[House Hearing, 118 Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]





                  THE CONSEQUENCES OF SCHOOL CLOSURES: 
                        INTENDED AND UNINTENDED

=======================================================================

                                HEARING

                               BEFORE THE

            SELECT SUBCOMMITTEE ON THE CORONAVIRUS PANDEMIC

                                 OF THE

               COMMITTEE ON OVERSIGHT AND ACCOUNTABILITY

                        HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

                    ONE HUNDRED EIGHTEENTH CONGRESS

                             FIRST SESSION

                               __________

                             MARCH 28, 2023

                               __________

                           Serial No. 118-14

                               __________

  Printed for the use of the Committee on Oversight and Accountability





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               COMMITTEE ON OVERSIGHT AND ACCOUNTABILITY

                    JAMES COMER, Kentucky, Chairman

Jim Jordan, Ohio                     Jamie Raskin, Maryland, Ranking 
Mike Turner, Ohio                        Minority Member
Paul Gosar, Arizona                  Eleanor Holmes Norton, District of 
Virginia Foxx, North Carolina            Columbia
Glenn Grothman, Wisconsin            Stephen F. Lynch, Massachusetts
Gary Palmer, Alabama                 Gerald E. Connolly, Virginia
Clay Higgins, Louisiana              Raja Krishnamoorthi, Illinois
Pete Sessions, Texas                 Ro Khanna, California
Andy Biggs, Arizona                  Kweisi Mfume, Maryland
Nancy Mace, South Carolina           Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, New York
Jake LaTurner, Kansas                Katie Porter, California
Pat Fallon, Texas                    Cori Bush, Missouri
Byron Donalds, Florida               Shontel Brown, Ohio
Kelly Armstrong, North Dakota        Jimmy Gomez, California
Scott Perry, Pennsylvania            Melanie Stansbury, New Mexico
William Timmons, South Carolina      Robert Garcia, California
Tim Burchett, Tennessee              Maxwell Frost, Florida
Marjorie Taylor Greene, Georgia      Becca Balint, Vermont
Lisa McClain, Michigan               Summer Lee, Pennsylvania
Lauren Boebert, Colorado             Greg Casar, Texas
Russell Fry, South Carolina          Jasmine Crockett, Texas
Anna Paulina Luna, Florida           Dan Goldman, New York
Chuck Edwards, North Carolina        Jared Moskowitz, Florida
Nick Langworthy, New York
Eric Burlison, Missouri

                       Mark Marin, Staff Director
             Mitchell Benzine, Subcommittee Staff Director
                        Marie Policastro, Clerk

                      Contact Number: 202-225-5074

                Miles Lichtman, Minority Staff Director

            Select Subcommittee On The Coronavirus Pandemic

                     Brad Wenstrup, Ohio, Chairman
Nicole Malliotakis, New York         Raul Ruiz, California, Ranking 
Mariannette Miller-Meeks, Iowa           Minority Member
Debbie Lesko, Arizona                Debbie Dingell, Michigan
Michael Cloud, Texas                 Kweisi Mfume, Maryland
John Joyce, Pennsylvania             Deborah Ross, North Carolina
Marjorie Taylor Greene, Georgia      Robert Garcia, California
Ronny Jackson, Texas                 Ami Bera, California
Rich Mccormick, Georgia              Jill Tokuda, Hawaii  






















                         C  O  N  T  E  N  T  S

                              ----------                              
                                                                   Page
Hearing held on March 28, 2023...................................     1

                               Witnesses

Mr. David Zweig, Author and Investigative Journalist, The 
  Atlantic, New York Magazine, The Free Press
Oral Statement...................................................     5
Ms. Tracy Beth Hoeg, M.D., Ph.D., Physical Medicine & 
  Rehabilitation Specialist, Epidemiologist, Private Practice 
  Physician
Oral Statement...................................................     6
Ms. Virginia Gentles, Director, Education Freedom Center, 
  Independent Women's Forum
Oral Statement...................................................     8
Ms. Donna Mazyck, R.N., Executive Director, National Association 
  of School Nurses
Oral Statement...................................................    10

Written opening statements and the written statements of the 
  witnesses are available on the U.S. House of Representatives 
  Document Repository at: docs.house.gov.

                           Index of Documents

  * Author Manuscript, HHS Public Access, ``Effectiveness of Mask 
    Wearing to Control Community Spread of SARS-CoV-2''; 
    submitted by Rep. Dingell.
  * Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, HHS/CDC, 
    ``Effectiveness of Face Mask or Respirator Use in Indoor 
    Public Settings for Prevention of SARS-CoV-2 Infection, 
    California, February-December 2021''; submitted by Rep. 
    Dingell.
  * Article, Pediatrics, Volume 149, number 6, Month 2022, 
    ``School Masking Policies and Secondary SARS-CoV-2 
    Transmission''; submitted by Rep. Dingell.
  * Presentation to Hon. Bruce D. Voss from Superintendent Keith 
    T. Hayashi, State of Hawaii Department of Education, 
    ``Measuring Student Achievement: Pandemic Impacts and 
    Recovery''; sbmitted by Rep. Tokuda.
  * Article, Contemporary Pediatrics, ``Pediatric speech disorder 
    diagnoses more than doubled amid COVID-19 pandemic''; 
    submitted by Rep. Miller-Meeks.

Documents are available at: docs.house.gov.

 
                  THE CONSEQUENCES OF SCHOOL CLOSURES: 
                        INTENDED AND UNINTENDED 

                              ----------                              


                    Tuesday, March 28, 2023

                        House of Representatives

               Committee on Oversight and Accountability

            Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic

                                                   Washington, D.C.

    The Subcommittee met, pursuant to notice, at 10:06 a.m., in 
room 2154, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Brad Wenstrup 
(Chairman of the Subcommittee) presiding.
    Present: Representatives Wenstrup, Comer, Malliotakis, 
Miller-Meeks, Lesko, Cloud, Joyce, Greene, Jackson, McCormick, 
Ruiz, Raskin, Dingell, Mfume, Ross, Garcia, Bera, and Tokuda.
    Dr. Wenstrup. Good morning. The Select Subcommittee on the 
Coronavirus Pandemic will come to order. I want to welcome 
everyone.
    Without objection, the Chair may declare a recess at any 
time.
    I now recognize myself for the purpose of making an opening 
statement, and before we get started, I do want to take a brief 
moment of silence for the lives lost, students and teachers, in 
Nashville yesterday.
    [Moment of silence.]
    Dr. Wenstrup. Thank you. While we are thankful for the 
quick actions of law enforcement, we pray and grieve for the 
families of those that lost their lives in this tragedy. May we 
someday discover the underlying events in someone's life that 
leads to senseless violence so that perhaps we may prevent 
great harm in the future.
    Today is the Select Subcommittee's first hearing evaluating 
impacts and consequences of prolonged pandemic-era school 
closures. Early on in this coronavirus pandemic, there was not 
a lot known. COVID-19 was clearly a novel virus. It was not 
acting like SARS or the annual flu. And unfortunately, China 
and the World Health Organization seemed to obfuscate facts in 
real time. It appeared that our health agencies had gone 
through decades of unpreparedness. Taking this into account, 
some decisions made early on were made with the best intentions 
and made with the prevailing science at that time. Through the 
chaos and over time, it seemed that many states and districts 
gave up or gave in and failed to put the students' well-being 
first. Long-term closing of schools proved to be harmful to 
students, their academic, mental, physical and social 
development, and overall success. We need to make every effort 
to not let this happen again for the sake of our future.
    Preparing this Nation's education system to effectively 
address a future pandemic starts with holding ourselves and our 
agencies accountable and being honest about it. It is fair and 
just to recognize our errors and misjudgments. Good judgment, 
retrospective or otherwise, should be acknowledged as well. The 
intent of this hearing is to examine school closures related to 
the COVID-19 pandemic response in order to enable the Select 
Subcommittee to conduct further investigations, learn from 
policy failures, discover and apply best practices, and improve 
readiness for future pandemics.
    As we look back, I believe each state and district should 
have asked themselves, schools need to be open, students need 
in-person instruction. How can we achieve that? Many schools 
did just that. In full perspective, and indeed retrospectively, 
the baseline should have been to keep schools open and to ask 
how that gets done to best protect the health of students and 
teachers, but also provide the in-person learning and social 
interaction that children need in order to develop normally. 
Preparing a Nation's education system to effectively address a 
future pandemic starts with holding our health agencies 
accountable and to expect an open scientific process, steep in 
accurate data in order to drive sound policy decisions. Who 
knows? The next pandemic may affect children more than adults. 
Will we be prepared to minimize harm?
    In the case of COVID-19 pandemic, the lingering negative 
effects have been many: academic, mental, economic. There are 
also secondary harms of prolonged school closures that fell 
upon children, for example, abuse and poor nutrition among 
them. We must strive to be prepared to never let this happen 
again. Our children have paid the price and are continuing to 
pay the price. Let's make sure that those involved with policy 
decisions were not motivated in some way to put themselves 
above our children and their futures. This is not a question of 
right or left. Opinion differences are one thing. Right and 
wrong is yet another. It is upon us to fully investigate 
whether officials truly placed the best interest of our 
Nation's children first or were there other factors at play. 
Honesty is non-negotiable. Our students and our families 
deserve answers.
    I look forward to working with my colleagues on both sides 
of the aisle to deliver the truth to the American people so 
that we can better prevent, prepare, protect, and maybe even 
predict when it comes to our pandemic response in the future.
    I would now like to recognize Ranking Member Ruiz for the 
purpose of making an opening statement.
    Dr. Ruiz. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Let me begin by also 
expressing my condolences to the parents and families who lost 
their loved ones yesterday at Covenant School in Nashville. And 
as we grieve the loss of another six lives to the epidemic of 
gun violence in America, we must act beyond condolences and 
enact commonsense reforms that put our children and communities 
first. I will now turn my attention to another issue of 
critical importance for our children's health, safety, and 
well-being.
    Over the last three years, the impact of COVID-19 pandemic 
on our Nation's children has weighed heavily on the minds of 
parents, students, educators, and Americans all across the 
country. As a physician and a father, it has certainly been at 
the top of my mind. Today, I hope that we make progress on 
identifying evidence-based solutions to help America's children 
live and learn healthily and safely. In this work, our goal 
must be to make our schools resilient for the next highly 
contagious lethal virus so that we can keep schools open, 
protect students and teachers, prevent outbreaks, and reduce 
transmissions of the virus in our communities.
    We must help children cope with the anxiety, depression, 
and trauma they experienced during the pandemic, which continue 
to impact their mental health and academic performance to this 
day. And my heart breaks for the many suffering from anxiety 
and depression and families who lost a son or a daughter from 
suicide. We must also identify ways to help students not only 
catch up in school, but also excel in the future. To do right 
by our Nation's parents, students and educators, we must have 
an honest conversation today, one that is objective, guided by 
compassion, and led by facts and science. That includes taking 
a comprehensive approach to examining actions taken throughout 
the entire days of this public health crisis, including the 
earliest days.
    From the beginning, President Trump and his Administration 
did not act with the urgency needed to reduce transmission, 
communicate honestly with the American people, and equip our 
schools with the resources they needed. Instead of working to 
efficiently manufacture PPE, scale up testing, and promote 
basic public health measures, like masking and social 
distancing, President Trump chose to politicize this virus, 
calling it a hoax and downplaying its severity, saying, ``It 
would go away just like the flu.'' But as the coronavirus 
reached pandemic proportions, public officials of all political 
persuasions had to act to suspend in-person learning, slowing 
the transmission of an airborne virus that easily spreads in 
close, confined spaces, like classrooms.
    The Trump Administration's early failures resulted in the 
prolonged suspension of in-person learning, so much so that 
when January 2021 rolled around, less than half of America 
schools were open for full time in-person learning. President 
Biden took a different approach. The Biden Administration took 
swift action to develop evidence-based guidance for schools, 
and congressional Democrats enacted the American Rescue Plan to 
help kids in schools get back in school safely and responsibly. 
The results speak for themselves.
    One year after President Biden was sworn into office, 
efforts more than doubled the number of schools opened for full 
time in-person learning to 95 percent. And schools did not just 
reopen, they stayed open. Today, more than 99 percent of 
schools in the United States have safely and responsibly 
reopened for in-person learning. That is a direct result of the 
American Rescue Plan, targeted investments in childhood 
education to keep students healthy and safe while they learn.
    In fact, key funding from the American Rescue Plan is 
already at work rebuilding schools' crumbling infrastructure, 
upgrading their ventilation systems, and getting students the 
resources that they need. I will give you an example. Coachella 
Valley Unified School District, where I went to school, is 
putting $2 million of their funding toward making critical 
updates of air purification systems that can filter out viruses 
so that kids can breathe cleaner air in their classrooms.
    The American Rescue Plan also included strong provisions to 
not just get kids back in school, but also to make up for the 
lost classroom time requiring that 20 percent of all funds go 
toward addressing learning loss. Again, CVUSD in my district is 
investing nearly $600,000 for instructional support and over 
$1.8 million for emotional and behavioral health support. We 
should look to build on this progress.
    So let us not turn our backs on lifesaving public health 
measures that reduce transmissions in schools, in our 
communities, including vaccines, which have saved more than 3 
million lives and prevented nearly 120 million COVID-19 
infections in the United States as shown in a Commonwealth Fund 
study. Social distancing, which, if not in place at the time, 
would have resulted in a 35 times greater spread of COVID-19 
between March and April 2020, according to a peer-reviewed 
report in Health Affairs, and effective mask wearing, which 
researchers at Duke University found, was associated with a 72-
percent reduction of in-school COVID-19 cases.
    We should aim to put people over politics and work together 
to prioritize our children's health and well-being both inside 
and outside the classroom because when we do just that, we will 
set our kids up for success and help them thrive now and into 
the future. Thank you.
    Dr. Wenstrup. Pursuant to Committee on Oversight and 
Accountability Rule 9(g), the witnesses will please stand and 
raise their right hands.
    Do you solemnly swear or affirm that the testimony that you 
are about to give is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing 
but the truth, so help you God?
    [A chorus of ayes.]
    Dr. Wenstrup. Thank you. Let the record show that the 
witnesses all answered in the affirmative.
    Our witnesses today are Mr. David Zweig. Mr. Zweig is an 
investigative journalist and author writing for The Atlantic, 
New York Magazine, and the Free Press. He has investigated and 
written extensively regarding pandemic-related school closures 
and their intersection with available science and outside 
influences. He is the author of the forthcoming book titled, An 
Abundance of Caution, about American school closures during the 
COVID-19 pandemic. Dr. Tracy Beth Hoeg. Dr. Hoeg is a physician 
and holds a doctorate in epidemiology. She currently practices 
in Northern California and works at the University of 
California at San Francisco in the Department of Epidemiology 
and Biostatistics.
    Ms. Virginia Gentles. Ms. Gentles is the director of the 
Education Freedom Center at the Independent Women's Forum. She 
has previously served in the Florida Department of Education 
and the U.S. Department of Education. Ms. Donna Mazyck. Ms. 
Mazyck has been the executive director of the National 
Association of School Nurses since 2011 and is actually 
retiring next month. Congratulations. Prior to that, she was a 
school health nurse--thank you--and served in the Maryland 
Department of Education.
    The Select Subcommittee certainly appreciates you all for 
being here today and we look forward to your testimoneys. Let 
me remind the witnesses that we have read your written 
statements, and they will appear in full in the hearing record. 
Please limit your oral statements to five minutes. As a 
reminder, please press the button on the microphone in front of 
you so that it is on and the members can hear you. When you 
begin to speak, the light in front of you will turn green. 
After four minutes, the light will turn yellow. When the red 
light comes on, your five minutes have expired and we would ask 
that you please wrap up.
    I would now like to recognize Mr. Zweig to give an opening 
statement.

