MERIDEN, Conn. (AP) – White House teacher Jill Biden, along with new education minister Miguel Cardona, went back to school on Wednesday in a public effort to reproduce districts that have yet to cross to personally learn that can be done safely during the pandemic.
“Teachers want to be back,” the first lady said after spending about an hour at Benjamin Franklin Elementary School in Meriden, Connecticut, visiting classrooms and other areas. “We want to be back. I’m a teacher. I actually learn. ”
Biden is an English professor in the community college who now teaches at a distance from the White House. She said her students recently told her that they could not wait to be in the classroom again.
“But we just know we have to get back safely,” she said.
The trip was the first business holiday for Cardona, the former Connecticut education commissioner, who had been sworn in his new cabinet post just a day earlier.
Biden and Cardona also visited a high school in Pennsylvania on Wednesday. During the trip, they accompanied the heads of two major teachers’ unions, Randi Weingarten of the American Federation of Teachers in Connecticut and Becky Pringle of the National Education Association in Pennsylvania.
The visits came when President Joe Biden made a promise that most K-8 schools would be open for classroom instruction by the end of his first 100 days in office, or the end of April.
To help push this, Biden said on Tuesday he insisted on administering at least one coronavirus vaccine to every teacher, school employee and childminder by the end of March.
The issue of vaccinating teachers has become a flashpoint in school districts across the country as many teachers have held the rope and refused to return to their classrooms unless they got the shots.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention did not include the vaccination of teachers in the guidelines that schools should consider when reopening after months of computer learning.
“We must continue to reopen America’s schools for personal learning as quickly and safely as possible,” Cardona said. He said the president’s directive that teachers and school staff be vaccinated quickly was “my top priority.”
Later Wednesday, Biden and Cardona visited Fort LeBoeuf Middle School in Waterford, Pennsylvania, where parents told them they appreciated that the school district had asked their opinion on the reopening.
After the strike in March 2020, the school with a few hundred students in grades six to eight welcomed them in person on a voluntary basis, starting in early September.
“I love that you have this holistic approach,” Biden said.
She and Cardona also attended a robotics class at high school and a class for students who need or want a little extra pressure.
Supporters of former President Donald Trump waved flags with his name and kept their thumbs upside down while Biden’s car rolled away from the school. Abortion protesters held signs reading “Protect Every Child” and “Abortion is not health care.”
During the Connecticut elementary school visit, Biden and Cardona saw children sitting some distance apart at individual desks, each wearing a mask. Transparent plastic partitions separated groups of four students sitting at crescent-shaped tables. Hand cleaners were available in the hallways.
“I love it,” Biden said after a teacher showed the partitions. The teacher also said that her young people had “no problems” with the masks.
The school reopened at the end of August, Cardona said: “It was done in a way that protects the students and their families.”
The first lady and Cardona also visited a ‘sensory room’, complete with colorful climbing walls, zippers, monkey bars, stability balls and a mat, where students can gather their special emotions.
Biden asked the teacher in the sensory room if he saw anxiety in children increasing as a result of the pandemic. The teacher said she did.
Biden and Cardona later listened as another teacher described her transition to personal learning.
The school visit was also a homecoming for Cardona, who hails from Meriden and was so warmly praised that Biden called the welcome a ‘love party’. His parents were among those who were in the school portal for the comments.
“Now our country will have that love for you,” she said.
“Educators’ three favorite words are not ‘I love you,'” she joked. “It’s going to be Cardona’s education minister.”