, Wisconsin, where, in the wake of the police shooting of Jacob Blake, he “will hold a community meeting in Kenosha to bring together Americans to heal and address the challenges we face.”