STATEMENT OF DAVID ZWEIG, AUTHOR AND INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALIST, 
        THE ATLANTIC, NEW YORK MAGAZINE, THE FREE PRESS

    Mr. Zweig. Good morning, and thank you Chairman Wenstrup, 
Ranking Member Ruiz, and members of the Subcommittee for 
inviting me to testify today. Since the spring of 2020, I have 
been researching and writing about the nexus of children and 
schools and COVID. I have conducted more than 100 interviews 
with experts in a wide range of fields, from infectious 
diseases, to pediatrics, to epidemiology to psychology, and 
more about this topic. I am currently writing a book for MIT 
Press within which I will explore and explicate the decision-
making process behind school closures.
    I would like to offer my overview of some of the 
consequences of school closures and learning interruptions 
during the pandemic. The place to begin is by asking a 
question, is school an essential service? If the answer is yes, 
then that means there is harm if it is denied to children. In 
America, the option of free school is a long-cherished right. 
In March 2020, out of an abundance of caution, that right was 
taken away from more than 50 million children. The country was 
facing a novel and deadly virus and in the eyes of many this 
was a reasonable action. Yet caution does not only run in one 
direction. Recognizing this, at the end of April and in early 
May, many schools throughout Europe began reopening. In the 
United States, however, with rare exception, they remained 
closed for the rest of the academic year.
    While most of our focus will be on the effects of closures 
through the 2020-2021 school year, looking back to spring of 
2020, it can be easy to lose sight of the fact that a three 
months' school closure was in itself unprecedented and not 
without repercussions. In the fall 2020, things took a 
consequential turn. Millions of American children began going 
back to school while millions of their peers did not. Many of 
them in California, Virginia, Maryland, among many other 
states, did not step foot into a school building for more than 
a year.
    Within those states, a child could find herself in school 
full time while her best friend down the block was confined to 
her bedroom. Millions of children in private schools also 
attended in-person while peers in the same cities and towns did 
not. Still millions of other children were enrolled in hybrid 
learning where schools were listed as ``open,'' yet students 
only attended part time, some as little as one-half day each 
week. If you believe that school is an essential service, as I 
do, then the circumstances I just described were broadly 
inequitable. When the option of school was taken away from only 
some children, it did not remedy whatever inequities that 
already existed. Rather, it exacerbated them.
    Numerous analyses from Ohio State, Brown University, 
Harvard, among many other institutions, have repeatedly found 
direct correlations between time out of school and learning 
loss. They found that remote instruction was more prevalent 
among Black and Hispanic students, and that it was a primary 
driver of widening the achievement gaps. Outside of academics, 
the effects are harder to quantify. They are no less real. 
Perhaps the most heartbreaking consequence of the closures is 
the associated increase in child abuse. Educators represent 
around 20 percent of all official reports of child abuse and 
neglect. When kids were prevented from attending school, 
teachers were no longer there to act as that safety net. As a 
consequence, reports dropped massively. At a Virginia Safety 
Center, calls plummeted by around 70 percent, and when they did 
get calls, more of them were for injuries so horrific that it 
was only because an adult had to seek medical help.
    Isolation from peers and inactivity of remote learning had 
broad mental health consequences for children and teens as 
well, numerous studies showing depression and anxiety spiking 
in relation to the closures. There were physical harms. A study 
from the CDC found that the rate of body mass index increased 
approximately doubled during the pandemic compared to a pre-
pandemic period. Outside of statistics, there are far more 
nebulous effects. School closures also meant the end of sports. 
Student athletes, many in low-income families with few 
prospects, lost their chance of getting recruited to college. 
Many of these boys simply disappeared, one coach told me. It is 
impossible to quantify how life trajectories are altered by an 
infinite number of downstream effects.
    Last, harm should not only be calculated or considered 
through the lens of long-term effects. Children suffered in 
real time--and that alone matters--but were the harms of the 
closures worth it? Not surprisingly there are numerous analyses 
of the impact of transmission from school closures. One study 
published in Nature Medicine found that the case rates were not 
statistically different in counties with in-person learning 
versus those without.
    In the same study, however, in the South, the authors did 
find that counties with open schools had an increase of roughly 
10 to 20 more cases per 100,000 people each week than those in 
remote. Are 10 cases out of 100,000 people a reasonable 
tradeoff for kids to be able to attend school? This is the type 
of question many policymakers did not address during the 
pandemic, but is the type of cost benefit question I urge them 
to consider moving forward. Thank you.
    Dr. Wenstrup. Thank you. I now recognize Dr. Hoeg to give 
an opening statement.

STATEMENT OF TRACY BETH HOEG, M.D., PH.D., PHYSICAL MEDICINE & 
  REHABILITATION SPECIALIST, EPIDEMIOLOGIST, PRIVATE PRACTICE 
                           PHYSICIAN

    Dr. Hoeg. Hi. Good morning. My name is Tracy Beth Hoeg. I 
am a Ph.D. epidemiologist, currently working at the University 
of California, San Francisco, and I am a practicing physician 
in Northern California. I have thus far published 13 scientific 
publications related to COVID-19, looking at COVID-19 
transmission within schools, how COVID affects children, our 
COVID-19 mitigation strategies in children, and what are the 
evidences we use for those as well as harm benefit analyses in 
children and young people.
    I appreciate the opportunity to be here today to discuss 
something that has been very important to me for the last three 
years. I want the American people to understand that the harms 
that were inflicted upon children in the U.S. with school 
closures were unnecessary. I am not saying this is a COVID 
minimizer. I am saying this as a physician scientist who 
watched very closely the data out of Wuhan first about how 
children had a greater than 1,000fold decreased mortality 
compared with elderly adults, and then out of Europe that 
spring of 2020 which showed no corresponding increase in 
community transmission related to the school reopenings and 
very little transmission within the school setting.
    I had moved from Denmark with my family five years prior to 
the pandemic and watched the Danes on the news excitedly reopen 
their schools just six weeks after closing them, April 2020, as 
the first step of reopening their economy. Soon their neighbors 
and most of Europe followed suit. There was an implicit 
understanding across Europe that children must have a safe, 
happy environment to return to before parents can return to 
work. Where was that sentiment in the U.S.? Not only do I think 
that Americans reopening adult activities like bars, movie 
theaters, restaurants, fitness centers, before school sent the 
message that education was inessential but may have had the 
unintended consequence of children viewing themselves as less 
valuable.
    Looking into the fall of 2020, in stark contrast to Europe, 
the CDC set reopening guidelines to put greater than 90 percent 
of the country in the most restrictive tier for reopening based 
on arbitrary community transmission levels, which we had 
already seen from Europe were not necessary to reopen schools. 
So, this resulted in less than 25 percent of students across 
the U.S. returning to full time in-person school. But I knew 
from my experience in California as a medical adviser to a 
large diocese in Sacramento that this did not have to be the 
case because we were able to reopen full time, August 2020, by 
applying for a permit to be a daycare. So, we were able to find 
a way around Governor Newsom's very strict guidelines for 
reopening, and we never closed the schools again, and 
experienced very limited in-school transmission with minimal 
mitigation strategies and a simple procedure for reopening.
    I went on to research in-school transmission in Wood 
County, Wisconsin, and published with the CDC, finding that in-
school transmission in Wood County, Wisconsin, was minimal over 
the fall semester of 2020, and there was a 37 percent lower 
rate of cases in the schools than in the surrounding community. 
So it never made sense, and we knew this from Europe, to keep 
our children out of school when they had a higher risk of 
transmission outside of school than in school.
    In disbelief, I watched the CDC that spring release their 
new guidelines, again putting greater than 90 percent of the 
country in the most restrictive tier for school reopening, 
often requiring greater than six feet of distance between 
students, which made no sense considering this was a 
predominantly aerosolized virus and the CDC director, Rochelle 
Walensky, had previously only required three feet in her own 
district in Massachusetts, so it was unclear why she was now 
requiring six feet for students to return to the classrooms in 
February 2021. It is unclear if this was based on 
recommendations from teachers' unions affecting the wording of 
the CDC guidelines. That is my own suspicion based on a 
whistleblower, and I think that this should be investigated.
    School closures were highly regressive policy and are 
likely the worst public health decision we will see in our 
lifetimes. Students in poverty levels and higher levels of 
poverty were more likely to be kept out of school. And we have 
seen the academic achievement fall nationwide to levels where 
they were over two decades ago in both math and reading scores, 
and academic losses have been the greatest among students with 
the highest poverty levels. And there has been a striking dose 
response relationship between the length of school closures and 
the academic achievement declines. We have seen increasing 
absenteeism, and we have seen decreasing rates of community 
college enrollment, decreased lifetime earnings projections, 
increased weight gain, decreased physical activity. AAP has 
declared a mental health crisis, and we have seen that those 
kept out of school the longest have suffered some of the worst 
mental health consequences.
    In conclusion, we have known from the spring of 2020, from 
international data, that we should keep schools open as Europe 
did, yet we chose to risk our children in an attempt to protect 
adults. But this consequentialist, deeply unethical decision 
failed. We gambled with our children and gained nothing for 
adults, but our children lost so much. Thank you.
    Dr. Wenstrup. Thank you. I now recognize Ms. Gentles to 
give an opening statement.

  STATEMENT OF VIRGINIA GENTLES, DIRECTOR, EDUCATION FREEDOM 
               CENTER, INDEPENDENT WOMEN'S FORUM

    Ms. Gentles. Chairman Wenstrup, Ranking Member Ruiz and 
members of the Subcommittee, thank you for having me here 
today. My name is Virginia Gentles, and I am the director of 
the Education Freedom Center at Independent Women's Forum.
    We are here today to discuss the consequences of school 
closures. Despite children being COVID's lowest risk 
demographics, school district leaders endangered elementary and 
secondary children academically, emotionally, and physically by 
closing and refusing to open schools, decisions that lead to 
devastating learning loss, significant mental health issues, 
developmental delays and persistent discipline challenges.
    School district superintendents, school board members, and 
state leaders knew early on that children were extremely low 
risk and school closures were an ineffective strategy for 
preventing the spread of the virus, but many feared the 
political consequences for prioritizing to open schools. Let us 
be honest. Schools stayed closed primarily because the 
teachers' unions in our country have enormous political power, 
and parents do not.
    My community of Arlington, Virginia school closure disaster 
unfolded similarly to many blue areas around the country. 
School district leaders refused to open schools fully for a 
year and a half. Students received no instruction in the spring 
of 2020 and low-quality remote instruction for the 2020-2021 
school year as Arlington initially planned to open two days a 
week in fall of 2020, but reneged just before the school year 
began. Teachers were not trained to teach remotely, and online 
instructional materials were not created.
    Some students were allowed to return for a shortened two 
days a week in the spring of 2021, but many were placed in 
front of screens with teachers remaining remote. At the end of 
the utterly wasted 2020-2021 school year, the Arlington Parents 
for Education, my community's open schools' advocates, tweeted, 
``The worst part, it did not have to be like this.'' Arlington 
then reneged on plans to offer summer school to high-need 
students.
    When schools finally opened their doors for five-days-a 
week full-day instruction in the fall of 2021, onerous testing 
and quarantine policies further disrupted students' learning. 
The district's callous policies denied students with 
disabilities essential federally mandated services and 
accommodations. The damage to the young children who did not 
receive early intervention services is permanent. When district 
staff summoned me in summer of 2020 to discuss abandoning my 
daughter's Individualized Education Plan, or IEP, I knew it was 
our time to leave.
    Unfortunately, my community's story mirrors parents' 
experiences in school districts across the country, and the 
2022 Nation's Report Card, or NAEP scores, exposed the 
widespread catastrophic failure of the Nation's K-12 education 
systems: irresponsible pandemic-era policies. The NAEP scores 
showed the largest decline in fourth grade reading since 1990, 
the first-ever decline in fourth grade math. Seventy-four 
percent of eighth grade readers are not proficient in math, and 
69 percent cannot read proficiently. The average public school 
student grades 3 to 8 lost the equivalent of half year of 
learning in math and a quarter year of learning in reading, and 
many lost much more. Because schools with large numbers of low-
income and minority students were closed the longest, school 
closures resulted in the largest increase in educational 
inequity in a generation.
    The closures also caused social and behavioral skills, 
missed opportunities to develop those. As a direct result, 
pervasive discipline and mental health issues are creating an 
unsafe environment for students and teachers. Fifty-six percent 
of schools reported a rise in classroom disruptions because of 
student misconduct last year, and one-third of teachers report 
being verbally harassed or threatened with violence by a 
student. Too many students remain disengaged from learning with 
hundreds of thousands missing. Districts across the country are 
reporting alarmingly high rates of chronic absenteeism. These 
COVID-era policies condemned these children to low literacy 
skills, limited employment opportunities, higher rates of 
poverty and incarceration, and bleak futures.
    In contrast, private schools reopened quickly and stayed 
open. In the fall of 2020, 43 percent of traditional public 
schools and 92 percent of Catholic schools welcomed students 
back to classrooms. As a result, students in Catholic schools 
are about a year-and-a-half grade levels ahead of public school 
students in fourth grade reading and two grade levels ahead in 
eighth grade reading. State policymakers noticed the stark 
contrast between public and private school priorities during 
the COVID era and began introducing and passing universal 
education freedom programs. These popular programs empower 
parents to enroll their children in options committed to 
educating students. School district leaders, however, are not 
taking the learning loss crisis that they created seriously.
    The Federal Government bequeathed $190 billion of 
supplemental educational funding in the states and districts, 
but unfortunately, much of the ESSER funding remains unspent or 
was allocated unwisely. Rather than addressing the learning 
loss crisis, school districts around the country have wasted 
ESSER funds on expenses like football fields, sound systems, 
and unused online platforms. Irresponsibly, many school 
districts, despite declining enrollment, are creating perilous 
fiscal cliffs by hiring and paying new staff members with 
temporary ESSER funds.
    It is time to take drastic measures to address the learning 
loss and discipline crisis caused by school closures. School 
district and state departments of education are awash in 
supplemental Federal funding and must make student-focused and 
bold investments to redeem themselves as educators and put 
students' needs first.
    Dr. Wenstrup. Thank you. I now recognize Ms. Mazyck to give 
an opening statement.

