Sen. Roy Blunt wants answers from education secretary
U.S. Senator Roy Blunt, R-Mo, is calling on the nation’s education secretary to provide a detailed plan on how the Biden Administration is using federal money to help keep schools open.
In a letter to U.S. Department of Education Secretary Miguel Cardona, Blunt is asking the secretary to account for billions of Congressional dollars.
The Republican senator says despite the high vaccination rate among teachers, ample federal funding, and CDC-backed prevention strategies, a growing number of universities and K-12 schools have “unnecessarily shifted to remote learning in light of the omicron variant.”
Sen. Blunt says funding isn’t an obstacle to keeping schools open as Congress has provided more than $266 billion for K-12 schools and higher learning institutions over the last two years.
Blunt says over the past several weeks, many colleges and universities have returned to remote learning, including Georgetown University, Yale University, and Duke University. He says more than 5,400 K-12 schools across the country have closed their buildings for one day or more in the first week of 2022,
He calls the closures of in person schooling “preemptive and unnecessary, citing the high vaccination rate of teachers and the virus prevention strategies recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.