 STATEMENT OF DONNA MAZYCK, R.N., EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, NATIONAL 
                  ASSOCIATION OF SCHOOL NURSES

    Ms. Mazyck. Chairman Wenstrup, Ranking Member Ruiz, thank 
you for inviting me to testify today. I also acknowledge 
Chairman Comer and Ranking Member Raskin. I offer testimony 
today as executive director of the National Association of 
School Nurses, or NASN, on behalf of 95,000 school nurses 
across the country who work to support student learning and 
academic success by making sure students are healthy and safe. 
School nurses are critical members of student support teams, 
serving at the nexus of education and public health.
    In 2020, the U.S. Census Bureau reported 4.3 million 
children were uninsured. For many children living in or near 
poverty, the school nurse may be the only healthcare 
professional they access regularly, and access to a school 
nurse advances health equity. School nursing practice focuses 
on student-centered care that occurs in the context of the 
student's family and school community. Health and learning are 
linked, which is why all students should have their health 
needs met during school hours.
    In addition to education, schools are places where 
healthcare happens and an essential part of our Nation's public 
health infrastructure. The pandemic wasn't the first time that 
schools and school nurses responded to infectious disease 
outbreaks that included school closures. In fact, in April 
2009, a school nurse identified the first cluster of H1N1 among 
students. At that time, schools and local health authorities 
collaborated on when to close schools.
    During the pandemic, schools and local authorities were 
called upon once again to evaluate the need to close schools 
due to infectious disease, this time, a rapidly shifting novel 
coronavirus. The intended consequence of the Nation's school 
closures was to minimize spread of COVID-19. Just as with H1N1, 
at the time of the pandemic, NASN emphasized the need for 
localities to monitor community transmission, vaccination 
coverage, screening, testing, and occurrence of outbreaks to 
guide their decisions on the level of layered prevention 
strategies to use.
    With layered mitigation strategies, we can keep students in 
school communities safe. We knew this before the pandemic, and 
we know it now. A modeling study on transmission of COVID-19 in 
schools noted that the use of multiple mitigation strategies, 
along with contact tracing by school leaders, staff, and 
parents would reduce COVID transmission by at least 69 percent. 
As the novel coronavirus caused schools to shut down, school 
nurses continued to serve students and families.
    NASN places priority on equitable in-person learning 
located in healthy and safe school environments. We called on 
Congress and the Administration to reopen schools in the late 
spring and summer of 2020, understanding that it was essential 
for children to be back in school. Decisions to return to in-
person learning needed to be based on public health data, 
including data at community levels where coronavirus 
transmission rates varied and adequate resources and plans 
needed to be available, including PPE, cleaning and 
disinfecting supplies, testing strategies, and contact tracing, 
as well as adequate staffing to support the implementation of 
these measures.
    School nurses are critical to the implementation of 
mitigation strategies in schools. While NASN's vision is that 
all students are healthy, safe, and ready to learn, the reality 
is a bit different. It is estimated that 1 in 4 students in the 
United States have a chronic health condition, and 
approximately six percent of those students have multiple 
chronic health conditions. A recent study in JAMA Pediatrics 
found that schools are the de facto mental health system, 
providing services to 57 percent of adolescents who needed care 
before the pandemic. Prior to the pandemic, schools were 
already understaffed with school support personnel, including 
student mental health support and 25 percent of school students 
did not have school nursing services.
    School closures due to the pandemic highlighted the cracks 
in the foundation that have now grown to be large fissures. To 
support students' social, emotional, and mental health needs at 
school, NASN called for more investments in specialized 
instructional support personnel, such as school counselors, 
nurses, psychologists, and social workers. The pandemic 
highlighted the interdependence of health and learning. It also 
created a historic opportunity to build systems that better 
support the whole child and their communities. All students 
deserve to have their health needs met while at school. School 
health services provide equitable support for all students 
being in school, healthy and ready to learn. Thank you.
    Dr. Wenstrup. I want to thank you all for your testimoneys, 
and I am going to yield time for me to ask questions. But I do 
want to start by saying I really appreciate Ms. Mazyck and Mr. 
Zweig, in particular, talking about the essential need for 
children to be in school and all that comes with it, and, as I 
said in my opening statement, the importance of why we should 
be striving, regardless of what is going on with the pandemic, 
striving to find every possible way we can to have kids in 
school. So, I appreciate your testimoneys on that.
    But aside from the debate on whether the schools should be 
open or closed, just for a minute, I want to discuss the 
differences between the schools that were open and the schools 
that were closed. So Mr. Zweig, you mentioned that school is an 
essential service. I want to talk about the inequity in how 
school was delivered during the pandemic, if you will, and 
combine that with whether states and districts prioritized in-
person instruction, and did they perform better than those that 
were remote. So, I'm kind of combining a few things here, if 
you don't mind. And were the districts that stayed remote 
longer more likely to be in already disadvantaged districts? 
Did you find that? I can repeat those if you want me to, but--
--
    Mr. Zweig. I think I got it. Thank you for the question, 
Chairman. There are a number of analyses that looked at 
comparing the academic achievement related to the amount of 
time that children were in or not in school. You may hear talk 
about certain scores at a state level where they found that 
there wasn't a large difference through that particular lens. 
But what is interesting to understand about that is, that is 
very crude data when you are looking at states, but the 
analyses that actually drilled down at the district or county 
level did find very stark differences. So, there was an 
analysis by Vladimir Kogan at Ohio State University. He found 
that districts with fully remote instruction experienced test 
score declines up to three times greater than districts that 
had in-person instruction for the majority of the school year.
    Moreover, the research showed that disadvantaged students 
had disproportionate learning declines during the academic 
year. There are similar analyses by Emily Oster at Brown 
University, and there is a huge 36-page report that came out of 
Harvard University's Center for Education Policy Research, and 
this is on more than 2 million students. It found that remote 
instruction was more prevalent among Black and Hispanic 
students and that it was the primary driver of widening 
achievement gaps. They also found that high-poverty schools 
spent more weeks in remote instruction than low and mid-poverty 
schools.
    So, there certainly was evidence that we can look at now 
and that, in my view, was quite manifest even in real time that 
there were going to be very dramatic repercussions from keeping 
kids out of school, in particular, those who lacked resources. 
I know plenty of people who had the money and the wherewithal 
to hire tutors or go to special pod programs, which I wrote 
about for The New York Times and for other things, but the kids 
who lacked those resources in the homes where the parents both 
had to go to work, they weren't able to be there. This created 
an extraordinary circumstance for them where you had either 
young children left home alone with a device all day, or they 
then went to daycare centers or maybe a relative's home. This 
is kind of the core element of when we think about what did 
closing schools or do these hybrid programs, what do we achieve 
from that.
    For me, when you look at the science, one of the things 
from talking with numerous epidemiologists, like Dr. Hoeg, and 
with infectious disease physicians and implementation 
scientists is that these children did not operate in a vacuum. 
So even if the schools were closed, over time, they were going 
to interact with people anyway, and in some cases, in a more 
potentially dangerous fashion because you are mixing with kids 
from five different communities in a daycare center versus had 
they been in school with their own individual cohort.
    Dr. Wenstrup. Alright. I just want to ask a ``yes'' or 
``no'' question, I guess. We talked about the inequities, about 
how school was delivered during the pandemic, and seek your 
opinion. To me, this is a great opportunity for us to learn 
some valuable long-term lessons. Would you agree with that?
    Mr. Zweig. I certainly would.
    Dr. Wenstrup. OK. Thank you. Ms. Gentles, can you discuss 
the academic impacts of the prolonged school closures, 
specifically to the academics and also the children's social 
and behavioral development, and compare the two, open or closed 
schools?
    Ms. Gentles. Right. Well, I mentioned in the testimony we 
have got clear data from NAEP scores and the public schools and 
the Catholic schools. The public schools, half of them 
essentially closed until fall of 2021, half of students not 
attending school full time, and Catholic schools that were 
essentially 92 percent fully open starting in the fall of 2020, 
and you see a huge difference in the fact that the Catholic 
school performance is a year-and-a-half to two years ahead. So, 
that is one measure.
    Drilling down to Arlington Public Schools, where I live, 
the majority of Black students, Hispanic students, and students 
with disabilities started this school year, 2022, with testing 
below basic in the 2022 math inventory. So, we have got the 
NAEP scores, we have got the state assessment scores, and then 
we have got the local inventories and the assessments they do 
multiple times a year, all showing that the academic 
performance of the public school students in areas where they 
were closed dropped precipitously in contrast to schools that 
were open.
    You asked about discipline and mental health consequences, 
social and behavioral. Well, NCES, National Center for 
Education Statistics, has been gathering discipline statistics 
that definitely is worth taking a look. The spikes in reports 
in classroom disruptions, violence, incidents of violence, 
disrespect toward teachers, threats toward teachers has gone up 
considerably in public schools and that is very clear. In 
addition to that, the American Psychological Association did a 
survey of teachers, and they are reporting significant 
increases with these discipline issues. Eighty percent of 
teachers also reported that their students are behind social 
and behaviorally, developmentally, where the students were in 
2019, 80 percent.
    Dr. Wenstrup. Thank you. I now recognize the Ranking 
Member, Dr. Ruiz from California, for five minutes of 
questions.
    Dr. Ruiz. Thank you all for being here. I really appreciate 
that you are testifying here before us. Let me just make it 
very clear. The goal of all of us on this side of the panel, 
and I am assuming on both sides, is to keep schools open even 
in the next pandemic by equipping them with the tools, and the 
protocols, and all of the equipment necessary in order to help 
reduce transmission, as well as keeping our students, the 
teachers, the nurses, and everybody safe. And that should be 
the goal of this Committee is to figure out how do we make our 
schools resilient.
    As Chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, we dove deep 
into the disparities of school closures and how it affected 
African-Americans, Latinos, Native Americans, more than others. 
And the reason why we saw this disparity is because of the 
underlying inequities and disparities that we see in our 
healthcare system to begin with. Public schools and schools 
where you have African-Americans, Latinos are overcrowded 
compared to private and Catholic schools. They are underfunded 
compared to private and Catholic schools. And in those 
communities, those workers live in overcrowded housing.
    So the risk of increased transmission, as borne out by the 
data in African-American and Latino communities, was much 
higher. So, in the moment where we didn't have the vaccine or 
the healthcare tools that we needed, there was reason to 
practice more social distancing in those schools. And schools 
that had an abundance of funding were able to quickly bring 
their students back. They were able to comply with some of the 
guidelines and had the equipment necessary.
    And then you see the cycle of disparities and inequities 
that we see not just in the healthcare system, but also in our 
educational system, which, combined, that saw a higher rate of 
mortality and morbidity due to this pandemic in Black and 
Latino students. That is why, and I must say that in the 
infrastructure law that we supported, in the Inflation 
Reduction Act that we supported, in the omnibus that we 
supported, there was equity built into the funding in order to 
address the public health, schools, and the communities that 
have historically been under resourced for whatever reason, in 
order to prevent and stop this transmission and to protect the 
communities so they can have an equal playing foot in education 
and keeping their schools open, and in having to build 
resilient communities to begin with.
    That was built in the piece of legislation to address the 
type of disparities that you are speaking of now, and that is a 
reason of many that when President Biden took office, his 
Administration hit the ground running to get kids back in 
schools. The President knew kids belonged in schools to learn 
and grow, and he understood that we needed to get kids back in 
school safely and responsibly and open schools safely and 
responsibly, equipped with public health tools. That was 
crucial to putting our Nation on firmer footing in its pandemic 
recovery. Within one year of President Biden taking office, the 
number of schools that were safely reopened more than doubled 
to 95 percent, and thanks to the Biden Administration's 
decisive action, more than 99 percent of America schools remain 
fully open for in-person learning.
    Ms. Mazyck, when President Biden took office in January 
2021, just 46 percent of public elementary and middle schools 
were fully reopened for in-person learning. Is that correct?
    Ms. Mazyck. That is the data I see.
    Dr. Ruiz. And so, prior to when President Biden took 
office, had the Federal Government provided the necessary 
guidelines, tools, and resources to facilitate kids' safe 
return to the classrooms?
    Ms. Mazyck. There have been investments in bringing 
students into schools.
    Dr. Ruiz. Before the Biden Administration, or was it with 
the Biden Administration taking office?
    Ms. Mazyck. There were some CARES Act funds, and then there 
was the ESSER funds and other funds to provide in-person 
learning because we know that in-person learning promotes 
overall student health and wellbeing.
    Dr. Ruiz. And what was lacking at that time before 
President Biden that we needed to do in the American Rescue 
Plan?
    Ms. Mazyck. Specifically, what was lacking around the 
health of students?
    Dr. Ruiz. Around the response to get our kids safely and 
responsibly back into schools.
    Ms. Mazyck. Yes. One of the issues that was concerning was 
the equipment, the supplies. PPE was in short supply. 
Healthcare does happen at schools, and to provide healthcare in 
schools, there was a need for equipment such as PPE, cleaning 
and disinfectant, and ventilation in schools.
    Dr. Ruiz. So, less than one month after President Biden 
ordered the Department of Education and HHS to develop these 
evidence-based guidance, the CDC issued comprehensive guidance 
for testing matching vaccination to support the safe return to 
in-person learning. Ms. Mazyck, how did these resources bolster 
local policymakers and public health officials' efforts to 
reopen schools?
    Ms. Mazyck. Well, with vaccination, there was an ability to 
protect the community. They were layered mitigation strategies 
that were available as the novel coronavirus. We understood 
what it was doing, how to deal with it, especially from a point 
of mitigating factors with vaccination being one of the first 
lines.
    Dr. Ruiz. I thank the Chairman for his grace. I just have 
one more question. What lessons can we learn from our response 
to the COVID-19 pandemic to minimize the impact of future 
pandemics on our Nation's children?
    Ms. Mazyck. Well, I believe that one of the lessons we 
learn is that keeping children in school is important. We know 
that that is important, and in order to do that, we need to 
bolster the supports that they need in order to be in school 
learning. They need health, public health. They need the 
supports from a specialized instructional support personnel to 
help them be available for their learning.
    Dr. Wenstrup. I now recognize the Chairman of the full 
Committee, Mr. Comer, from Kentucky for five minutes of 
questions.
    Chairman Comer. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. As the parent of 
three kids in the public school system, a school system that 
had a prolonged shutdown that did almost a full year of virtual 
learning, I think my wife and I share the frustration of many 
parents in America, and can testify to the fact that our 
children are behind as a result of virtual learning versus in-
person learning.
    On February 12, 2021, the Biden Administration released its 
first guidance for schools entitled, ``The Operational Strategy 
for K-12 Schools Through Phased Prevention.'' Now, according to 
Director Walensky herself, this guidance when issued 
recommended keeping 90 percent of America's schools closed. And 
I think it is very clear the Biden Administration wanted to 
keep our kids out of the classroom and completely switch to 
virtual learning versus in-person learning. Ms. Mazyck, did the 
National Association of School Nurses consult with the CDC 
regarding the CDC's February 12, 2021, K-12 operational 
strategy prior to its release?
    Ms. Mazyck. That is something I would have to look back and 
see. I don't have an answer for you today.
    Chairman Comer. You can't remember if they consulted with 
you prior to----
    Ms. Mazyck. In February 2021. I would have to look and see.
    Chairman Comer. So, do you remember if the National 
Association of School Nurses provided any suggested edits or 
revisions to the CDC?
    Ms. Mazyck. Chairman Comer, I would have to be able to look 
and see. It is 2021. That is----
    Chairman Comer. Right.
    Ms. Mazyck. I received a letter today from Chairman 
Wenstrup that there is a desire to find out this information, 
and I acknowledge receipt of that letter and fully intend to 
cooperate with that. But right now, in this moment to say what 
I did related to a document in 2021 is something I can't answer 
with specificity.
    Chairman Comer. Well, let me ask you this. How often was 
the National Association of School Nurses, how often were you 
all called upon to consult with the CDC or either Presidential 
administration?
    Ms. Mazyck. The National Association of School Nurses has 
had a cooperative agreement with a branch of the CDC to do 
programming around COVID, making sure that students were 
healthy and safe in school, and also that they would have the 
mental health supports that they would need.
    Chairman Comer. So, I guess I am still unclear. I am just 
trying to get a picture of how often you all consulted with 
this guidance. I mean, this is important guidance that the 
Administration will be putting out that has had a negative 
impact on public education in America, and I don't think 
anybody would disagree with that. I think everyone's heart was 
probably in the right place, but I am trying to determine who 
all provided input on this. If it was, you know, we have 
suspicions, but we were wondering if the National Association 
of School Nurses were able to provide any input because you all 
would obviously be on the front lines of this.
    Ms. Mazyck. School nurses are very definitely on the 
frontlines of this pandemic. You are asking for two different 
things. The National Association of School Nurses, like many 
public health folks, looked to the CDC for guidance to see what 
was involved. That is what the National Association did, 
certainly. In turn, whether or not----
    Chairman Comer. But they didn't ask your all's opinion on 
anything.
    Ms. Mazyck. In terms of consulting for the documents, that 
is not something that I can tell you definitely. I think that 
in my complying with the request of the letter that came today, 
I would be able to determine that.
    Chairman Comer. Dr. Hoeg, that document that I have 
referred to recommended schools require the universal masking 
with children and six feet of physical distancing. Were those 
necessary to keep schools open?
    Dr. Hoeg. So, we had evidence prior to the pandemic that 
masks were largely ineffective at preventing community 
transmission of influenza and other upper respiratory viruses, 
and we did not obtain any new high-quality evidence during the 
COVID-19 pandemic that masks are effective mitigation strategy 
in schools or outside of schools. We have a number of 
confounded observational studies, many of which were actually 
published by the CDC that have serious flaws in them that I 
think, unfortunately, led people to believe that masking 
children was going to be effective and actually necessary to 
keep children in schools. But the highest quality data that we 
have, for example, from a Cochrane review of randomized studies 
has not found out evidence of that masks----
    Chairman Comer. So, that wasn't scientifically sound. The 
mask guidance was not----
    Dr. Hoeg. So correct, it wasn't science based, and the six 
feet of distancing was arbitrary. That was based on basically 
just looking at how far certain size droplets spread. It wasn't 
based on actual transmission of disease. And we knew very early 
on that COVID-19 was predominantly aerosolized and airborne 
transmission, so we ended up getting some pretty good 
observational data not finding correlation between amount of 
distancing 6 versus 3 feet and case rates in schools. So, it 
wasn't necessary, and it wasn't evidence based. We should have, 
by default, been keeping our schools open, but instead we were 
sort of requiring these non-evidence based mitigation 
strategies as a prerequisite for getting our children back in 
school. That ended up being a very harmful prerequisite, so.
    Dr. Wenstrup. I now recognize the Ranking Member of the 
full Committee, Mr. Raskin from Maryland, for five minutes of 
questions.
    Mr. Raskin. Mr. Chairman, thank you very much. COVID-19 was 
a catastrophe for our country as Donald Trump presided over a 
historic debacle of a public health response, and you don't 
need to go to the American Medical Association or the American 
Hospital Association, American Nursing Association to conclude 
that Trump's lethal recklessness and lying led to hundreds of 
thousands of unnecessary deaths. You just have to go to Donald 
Trump's own COVID-19 advisor, Dr. Deborah Birx, who said that 
by undermining mass testing, not more aggressively coordinating 
vaccination and treatment, not seriously implementing mask 
mandates, the Administration failed to save at least 130,000 
lives and probably a lot more than that. She testified we 
probably could have decreased fatalities into the 30 percent 
less to 40 percent less range, which translates into the lives 
of several hundred thousands of Americans. That is Trump's own 
COVID-19 advisor.
    Beyond the million-plus Americans killed in this plague, 
the public health orders closing our public schools set our 
educational process back dramatically and undermined the 
academic, athletic, emotional, and intellectual progress of 
millions of children across the country. No one can seriously 
dispute that. And as an educator and a father, I have been 
horrified by what this plague and the Nation's catastrophically 
ineffectual response to it have done to learning and education 
among young people.
    But was it the fault of the Governors, Republican and 
Democratic, who closed the schools in the middle of this 
emergency, the superintendent struggling to contain this out-
of-control pandemic? Was it the fault of the teachers on the 
front lines, at least 530 of whom died during COVID-19 
according to the American Federation of Teachers? Was it the 
fault of the school children or young people under 18 
themselves, more than 1,300 of whom themselves died of COVID-
19, or would it be the fault of the President who let the 
plague run loose and left the Nation without a unified, serious 
plan for managing the crisis, a President who praised China, 
China's Central Communist Party and President Xi, in handling 
of the epidemic on 37 different occasions?
    Well, let us take PPE for example. The Trump Administration 
knew as early as January 2020 that the U.S. would not have 
enough PPE for the pandemic. Instead of taking steps to bolster 
domestic supply chains, Trump consistently dismissed the impact 
of COVID, repeatedly assuring the country that China and Xi 
were doing a great job and had everything under control, and 
famously predicting that the pandemic would be over by Easter. 
When it became clear that he was wrong and the country 
desperately needed PPE, Trump put his unprepared and 
unqualified son-in-law, Jared Kushner, in charge of obtaining 
PPE. Instead of working with procurement experts in the Federal 
Government, Kushner hired a handful of 20-something friends 
working in finance in New York and none of whom had any 
significant procurement experience in order to source and 
distribute PPE.
    Ms. Mazyck, you are a school nurse with the National 
Association of School Nurses headquartered in Silver Spring, 
Maryland, so you understand the lengths to which schools went 
to keep kids safe throughout the pandemic. What did it mean for 
schools when they could not access the PPE they needed to 
protect the school children against the deadly virus in the 
spring of 2020?
    Ms. Mazyck. The unavailability of sufficient PPE, Ranking 
Member Raskin, was a concern because of the healthcare workers, 
the school nurses who were working with students, and most 
immediately with the healthcare that was happening throughout 
the Nation, healthcare professionals were advised to use PPE. 
That needed to happen for the school nurses, No. 1.
    Mr. Raskin. Thank you. Let us look at testing. It took 
months for the CDC to develop and distribute a reliable test. 
First, the Trump Administration rejected a protocol test design 
offered by the World Health Organization in January 2020, but 
the Administration didn't take any action to incentivize test 
manufacturing here at home, leaving us defenseless and 
floundering. And when there were widespread design and 
contamination issues with the CDC's tests, the Administration 
failed to provide public health centers with any guidance on 
how to proceed. This meant by the end of February 2020, the 
entire United States had conducted fewer than 500 tests 
compared to more than 65,000 in South Korea, for example. How 
did schools use testing as a tool allowing them to remain open 
during the pandemic, when they have the tests?
    Ms. Mazyck. Schools collaborated with local health 
departments, local health authorities to be able to offer 
testing, and some of them did that testing in school buildings. 
Some did it in testing centers.
    Mr. Raskin. All right. Mr. Chairman, in category after 
category, that Administration got an F, and I yield back to 
you.
    Dr. Wenstrup. I now recognize Ms. Malliotakis from New York 
for five minutes.
    Ms. Malliotakis. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for hosting this 
important hearing to discuss the mass lockdowns and the school 
closures that in New York City lasted a year and a half. It 
resulted in economic loss for parents, emotional and 
developmental harms to communities, and, of course, a great 
loss for our young people. New York City prohibited students, 
even after the schools reopened, from participating in sports 
and extracurricular activities. They even went so far as to 
mask preschool kids for extended periods of time. But in terms 
of the loss in social, emotional difficulties, we saw that 
suicide rate sharply increased, the rate of BMI and increased 
weight gain among children doubled. New cases of type 2 
diabetes among children nearly tripled. Others were set back 
months, even years in their development.
    Now New York is lowering standards for standardized test 
scores in reading and math following 2022 where less than 50 
percent passed their reading exam and 30 percent passed their 
math exam. We also know that these policies were directly 
influenced by powerful groups, groups like the American 
Federation of Teachers, to keep schools closed and made it 
nearly impossible to keep them open even with all the resources 
that have been provided to them by Congress.
    As a matter of fact, the inflationary American Rescue Plan, 
which the Democrats passed in March 2021 with their one-party 
rule, was billed as a necessity for reopening schools after the 
COVID-19 pandemic. They decided to spend this money despite a 
trillion dollars sitting there unused from the previous 
packages. This ARA provided another $122 billion for elementary 
and secondary schools. It was so critical, they needed this 
money, they could not open the schools without it. Guess what? 
As of November, only 15 percent of that money has been spent.
    They then created another fund, an additional $5.5 billion 
in relief funds for private schools with low-income students 
severely impacted by the pandemic. And we know, though, there 
was a clause in there, of course, so the Governors, including 
one like mine, could raid that money and use it for all sorts 
of different purposes. So to date, out of that pot, $157 
million has already been diverted to pay for other programs. 
Currently, $736 million has yet to be allocated to the private 
schools, and it is at risk again of being raided by the 
Governors.
    In total, $190 billion was allocated to aid schools across 
the country since 2020. Instead of using that funding for its 
original intent, we see states like New York spending it on all 
sorts of stuff, right? New York City allocated $12 million to 
go for restorative justice programs. They did implicit bias, 
anti-racism training. New York State Ed decided to put more 
money in diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. I don't 
know what that stuff has to do with COVID. I am not sure what 
it has to do with reopening our schools either.
    So, I guess my first question is, knowing what we know now 
and what we learned during the pandemic specifically about how 
the virus posed such a low risk to children, was it necessary, 
that excessive $190 billion in spending, to reopen schools? Yes 
or no. Go down the line.
    Mr. Zweig. No. Sorry. There we go.
    Ms. Gentles. The CARES Act was understandable in March 
2020. That is just now being spent down three years later, so 
the subsequent two bills, no.
    Ms. Malliotakis. Just say a ``yes'' or ``no.''
    Ms. Mazyck.
    [No response.]
    Dr. Hoeg.
    [No response.]
    Ms. Malliotakis. OK. I gave examples of what New York did. 
Would anyone like to comment on any awareness that they have of 
what other states may have done with that money?
    Ms. Gentles. We definitely have heard too many examples of 
the funds being expended on athletic endeavors and 
infrastructure. The funds were flexible. This isn't illegal or 
fraudulent that the districts and states are directing the 
funds to these endeavors, but it obviously reveals their 
priorities. We are dealing with a once-in-a-lifetime academic 
crisis. We need to be shouting from the rooftops that the funds 
need to be focused on academic recovery. You all put in the 
requirements that 20 percent needed to be going to academic 
recovery, and that is being done at a minimum. That needs to 
stop.
    Ms. Malliotakis. I am running out of time here. One last 
question. Should the Federal Government audit that money to 
find out where it went? Yes or no.
    Dr. Hoeg. Yes, definitely.
    Mr. Zweig. Yes.
    Ms. Malliotakis. And should the states be forced to repay 
that money if it is unspent still?
    Dr. Hoeg. Yes.
    Ms. Malliotakis. OK. Thank you very much for your time.
    Dr. Wenstrup. I now recognize Mrs. Dingell from Michigan 
for five minutes of questions.
    Mrs. Dingell. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I want to do a 
couple of things before I get into my questions, and one is to 
set the record straight on masks. I think that too many people 
criticize commonsense precautions for students and staff in 
classrooms and in everyday life, and I say that as one of the 
people that wore her mask longer than anybody. The study 
referred to today did not examine whether masks are effective 
at preventing infection. Instead, the study examined the 
effectiveness of masking interventions, which are contingent 
upon whether people wear them.
    In fact, the editor-in-chief of the Cochrane Library, which 
published the study that was referenced, issued a statement 
saying exactly that. Dr. Karla Soares-Weiser said, ``Many 
commentators have claimed that a recently updated Cochrane 
review shows that masks don't work, which is an inaccurate and 
misleading interpretation. The overwhelming body of scientific 
evidence indicates that wearing masks, particularly well-
fitting masks like KN95, is effective at preventing COVID-19.''
    For example, one study published in February 2022 found 
that wearing a surgical mask resulted in a 66 percent reduction 
in testing positive for COVID-19, and wearing a KN95 or N95 
mask resulted in an 83 percent reduction. Another study 
published by researchers at Duke found that the effective mask 
wearing was associated with a 72-percent reduction of in-school 
COVID-19 cases. And a February 2021 article published in The 
Journal of the American Medical Association compiled 11 
different studies evaluating the efficacy of masks, each of 
which has independently demonstrated that masks reduced the 
spread of COVID-19. And, Mr. Chairman, I would like to provide 
copies of those for the record without objection.
    Dr. Wenstrup. Without objection.
    Mrs. Dingell. Thank you, sir. And I also want to say again 
that as we talk about funds and other things, that just three 
weeks after President Biden took office, the CDC issued 
comprehensive guidance on how to safely reopen schools, which 
resulted in 60 percent of schools reopening in a matter of 
months and more than 95 percent reopening one year into the 
Administration. And Ms. Gentles, I agree with you about what is 
happening in our schools. Unfortunately, I think it was 
happening before COVID began, and it is a reflection of what is 
happening in our society. And we should all care about 
civility, treating each other with respect, and trying to 
reduce this tension and division we see between too many 
people.
    But while there is still much that we don't know about the 
pandemic's long-term effects on our Nation's youth, we are 
beginning to learn more, and I think we are all going to agree 
on something here. According to a January 2023 McKinsey report, 
we have been set back two decades of progress in learning 
because of this pandemic and the early missteps that forced 
schools to close and delayed getting kids back in the classroom 
sooner.
    Now, in large part thanks to the American Rescue Plan and 
this Administration's leadership in getting our Nation's 
schools the resources to safely bring students back to the 
classrooms, more than 99 percent of schools are open for full-
time in-person learning. But the American Rescue Plan wasn't 
just about getting schools to reopen. We just talked about it. 
It also took a forward-looking approach to pandemic recovery 
that we should look to replicate, including by requiring that 
schools use 20 percent of all funds allocated through the ESSER 
fund to address learning loss.
    Ms. Mazyck, you and school nurses all across the country 
have been on the front line of this pandemic's impact on 
America's students. How are schools working now to ensure 
students can learn in a healthy environment and catch up on 
lost classroom time from the height of the pandemic?
    Ms. Mazyck. Thank you. School nurses bring public health 
expertise as well as real-time view of conditions in schools. 
We believe that the best practice ensures that school nurses 
have a seat at the table when decisions are made. School nurses 
are helping students and families catch up with routine 
vaccinations that were delayed due to the pandemic and 
shutdowns of healthcare offices. School nurses are making sure 
that immunizations are done either in school or in the 
community. School nurses support the school community through 
constant surveillance of student and staff conditions to 
prevent and control spread of communicable disease and to 
respond in emergencies.
    Mrs. Dingell. Thank you. I am going to try to get one more 
question and then have some for the record for all of you. 
Nearly 8 million students have lost a parent or caregiver 
during COVID-19. There is no doubt that that kind of loss is a 
cause for stress, anxiety, and depression that impacts a 
child's ability to learn. Ms. Mazyck, what is the connection 
between students' mental health and their learning, and how can 
we better support them with emotional and behavior health 
support?
    Ms. Mazyck. The health of children, physical and mental, 
and learning are inextricably linked. They are connected 
together. And so, it is important for students to have learning 
supports through specialized instructional support personnel 
who are able as counselors, nurses, school psychologists, 
school social workers to provide what the needs are for those 
students. I heard today that some students came back to school, 
and they do not know how to be with one another because they 
had time in isolation. Social/emotional learning is important 
for them. They need the social skills to develop that may have 
been delayed. They also need the care for any anxiety, any 
depression, any of the bereavement, any of the emotional and 
mental health concerns that they have, and they need the 
personnel in the school building to help them.
    Mrs. Dingell. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
    Dr. Wenstrup. I now recognize Dr. Miller-Meeks from Iowa 
for five minutes of questions.
    Dr. Miller-Meeks. Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you to 
the witnesses who are here. As a physician and a former 
director of the Iowa Department of Public Health, in March 
2020, as a state senator, our legislature went into pause. At 
that time, I recommended to our Governor and to our legislators 
that we not close schools, especially elementary, because the 
scientific data we had at that time indicated that children 
were of minimal risk and did not seem to be good transmitters 
of the virus.
    Later, I submitted to our Senate the American Journal of 
Pediatrics article in June or July 2020 that indicated that 
there was very low transmission and, at that time, recommended 
that schools should not be closed. But the CDC did not follow 
that guidance. So, beginning in March 2020, schools across the 
Nation began closing, which seemed to be not, you know, 
unprecedented given that we did not have as much data about the 
SARS-CoV-2. That led to a complete transmission of classrooms 
to virtual classrooms.
    The impact of those decisions are no secret. The Pediatric 
Journal of the American Medical Association reviewed 36 
different studies comprising almost 80,000 children and 
adolescents as well as 18,000 parents, and concluded that 
school closures were related to adverse mental health 
conditions, distress, anxiety, health behaviors, and obesity 
among children and adolescents.
    I argued at the time in my first year in Congress numerous 
times before this Committee, and before Dr. Walensky and Dr. 
Fauci and others, that schools reopened in Nevada. A published 
article: Schools reopened in January 2021 because between March 
16 and June 30, there were six youth suicides. Between July 1 
and December 31, there were 12 youth suicides, the youngest of 
whom was nine. So Dr. Hoeg, are children less susceptible to 
COVID-19 infections than adults?
    Dr. Hoeg. So, early on in the pandemic, we saw that they 
were less likely to be infected, but they have always been much 
less likely to experience severe outcomes. And I discussed that 
is greater than a thousandfold difference between children and 
older adults, and that continues to be the same in terms of 
severe outcomes, that children are much, much less impacted. 
And it is comparable to a typical seasonal flu year, their 
infection fatality rate from COVID-19 to seasonal influenza. 
So, we should have been taking that into account from the 
beginning, and it is even lower now from COVID-19 considering 
the amount of immunity children now have.
    Dr. Miller-Meeks. And do we close schools or require mask 
wearing for children during the influenza season?
    Dr. Hoeg. No, we do not. Yes.
    Dr. Miller-Meeks. Thank you. And do children transmit 
COVID-19 to adults at a high rate?
    Dr. Hoeg. So, children do transmit COVID-19 to adults. What 
we saw, especially early on in the pandemic when we were doing 
contact tracing, is that children were much less likely to 
transmit to others outside of the home. They could transmit to 
adults outside the home, but at a lesser rate. And in school, 
the transmission rate to adults was minimal to almost none. In 
numerous studies from Europe, from the United States, from my 
own work in Wood County, Wisconsin, we saw no transmission from 
students to teachers in our Wood County, Wisconsin study over 
the fall semester, and we had the same experience in California 
with that.
    Dr. Miller-Meeks. Yes. When we had Dr. Walensky before us 
in testimony, I asked her if she inquired in other places other 
than the American Federation of Teachers Union about school 
closures, and she said she did. I asked her to submit data that 
had not been submitted to this Committee. I also specifically 
asked her if she checked with the state of Iowa. Iowa reopened 
its schools in the fall of 2020. There was not big drivers of 
community spread. And did you see other schools that were 
drivers, especially elementary school drivers of community 
spread?
    Dr. Hoeg. No, and I think it is important that we actually 
look at data from Europe that, you know, independent of what 
the mitigation strategies were or what the country was, there 
was no relationship with the school reopening and the community 
case levels. And we also saw that in Brazil with community case 
levels and with severity of disease outcomes that whether or 
not they opened or closed schools had no impact on community 
transmission.
    Dr. Miller-Meeks. Yes. And we asked if the CDC and FDA both 
would look at real-world evidence of other countries as they 
developed policy. When did this data become clear? And if you 
could answer very quickly because my time is almost up.
    Dr. Hoeg. In the late spring and early summer of 2020.
    Dr. Miller-Meeks. Thank you for that. I would like to have 
entered into record an article from Contemporary Pediatrics, 
March 23, 2023, ``Pediatric Speech Disorder Diagnoses More Than 
Doubles Amid COVID-19 Pandemic.'' That is related to mask 
wearing. Did they need to wear PPE?
    Dr. Hoeg. No. We have found no evidence from the best 
studies that we have that masking children provides a benefit. 
The best study we have actually is from Spain, a regression 
discontinuity study that found no evidence of benefit, and 
children in Scandinavia were not masked under the age of 12. 
So, it is important to keep in mind.
    Dr. Miller-Meeks. Thank you so much. Mr. Chair, I yield 
back.
    Dr. Wenstrup. And without objection, your entry will be 
submitted for the record.
    Dr. Wenstrup. I now recognize Mr. Mfume from Maryland for 
five minutes of questions.
    Mr. Mfume. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I want to 
thank you and Ranking Member Ruiz for giving us all an 
opportunity to discuss this matter, but, more importantly, to 
set the record straight on a number of different things. And I 
would caution all of us against Monday morning quarterbacking. 
So, in this case, I guess it would be Tuesday morning 
quarterbacking.
    It is so easy after the fact to assign blame and to talk 
about what should have, could have, or did not happen, but we 
run the risk of failing our jobs and we run the risk also of 
tainting history. In case no one remembers, COVID and those 
days of COVID were dark, dreary, desolate, and disconcerting. 
All the evidence we have now we did not have at the time of 
COVID. It was a learning process that we were all going 
through. And I would also caution against this notion of always 
comparing what we did in the U.S. against what they did in 
Europe to suggest somehow or another that it should have been 
the same. United States is one country. Europe is 44 nations. 
So, let us be real careful about how we compare apples to 
apples or oranges to oranges and make sure that we are talking 
about the same thing here.
    On January 21, the day after the inauguration of President 
Biden, the President signed an executive order directing that 
the Department of Education and the Department of Health and 
Human Services develop additional evidence-based guidance to 
assist schools in determining how they could safely reopen and 
remain open for in-person learning. And I say additional 
evidence-based guidance because it was Mr. Trump and Dr. Birx, 
who was advising him, as Mr. Raskin pointed out earlier, who 
had already given guidance. And her testimony on the record, as 
the Ranking Member stated, was that we could have saved over 
100,000 lives, we could have done more than what we were doing, 
and that we were doing what we should do with respect to 
masking and taking precautions. That was her testimony to the 
President and to the Nation, so let us not really forget about 
that.
    So, two months later, fast forward, after the President 
signs the executive order, he signs the American Rescue Act, 
which included $122 billion investment in special ed, in 
curriculum development and renovations to school, increased 
ventilation, and other forms to ensure school districts, again, 
across the country could return children to classroom and 
return them there safely. Thanks to those efforts, Baltimore 
City Public Schools was one of the first large school-based 
districts in the state of Maryland and one of the first urban 
districts nationwide to reopen in a safe in-person learning 
environment.
    Many of my colleagues who sometimes seek to assign blame 
and suggest that there was some sort of weird evil plan in 
effect are the same persons who have a long track record of 
pushing draconian cuts to programs that support American 
schools and American children, but I appreciate these newfound 
expressions of concern for poor Black and poor White and poor 
Latino kids. We just need to make sure we maintain that 
throughout the course of every year. At the end of last year, 
200 of those same persons voted against the Consolidated 
Appropriations Act, which had basic funding for K through 12 
education as well as funding for child nutrition programs. And 
then, as we all know, at the end of last year, 40 of those same 
colleagues voted against extending free lunches to schools in 
the summer.
    Ms. Mazyck, I am going to ask you a couple of things 
related to nutrition, or at least one. I want to, first of all, 
just say my hat is off to the school nurses and all nurses 
everywhere who helped us get through a harrowing time in our 
Nation's history. Can you just give an example or your 
estimation of how does limiting access to nutritious food 
programs undermine a child's learning and cognitive 
development? Because I think that is just as important.
    Ms. Mazyck. Yes, it is. Thank you. So, we know that health 
and learning are connected, and we also know that there are 
social determinants to children being healthy. And when they 
cannot get the food that they need, they live in housing that 
does not support their wellbeing or in neighborhoods the same, 
that impedes their learning. So, with the meals that students 
need, one of the things that school nurses found when schools 
were shut down was that children needed the meals. They were 
missing meals because school was no longer open where they had 
two meals, generally breakfast and lunch. That nutrition is 
absolutely necessary for learning to happen.
    Mr. Mfume. Thank you. My time has expired, Mr. Chairman.
    Dr. Wenstrup. I now recognize Mrs. Lesko from Arizona for 
five minutes of questions.
    Mrs. Lesko. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Zweig, you asked a 
great question, are schools an essential service? Yes. My 
answer is yes, and so it boggles my mind that we had grocery 
stores open, Walmart open, and all these other businesses 
deemed essential services that were open, yet we closed 
schools. Sweden kept daycare and schools open throughout the 
spring of 2020 for all children ages 1 through 15 without 
social distancing, masks, or testing.
    As of June 2020, among the 1.8 million children in this age 
group, zero died from COVID-19 and only a few were 
hospitalized. In May 2020, the Center for Global Development 
released a report that failed to find any increase in community 
COVID-19 case rates related to school reopenings 
internationally. On August 7, 2020, the CDC itself published an 
MMWR study based on COVID-NET data, which clearly established 
the low risk to American children. In August 2020, Australia 
and South Korea data showed that secondary infection rates were 
very low in schools.
    Yet, even with all this data showing that children were at 
low risk of having serious COVID effects and low transmission 
risks to adults, the CDC set guidelines in the fall of 2020 
that would keep 99 percent of American schools closed. 
Evidence, as shown by emails between the teacher union and the 
CDC, show that the CDC was greatly influenced by the teacher 
union and in fact, added language verbatim suggested by the 
teacher union. Mr. Zweig, why do you think the CDC seemed to 
listen more to input from the teacher unions than from 
scientific data from other countries and from their own 
scientific report?
    Mr. Zweig. Thank you, Congresswoman. I can't speak to the 
mindset of the people in charge of the CDC, but the broader 
context of your question, I think, is highly relevant. And with 
all due respect to the other Congress member, I think it is 
entirely appropriate to look at what happened in Europe and 
elsewhere. Those are human beings. They are children. They are 
in schools. I have lived in Europe. They have very crowded 
cities. They do not have sophisticated HVAC systems in all of 
their schools. That is real evidence in front of us.
    And I think we are talking about the difference between 
looking at models, looking at projections over empirical data, 
looking at theory over what we actually were observing. And I 
think that is incredibly important, and it is one of the things 
that I have been studying and been so fascinated by is this 
sort of very, very myopic, American-centric idea that nothing 
else was happening outside of our bubble. We had actual real-
world evidence from schools in countries throughout Europe with 
cities very similar demographics to our cities. The class sizes 
were not, you know, three kids in a giant room, and that 
evidence, for complex reasons, was disregarded.
    Mrs. Lesko. Thank you. Ms. Gentles, in Arizona and 
elsewhere, school districts created in-person hubs where low-
wage staff monitored in-person students who sat in front of 
their laptops while the teachers still worked remotely. This 
happened in Arizona to my grandkids. The Governor put out an 
executive order saying that students needed to have a place to 
go if their parents had to work and they had no place else to 
go. So my question is, if it was safe for low-wage workers to 
be in the presence of children in schools, why was it unsafe 
for teachers to be in the schools with the children?
    Ms. Gentles. Yes, this happened in Virginia where I live. 
It happened in California. It happened all around the country. 
Schools turned into daycares with low-wage workers who were not 
unionized, and I think that is the essential issue here. The 
teachers unions had made a decision that they needed to control 
the instructional hours that were offered whether or not 
schools were open and teachers were going to teach in the 
classroom. And I am speaking about the unions, not the 
individual classroom teachers. The unions were going to do that 
until the American Rescue Plan came forward with 122 additional 
billion Federal dollars.
    So, there were three big bills that offered the ESSER funds 
that we have been talking about: the supplemental Federal 
emergency funding, March 2020, and then winter, December, 
January, and then again, March 2021, that final ARP. They were 
waiting until that final $122 billion ARP funding came through, 
and then schools could open up and the unionized teachers could 
return to classrooms fully that fall.
    Mrs. Lesko. Thank you, and I yield back.
    Dr. Wenstrup. I now recognize Ms. Ross from North Carolina 
for five minutes of questions.
    Ms. Ross. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you to our 
witnesses for being here. As part of the American Rescue Plan, 
which we were just hearing a little bit about, congressional 
Democrats included a historic investment of more than $122 
billion dollars of ESSER funds, or the Elementary and Secondary 
School Emergency Relief Fund, which distributed that funding to 
schools and communities across the United States. These dollars 
could be used to facilitate academic recovery, modernize school 
facilities, bridge the digital divide, address staffing 
shortages, and provide physical and mental health services to 
students. The legislation also made sweeping investments in 
vaccines, testing, and other critical resources to restore our 
way of life. For example, the American Rescue Plan provided $10 
billion in Federal funding to scale up COVID-19 testing in K 
through 12 schools across the country.
    Ms. Mazyck, why is it so important to invest in the tools 
to ensure that schools could return safely to classrooms, and 
how did communities use these investments to do so? I know my 
school district in Wake County, which, by the way, does not 
have a union, used it for testing, for laptops for kids, for 
tablets, and for a wide variety of things to not only address 
immediate learning problems but also to bridge gaps in learning 
from before the pandemic.
    Ms. Mazyck. Thank you for your question. We know that in-
person learning promotes overall student health and wellness, 
and so the funds that were provided enabled buildings to be 
healthy, funding for ventilation. Many schools are older, and 
they needed help with having good ventilation. Also, schools 
were a nexus in communities for COVID testing, and that funding 
was helpful for that, in addition, making sure that students' 
mental health needs, which were prevalent prior to the 
pandemic, making sure there was support personnel who would be 
available to help students was paramount, and schools have used 
fundings for that.
    Ms. Ross. Could you tell us about any learning loss 
programs that were also funded?
    Ms. Mazyck. I am not able to speak to the learning loss 
programs.
    Ms. Ross. OK. How do you think these dollars have helped 
fortify our Nation's schools and communities for the 
possibility of a future public health crisis?
    Ms. Mazyck. I think we have learned lessons from this 
pandemic, and I will say that this pandemic has been fraught 
with the novelty of the coronavirus that shifted throughout the 
time over the past three years in how it performed and how it 
reacted. Right now, we know that schools and local health 
authorities need to work together to be able to make the 
decisions about health and safety in schools. And the funding 
that has happened--that has been available to schools--has 
enabled those entities to connect and collaborate. We have seen 
school-located vaccination clinics provided in schools so that 
students are caught up with their routine vaccinations. That 
happened because of funding.
    Ms. Ross. And just finally, do you have any thoughts or 
information about the impact of the coronavirus on teachers and 
teaching assistants and school personnel?
    Ms. Mazyck. I don't have those data with me.
    Ms. Ross. OK. I will submit a question for the record.
    Ms. Ross. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and I yield back.
    Dr. Wenstrup. I now recognize Mr. Cloud from Texas for five 
minutes of questions.
    Mr. Cloud. Mr. Zweig, there has been a lot of talk about 
the fact that this, you know, understanding of what COVID was 
happening over the last few years has certainly changed, and 
that is true. What we know now is certainly a lot more than 
what we knew then. My understanding is you were actually more 
at the beginning in favor of school closures and the like--
maybe that is not true--but as data became available that your 
thoughts had developed. Anyway, I was wondering if you could 
walk through that process. You know, the talking point we are 
hearing is that we know now more than we did then, which is 
true, but we did know early on how this affected children. 
Isn't that correct?
    Mr. Zweig. Thank you for your question. Yes, I was probably 
the first journalist from a major publication in America in the 
very early days of May 2020 to write an investigative piece 
reviewing all of the data. I have two kids myself, and I 
watched at the end of April as they were stuck in their 
bedrooms staring at screens, and crying, and all sorts of 
craziness happening, because it is not a good thing for them to 
be stuck in a bedroom staring at a screen for eight hours. It 
wasn't working, and I knew from all the other parents.
    And I saw that schools began opening in Europe at the end 
of April and the beginning of May, and that sort of set me on 
my course, and we knew very early that schools could open 
safely. The education ministers at the EU met not once, but 
twice that spring and announced that they saw no evidence that 
the reopening of schools there led to any sort of meaningful 
difference in case rates. That is profound that they said that, 
and that still was ignored, so that is why I wrote about it.
    Mr. Cloud. Yes.
    Mr. Zweig. So the idea that this is all revisionist 
history, you know, this is Monday morning quarterback is false. 
We, of course, gained more information as time goes on. The 
evidence was there, it was literally happening in front of us, 
and it was ignored.
    Mr. Cloud. Not only was it ignored, we actually had 
taxpayer-funded government agencies spreading the opposite 
information and clamping down on the accurate information. Dr. 
Hoeg, I see you smiling. You are actually a doctor. Could you 
speak to some of this?
    Dr. Hoeg. Yes. I mean----
    Mr. Cloud. Your microphone.
    Dr. Hoeg. David and I really kind of came to the similar 
conclusions at about the same time, and I started writing about 
it at the same time because I, being Danish, I had also watched 
what happened in Denmark, and I saw that they reopened their 
schools there after six weeks of closures in April 2020. There 
were no major outbreaks, and the pattern was the same across 
Europe.
    And so, I do feel like even over the course of the summer 
of 2020 that we got increasingly disparate messages from our 
American CDC and from Europe because across the U.S., we were 
getting more sort of fear mongering messaging about the risks 
of COVID-19 to children and how often they transmitted the 
virus that we were seeing in the media. And on the other hand, 
there was this hopeful message in Europe about children are not 
spreading COVID-19 in the schools as much as we had feared and 
were able to reopen the schools.
    And in Europe, there was this fundamentally different 
philosophy that schools should be open by default, whereas I 
don't know what happened in the United States with our 
messaging, where somehow it became the normal thing to have 
schools closed until proven otherwise that it was safer to have 
them in than outside of school. We should have always assumed 
they should be in school, figure out how to do it because we 
know the harms of keeping them out of school. And then we 
should have been studying what to do to decrease the 
transmission while they were in school.
    And so really, you know, the U.S. had a fundamentally 
different philosophy than Europe that, you know, ended up 
hurting the children. And we shouldn't be focusing on the 
differences in demographics between Europe and here, even 
though they do exist. Europe, like David said, is very diverse. 
I was a teacher in France in very crowded classrooms, and I 
knew from Denmark that the students were also in crowded 
classrooms. It is not like they have much smaller classrooms 
than we do here in the United States. And like I said, in 
Scandinavia, they weren't even wearing masks, and in Sweden, 
early on they weren't testing, so----
    Mr. Cloud. Yes. And to that point, Ms. Gentles, you kind of 
started to make this comment that some teachers unions came out 
specifically, like in California and other states that were 
really kind of adamant, like, we are not going back to the 
classroom, but it wasn't really until the science changed. It 
wasn't until they got money passed in a sense. You know, we see 
this a lot here in the Federal Government in the sense we 
create a problem and then we march in to be the white knight in 
shining armor to allegedly fix the problem we created. And here 
we have the government in a sense locking down schools, but 
then trying to ride in. Your thoughts to what happened there?
    Ms. Gentles. Well, I think the fear mongering is really 
important to emphasize that the union role was not just limited 
to influencing and editing the CDC guidance February 2021. We 
saw in spring of 2020 that unions were telling teachers not to 
provide new instructions or materials to students. And then 
throughout the summer, we saw----
    Mr. Cloud. So, they were actually putting pressure on the 
teachers who wanted to go educate kids.
    Ms. Gentles. Right.
    Mr. Cloud. Yes.
    Ms. Gentles. And then we saw throughout the summer that 
unions were sending body bags, and hearses, and draft 
obituaries to Governors and to other leaders to let them know 
that death would be on their hands, blood would be on their 
hands if they chose to open schools in the fall. And then as 
parents, I am sure we all saw on the Facebook community groups 
fear mongering and threats to parents who tried to speak up and 
express interests in open schools. Fear mongering was 
everywhere. It was pervasive throughout 2020.
    Mr. Cloud. Thank you. Thank you, Chairman.
    Dr. Wenstrup. I now recognize Mr. Garcia from California 
for five minutes of questions.
    Mr. Garcia. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I want to 
make some clarifications and then definitely have a couple of 
thoughts and questions. Just for starters, I know we have been 
hearing this here from some of my Republican colleagues. I 
think it is important to note that the CDC constantly engages 
with numerous groups, of course, during any sort of major 
crisis or process. There were stakeholders that were brought in 
to talk about how we return to the classroom. This was very 
common.
    I think there is obviously an attack going on here on 
teachers associations and teachers unions, and generally 
teachers as a whole. And so, I think that is very distracting 
considering that the Biden Administration, within three weeks 
of being in office, put together a plan to reopen schools.
    As we may need to remember that schools were closed during 
the tenure of President Trump. That is when most of the school 
closures actually happened, and so I just want to put in 
perspective that the Biden Administration did put in a plan to 
reopen schools. Now, that resulted, of course, 60 percent of 
schools reopening in a matter of months and more than 95 
percent of schools reopening one year into his Administration. 
And so, it is important to be critical, but also to make sure 
that we are being fair in when schools closed and when they 
actually reopened.
    It is standard practice for the CDC to engage with 
impactful organizations, like teachers unions and others, to 
get feedback to ensure guidance is comprehensive and 
implementable. I mean, at the end of the day, the teachers are 
the workers on the ground in the classrooms. Their opinions, 
and particularly opinions on safety, is important, and so I 
think that is critical. Teachers and teacher associations are 
one of more than 50 different organizations ranging from 
parents, superintendents, business groups, and others that all 
were a part of these decision-making processes as it relates to 
schools opening and closing. So, I just want to make those 
notes.
    And with that, I want to just turn to some other thoughts. 
This is a very important topic. I want to thank, of course, all 
the witnesses that are here, and it is important that we always 
engage with teachers, staff, parents, most importantly, as we 
have these decisions in serious crises.
    So, I was the mayor of Long Beach before being on this 
panel. I served at the height of the pandemic. It was horrible 
and really difficult to see, of course, not just school 
closures, but business closures, and the single largest of 
death event, where we lost over a million Americans, happened 
over the last couple of years. We have to always put this 
crisis in context of the lives that were lost. Back in Long 
Beach, we were the first large city in the state of California 
to actually vaccinate all of our public school teachers. We 
were also the first large school district to reopen our schools 
because all of our public school teachers were actually 
vaccinated.
    The White House actually called the Long Beach vaccination 
process a national model because we were committed to safe 
reopening of schools and working with our teachers on the 
ground. And this was all, by the way, in spite of very little 
support that we received from the Trump Administration early 
on, no plan on how we are going to reopen schools. And so 
again, I think it is important that we look at the totality of 
what happened during the pandemic. Someone that was on the 
ground in California can tell you that the lack of concern from 
the Administration, from many colleagues in Congress, some of 
which continue to serve, was very distressful for mayors on the 
ground. But we are serious today, and I am glad the Committee 
is serious about addressing the impacts of the pandemic and 
school closures.
    And I wanted to turn this real quickly to Ms. Mazyck. I 
will see if you can answer a couple of quick questions. Is it 
safe to say that a reckless reopening process without vaccines 
or safeguards would have been damaging, particularly to the 
health and possibly lives of folks, not just in our schools, 
but those with family members back home?
    Ms. Mazyck. Yes.
    Mr. Garcia. And is it also true that during the pandemic, 
families that were impacted oftentimes the most were low-income 
families, communities of color, where there weren't choices 
about being able to quarantine in separate bedrooms? Perhaps 
you had multifamily living in the same apartment. You had kids 
that could have been in school and bringing back the virus to 
grandparents or the parents. Isn't that also true?
    Ms. Mazyck. That is true.
    Mr. Garcia. Thank you. As we move forward to put in better 
safeguards, do you have a couple of additional pieces of advice 
for schools or school leaders that could keep us healthy as we 
move forward?
    Ms. Mazyck. I think it is important to understand that 
preparation for a pandemic or any emergency health situation is 
a must, and schools need to bring together stakeholders in the 
community, including health departments, but also making sure 
that the right people are at the table. We have had a lot of 
lessons that we have learned over the past three years on how 
to layer mitigations, how to make buildings safer, how to keep 
people safe. And it is incumbent upon us to begin those 
planning conversations, making sure families are at the table 
and all the other stakeholders who would be involved.
    Mr. Garcia. Thank you so much, and I yield back.
    Dr. Wenstrup. I now recognize Dr. Joyce from Pennsylvania 
for five minutes for questions.
    Dr. Joyce. Thank you for yielding, Mr. Chairman, and thank 
you for our witnesses for appearing. You know, I look back at 
the devastating impacts that COVID-19 pandemic and our U.S. 
response have had, and perhaps none is more tragic and also 
more avoidable, tragic and avoidable, than what happened to our 
kids.
    This is from the New York Times from last September: ``This 
year, for the first time since the National Assessment of 
Education Progress tests began tracking students in the 1970's, 
nine-year-olds lost ground in math and scores, and reading fell 
by the largest margin in more than 30 years. The decline 
spanned almost all races and income levels and were markedly 
worse for the lowest performing students. While top performers 
in the 90th percentile showed a modest drop--three points in 
math--students in the bottom 10th percentile dropped by 10 
points in math, four times the impact.'' And the sad truth of 
matter is it didn't have to be this way.
    From the earliest days of the pandemic, we knew that the 
risk to kids for both transmission and severe illness from 
COVID-19 was low, and yet, at the urging of the AFT and other 
powerful unions, kids were kept home far too long. This dynamic 
was further exacerbated by the Biden Administration's first 
guidance on school reopening that recommended leaving 90 
percent of students in remote settings, and now we are facing 
the consequences in learning loss and mental and physical 
health declines.
    Ms. Gentles, as a parent in a blue school district, you 
faced some of the most restrictive school closure policies. Can 
you please speak on the impact on students learning, 
particularly as we address these losses in math and reading 
scores?
    Ms. Gentles. Well, I think sometimes we get numb to these 
scores and we think, well, they were already low before the 
pandemic and now they are lower, but when we talk about these 
huge drops, we have to think about the individual students. And 
we have to recognize in a community like mine that is divided 
by a highway, North Arlington versus South Arlington, when 
schools closed, the parents in North Arlington, which is a more 
well-to-do part of the county, were able to afford tutors, and 
learning pods, and resources to ensure that their students 
didn't fall behind. The kids in South Arlington less so. And 
so, when you look at the data for the Title I schools, the 
schools that have more low-income kids, it is heartbreaking to 
look at the number of students that failed the math and reading 
state assessments in those schools.
    Dr. Joyce. Do you feel that there are policies that we 
should be pursuing as far as educational testing requirements 
to ensure the students get back on track and that we mitigate 
these severe losses that we have seen?
    Ms. Gentles. Well, a proven strategy is high-dosage 
tutoring. Unfortunately, a lot of school districts needed to 
quickly push money out the door. They had so much money, 
millions in cases, billions in some of the larger school 
districts, so they quickly signed contracts with online 
tutoring platforms that don't actually reach the kids and have 
low participation rates. When districts have invested in high 
dosage tutoring, one-on-one tutoring multiple times a week, 
that can have a real impact on children's lives and address the 
learning loss. Other places have----
    Dr. Joyce. If I may, my time is limited, but let us pivot 
from educational losses to healthcare losses, and this is 
where, Dr. Hoeg, I think that your expertise comes into play. 
According to CDC data, in 2021, 37 percent of high school 
students reported experiencing poor mental health during the 
COVID-19 pandemic, and 44 percent reported that they 
persistently felt sad or hopeless during the past year compared 
to 36 percent in 2019. Suicide attempts increased sharply for 
adolescents and suicide attempts for 12-to 17-year-old girls 
were rising over 50 percent again comparing 2021 with 2019 
statistics. Do you feel that school closures played a role in 
these alarming statistics, and how do we repair this?
    Dr. Hoeg. Yes. So, I think it is actually very difficult to 
establish closing schools as causal in the increase in mental 
health issues, but we do have some good data that was published 
in the Journal of American Medical Association showing that 
there was a significant association between school closures and 
increasing mental health issues such as anxiety and depression. 
And we have data showing increased suicide rates as well in the 
Journal of Pediatrics that especially affected males, 
adolescent males and younger males as well, and the increase 
really started in the summer and fall of 2020, those suicide 
rates.
    And so whether or not it was schools, whether or not it was 
the access to sports through schools, or some other factor, it 
is difficult to say, but we see across the board these 
accelerating increasing mental health issues correlating with 
the closures of the schools. And so, I think it is not a 
stretch of the imagination, you know, to see how isolating 
children, keeping them out of school, keeping them away from 
their peers, keeping them away from adults they can confide in 
and in a safe environment, you know, for them, that that could 
be correlated with worsening mental health issues.
    Dr. Joyce. So as a physician, as a doctor, do you feel that 
the school closures accentuated long-term mental health issues 
in children?
    Dr. Hoeg. I am concerned that they did because of the 
correlation we saw----
    Dr. Joyce. In school-related activities, whether it was 
being on the soccer field----
    Dr. Hoeg. I mean, we have seen also evidence that sports 
activities, the decreased participation in sports activities 
have been associated with increased depression rates 
specifically during the pandemic, and we know that many 
children get access to sports and physical activity through 
school. It would be extremely difficult to say that the school 
closures had no impact on this mental health crisis that we are 
seeing right now in our youth.
    Dr. Joyce. Thank you for your insight, and I yield.
    Dr. Wenstrup. I now recognize Ms. Tokuda from Hawaii for 
five minutes of questions.
    Ms. Tokuda. Thank you, Mr. Chair. I ask to insert into the 
record a March 2023 report from Hawaii State Superintendent on 
measuring student achievement pandemic impacts and recovery 
without objection, Mr. Chair.
    Dr. Wenstrup. Without objection.
    Ms. Tokuda. Thank you. I am a mother of two school-aged 
boys who attend public schools in Hawaii, and like many parents 
across our country, I wanted to get my children back into 
classrooms with their teachers and their peers as soon and 
safely as possible. But like all of us, we watched the 
infection and death tolls rise across our country. You have 
heard it today, the millions of lives that were lost right here 
in the United States. Over 1,700 minors lost their lives. Over 
200,000, and by some accounts more, children lost a parent or a 
secondary caregiver. That is 1 in 360 kids losing a parent or a 
loved one that cares for them. Some assessments have brought it 
even closer to 1 in 260 youth.
    Ms. Mazyck, you testified that during the Trump 
Administration, we lacked basic public health infrastructure, 
PPE, ventilation systems, testing capabilities. We didn't even 
have a vaccine. Lacking these things, was it a safe environment 
for our students to return to? Yes or no.
    Ms. Mazyck. No.
    Ms. Tokuda. And despite the state of the pandemic, the 
Trump Administration tried to bully our schools into reopening 
by threatening to withhold greatly needed Federal funds unless 
they did so, all for Donald Trump's political gain. On July 8, 
2020, President Trump tweeted about America's schools, noting 
that he ``may cut off funding if not open.'' Less than a week 
later, Trump's Education Secretary, Betsy DeVos, told Fox News 
that if schools weren't going to reopen, ``They shouldn't get 
the funds.'' Ms. Mazyck, how would cutting off Federal funds, 
greatly needed Federal funds, for our Nation's schools in the 
middle of the pandemic have undermined our children's 
education? What impact would that have had further on learning 
loss, and would it have done absolutely anything to improve 
student mental health or reduce the rates of abuse that rose 
during the pandemic?
    Ms. Mazyck. I will speak specifically to one aspect of 
education that is in the Every Student Succeeds Act, the 
education law, and that is a provision for specialized 
instructional support personnel, the school counselors, nurses, 
psychologists, social workers, and others who are there to 
support students so that they have what they need in order to 
access their learning. That would have been difficult for 
schools to move forward because they would not be able to 
provide equitable healthcare and mental health needs to 
students.
    Ms. Tokuda. Thank you. And so, a lot of the talk we have 
had today about the fact that learning loss took place, that 
the mental health of our students were severely impacted, 
access to opportunities that were overlooked, rates of abuse 
increased, none of this would have helped. In fact, it would 
have been made worse by the threats and the actions of the 
prior President.
    Ms. Mazyck. Thank you.
    Ms. Tokuda. So, you know, I just want to go off a little 
bit about what we are hearing today. You know, we have talked a 
lot about learning loss, and, yes, we lost a lot during the 
pandemic, and we need to start to refocus our support on 
schools and our educators in order to overcome this. But let me 
be clear about this as a mother of two boys who were in our 
public school system during the pandemic and are still in our 
public school system. The loss of a child, a child's loss of a 
parent, a caregiver, a classmate, a teacher, no amount of money 
or political pandering can make up for that. We lost a lot, as 
I said, during this pandemic, but we also learned a lot from 
this experience.
    I asked to insert Hawaii's report into the record. We are 
one of the largest school districts in the country, despite our 
small geographic size. We were amongst the most conservative in 
reopening our schools and businesses. And while we suffer from 
health disparities and have a number of vulnerable communities 
even before this pandemic, we were one of the best-performing 
states in this country when it came to mortality rates, 
vaccination rates, hospital capacities.
    Was there learning loss amongst our children? Did I worry 
about my two sons? Yes, as there was across our country in 
every school district in every single state. But recent 
findings that we have seen from an independent analysis shows 
that thanks to smart and targeted use of ESSER funds, these 
very funds that were threatened by the former President, our 
students and schools' recovery was exceptional. ``It is 
exceptional compared to other states.''
    That being said, we have much work ahead. But if we are 
going to take anything meaningful away from this tragedy and 
from this hearing today, it is that funding like ESSER, funding 
from the Federal Government, not reckless reopening and 
threatening of funding, funding works. I am glad to see 
colleagues across the aisle care so much about our kids, about 
learning, about their mental health, and I look forward to them 
supporting us in increasing funding, in fact, for our public 
schools, for our teachers, for mental health services to our 
school districts to help them combat the learning loss they 
have experienced. Thank you, Chair. I yield back my time.
    Dr. Wenstrup. I now recognize Ms. Greene from Georgia for 
five minutes of questions.
    Ms. Greene. Thank you, Mr. Chair. We are hearing a lot 
about funding from Democrats today as we are preparing our 
budget here in the House of Representatives. And I would just 
like to point out, we don't have a revenue problem in 
Washington. We have a spending problem. And there was a lot of 
misuse of COVID funds during the shutdowns and a lot of waste, 
fraud and abuse, and that is why we are here on the Oversight 
Committee today.
    I also wear another hat other than a Congresswoman. I am a 
mother, and I have three children, and I have children in 
school, or at least one of them has graduated. The other two 
are now in college. But my youngest, my son, he graduated in 
the class of 2022. Now thankfully, I am from a red state where 
his high school opened up quickly, his activities resumed, but 
my three children did suffer during that time. All three of 
them lost their part-time jobs. My daughter, who was a D1 
athlete in college, her sport was completely suspended for an 
entire season. They lost many things. But I will say that 
thankfully, because our schools reopened quickly, my son's 
education did not fall behind, but many's education did fall 
behind.
    We have talked about ACT scores. For example, approximately 
42 percent of the graduate test takers from the high school 
class of 2022 failed to meet the benchmark scores in English, 
reading, science, and math. The average of that class was 19.8 
out of 36 on the ACT. This is a failure and a direct result of 
school closures.
    I would also like to talk about, you know, I hear a lot 
from my colleagues on the other side talking about vulnerable 
children, and children in poverty, and children that are at 
risk, especially with learning disabilities. That is something 
else I know about. Children with autism, Down syndrome and 
other disorders, they went without their therapies, tutoring, 
and many other things that they were used to receiving when 
they were in person and education in schools. That was 
detrimental. I have a family from my district whose daughter 
with autism completely quit speaking after years and years of 
therapy that she had finally begun to speak, and she quit 
speaking again when her therapies were discontinued. I think 
that is a complete failure.
    But the most devastating effect that I think that we all 
saw was the suicide increase in children. It is unthinkable to 
me that any child would commit suicide, and I know, all of you 
on the panel agree with that. But here we saw suicide increase 
to 6,000 suicides among the ages 10 to 24, 51-percent increase 
in suicide attempts in girls ages 12 to 17. But boys were the 
ones that so tragically were actually getting the job done with 
the largest rate of suicide in an average of eight percent 
increase, and so it is just completely devastating.
    But another thing I would like to point out that we haven't 
really talked about here is that the gigantic impact on mental 
health of our kids while they were being forced to stay home, 
many of them alone by themselves sitting in front of a screen 
for most of their waking hours as they were trying to educate 
themselves with online learning, which was a failure for many. 
But they were also spending their time on TikTok and Instagram, 
which are two poison pills for our children's minds. And since 
this time, the school closures, we have seen a dramatic 
increase in trans-identifying children, which is something that 
was not normal nor common many years before this, and I think 
that is completely devastating. But I would also like to point 
out the AFT, the teacher's union, were the teachers that, by 
the way, were getting paid to stay home and didn't have to go 
work, were the ones talking to the CDC about when should 
schools reopen, and then we had Governors of blue states. So, I 
would like to ask each of you, and each of you take your turn.
    If you had the chance to explain with your experience and 
knowledge that you have about the horrific failures of the 
COVID shutdowns, what would you say to Randi Weingarten, who I 
would prefer to be on this panel today--I think that is who we 
should be talking to--or what would you say to CDC Director, 
Rochelle Walensky, who I also think we should be questioning 
today? Mr. Zweig, if you had questions for her, what would you 
ask? And then I would like to hear from each witness. Thank 
you.
    Mr. Zweig. I would ask Dr. Walensky why the evidence that 
existed in front of us, real-world observational evidence, was 
dismissed or ignored, and instead we focused on projections and 
models about what would happen. That is against sort of 
fundamentals in the hierarchy of evidence when you look at, and 
we chose to look at a lower form of evidence and prioritized 
that over real-world evidence that was occurring. I would like 
to understand why that happened.
    Ms. Greene. Thank you. Dr. Hoeg?
    Dr. Hoeg. Yes. So, I would like to discuss with Randi 
Weingarten about the perceived risks both to teachers and 
children as I do think that there was a misunderstanding and a 
miscalculation about the many risks that children face, and 
about the risks that teachers faced also from children. But I 
would like to ask Dr. Walensky, you know, why, when she was 
creating the guidance for reopening the schools in February 
2021, that she was using the wording of the teachers unions in 
terms of requiring six-feet of distance and not actually 
consulting the scientists and physicians who were doing the 
actual research looking at amount of distancing and 
transmission in schools, and why it seemed like the teachers 
unions had had a more dominant voice in creating those 
guidelines then then the scientist.
    Ms. Greene. Thank you. Ms. Gentles?
    Ms. Gentles. Yes. I think that if I had the opportunity to 
speak with Randi Weingarten, I would ask her about what her 
conversations are like with teachers in urban districts that 
were closed and did not serve students. What is it like to talk 
to teachers in Baltimore at schools that have zero percent 
students proficient? Zero. And what is it like to talk to 
teachers in Newark that have less than two percent of their 
students proficient in math? What is she advising those 
teachers now when they say what do we do? How do we teach these 
kids? How do we turn this around? She has to take 
responsibility for keeping those schools closed and creating 
the situation for her members, for her teachers. What is she 
going to tell them to do now?
    Ms. Greene. Excellent. Ms. Mazyck?
    Ms. Mazyck. I will speak from a public health perspective 
from the Federal, state, and local level, and ask for a way to 
communicate lessons learn after-action plans are very common in 
dealing with emergencies. I think that needs to happen on all 
levels so that we know what to do the next time we have a 
pandemic.
    Ms. Greene. Thank you very much. I yield back the remainder 
of my time.
    Dr. Wenstrup. I now recognize Dr. Jackson from Texas for 
five minutes of questions.
    Dr. Jackson. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you for our 
witnesses. Thank you for being here today.
    A lot of this has already been said, but I am going to 
state it anyways because I do think it is important, but early 
on, COVID was a black box. No one really knew how infectious it 
was. We didn't know what the true morbidity and mortality of 
this disease was. No one knew who the truly vulnerable 
populations were. But we started pretty quickly to figure this 
out, and one thing that we learned very early on was that 
children were not the at-risk group in this disease. They 
didn't get COVID easily. They didn't spread it. And if they did 
get it, they did not get seriously ill and die from it despite 
some of what we heard.
    We also knew that masking and school closures were having a 
devastating effect on social development, academic performance, 
and rise in youth depression and suicide. Despite that, there 
was no course correction. And the White House, Democrats at all 
levels of government, and the public health sector, which, by 
the way, has lost all credibility and trust of the American 
people at this particular point, all doubled down on these 
destructive policies. Why? Why were these decisions being made? 
Who was actually driving these bad decisions? You have to ask 
yourself.
    We know now that the teachers union, and specifically AFT 
and its president, Randi Weingarten, were aggressively pushing 
this destructive agenda. Why were they doing that? You ask 
yourself. Well, No. 1, my opinion is because there were 
billions of dollars at play here, billions, billions of dollars 
which would ultimately be controlled by the teachers union. 
Since 2020, Congress has actually allocated $190 billion to the 
schools. Seven million dollars of that went to the teachers 
union, the intent of which the $190 billion was to reopen our 
schools and get back to normal. However, that did not happen, 
and the teachers union continued to support school closures.
    Liberal politicians continue to advocate for more money and 
support of the union--why--and more government money for this 
purpose. Well, I will tell you why. It is because a large part 
of that money was going right into the reelection campaigns, in 
the coffers of those very Democrats. In fact, the teachers 
union gave $20 million to Democrats in the 2020 election cycle 
alone. This, in my opinion, was the biggest driver of all of 
this. However, it didn't help at all that the teachers, 
administrators, and other school employees were being paid to 
stay home as well. And the teachers union was once again 
promoting this for political reasons with complete disregard 
for the health and the wellbeing of our children.
    A perfect example of this, recently published, this CDC 
report. The CDC admitted that there were errors in their CDC 
reporting. These errors, they resulted in exaggerating the 
severity and the risk for children. They also resulted at the 
time and they continued CDC recommendations to keep kids at 
home. These recommendations we now know were developed in 
conjunction with the teachers union. This is politics, not 
science.
    Ms. Mazyck, I wanted to ask you. Are you a member of the 
teachers union?
    Ms. Mazyck. I am not.
    Dr. Jackson. You are not.
    Ms. Mazyck. National Association of School Nurses is a 
501(c)(3) member organization.
    Dr. Jackson. Thank you. You are the executive director of 
the National Association of School Nurses. Is that correct?
    Ms. Mazyck. That is correct.
    Dr. Jackson. Were you the director in February 2021?
    Ms. Mazyck. I was.
    Dr. Jackson. OK. And I know this question has been asked, 
but I think it is important, but I want to ask one more time. 
Were you consulted by the CDC or the White House or anyone else 
regarding recommendations for in-person learning?
    Ms. Mazyck. The term ``consultation'' means that I really 
need to look at data and documents. I received a letter----
    Dr. Jackson. Did you get a phone call? Did you receive a 
letter? Did you remember having any conversations?
    Ms. Mazyck. I received a letter today from the Chairman----
    Dr. Jackson. Not today before----
    Ms. Mazyck [continuing]. Asking for me to provide 
information from our association.
    Dr. Jackson. I am not talking about that today. That is 
fine. We will get that letter. We would love to find that 
information. Now what I am asking is at the time when these 
recommendations were being made, did you receive any phone 
calls? Did you get any letters? Did you have any communication 
with somebody at the White House or somebody at the CDC 
regarding in-person learning?
    Ms. Mazyck. You are asking me to go by my memory, and----
    Dr. Jackson. I am asking you, you were the executive 
director. This is the organization that you were in charge of, 
and you can't remember if you had any type of conversation 
about that?
    Ms. Mazyck. Sir, I will fulfill what the letter asks me 
for, and I ask that you would respect that.
    Dr. Jackson. I will be happy to look at that letter when we 
get it. I think it is very concerning that you can't remember, 
as the executive director, whether you had any type of 
conversation or any type of communication about that at all. I 
mean, I think you could easily say I did, I don't know the 
detail. I can't relate to you the extent of which this 
conversation took place. I will get that to you in writing. But 
you are saying you do not remember having any of those 
conversations.
    Ms. Mazyck. No, I don't. What I do know is that the 
National Association of School Nurses depended on the guidance 
that was issued from the CDC.
    Dr. Jackson. I understand that. What I want to know is did 
they participate in developing that guidance along with the 
teachers union. I think this is a very important question. This 
is just the beginning. We are just starting to scratch the 
surface of what happened here. When we see something that 
doesn't look like it is not right, usually follow the money and 
you can figure out exactly why this stuff happened. So I am 
excited about looking into this and finding out exactly what 
drove all of this, where that money went and who made these 
decisions. Thank you, Mr. Chair, I yield back.
    Dr. Wenstrup. Thank you. I would now like to yield to 
Ranking Member Ruiz for a closing statement if he would like to 
make one.
    Dr. Ruiz. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you again to 
all of our witnesses for your participation. It is clear, in-
person learning is critical to our children's health and well-
being, both inside and outside the classroom. It is very clear 
that we have to do our utmost best to ensure that every school, 
regardless if you are in an affluent community or an indigent 
community, where, if you have kids with affluent parents or 
hard-working poor parents, that they all have the equal 
opportunity to stay in school, a school that is resourced well, 
that is well equipped, and then has all the provisions 
necessary not only to stay healthy, but also to learn during 
and not during a very highly infectious airborne virus to keep 
them safe, to keep them in school, and to keep them learning, 
and also in a way that helps reduce transmission in a 
community.
    Before we wrap up today, I would like to take the 
opportunity to correct the record regarding some 
characterizations of the comparisons between when America 
schools reopened versus other countries that we have heard 
throughout the hearing.
    Look, when other countries took the virus seriously, they 
acted quickly to rapidly boost with the tools necessary to 
catch up or do measures to help reduce the transmission. And 
when you have a highly transmittable virus with an R0 of 4, 
which we had early on in the pandemic based on some high 
transmission rate cities, like New York City and others, 
whatever you do on a highly infectious pandemic, the effects of 
what you do has some latency. So, the higher the transmission 
rate, the infectivity, the longer the latency of your actions 
on the pandemic.
    So, the lack of urgency, the downplaying of the virus, and 
under the previous Administration our schools were left under 
resourced and under prepared to keep kids and their community 
safe and healthy. And that lack of urgency led to delays in 
reopening our schools, led to the ill-equipped schools in the 
hardest hit communities having to delay returning to schools, 
and commonsense measures to ensure kids could learn safely in 
classrooms were politicized for President Trump's partisan gain 
during the election year.
    In contrast, you know, on his first full day in office, 
President Biden took decisive action to reopen our Nation's 
schools by issuing an executive order calling on the Department 
of Education and Department of Health and Human Services to 
issue long-awaited guidance on safely returning to in-person 
learning. And just three weeks later, CDC issued this 
comprehensive guidance on vaccines, testing and masking, paving 
the way for 95 percent of schools to reopen by fall of 2021.
    Now schools are 99 percent open, and yet this does not 
erase the need to make sure that we address learning loss and 
make our education system more resilient for the next highly 
contagious lethal virus, protecting students and teachers and 
keep schools open in the event of another public health crisis. 
That is our goal, and we must do all this with compassion for 
the heavy toll the pandemic took on our Nation's children, 
families, and educators. And we must do all this with a focus 
on ensuring America's children can live and learn healthily, 
and safely now and into the future.
    And I think one of the biggest lessons learned and takeaway 
is to act with urgency, to beef up testing and PPEs to make 
sure our schools, especially our underfunded schools, now have 
the resources they need to make sure that we have more school 
nursing, more protocols, more air purifiers, more ability to 
keep our students safe from any future pandemic, to keep our 
teachers safe, to keep our school workers safe, and to keep 
their community safe so that in our hardest-hit communities, 
the schools that exist that are underfunded in those highly hit 
communities do not contribute to transmissions, albeit in other 
affluent communities, those transmission rate may be smaller. 
But we need to look at all of these things, and I am glad that 
we are having these conversations. And so, with that, I yield 
back.
    Dr. Wenstrup. Thank you. In closing, I would like to thank 
our panelists once again for their important and insightful 
testimony here today, and I am going to make my closing 
statement.
    What are some of the things we heard today? Instead of 
schools being the last to close and the first to open, they 
were the first to close and the last to reopen, yet bars and 
liquor stores, they were open. We talked about Europe, and we 
saw in Europe that there were some places where the rate of 
transmission/infection outside of the school was greater than 
inside the school. Dr. Ruiz and Mr. Mfume talked about these 
aren't apples to apples, and I get that. That makes sense, but 
we can learn from them, and it doesn't mean we should ignore 
them altogether, which is seemingly what we did, very little 
discussion, very little input from what we were finding from 
data from around the world.
    Mr. Garcia talked about schools being reopened. Well, were 
they fully reopened? Were they partially reopened? Were there 
restrictions on them? Were there restrictions that limited the 
education of the children? We have to discuss that, too. You 
can't just say they reopened and expect to really be able to 
guide us further. Now we heard about, well, teachers went back 
when they were vaccinated. Well, that is great, but vaccinated 
people get COVID too. We knew that from the trials. That is not 
new, so why was that the factor? This is kind of hard to 
imagine.
    Mr. Garcia also mentioned that many groups were asked to 
provide input, stakeholders, if you will, and that is a good 
thing to give that to the CDC. So, the question is, if we find 
out the school nurses gave some wonderful advice based on their 
medical experience especially, did it have more say or more 
influence than what the teachers union had to say, with no 
medical background? We need to know that. It is important to 
know that because what influence did it have on the guidelines 
that CDC put out?
    You know, during either administration, actions were taken, 
actions that are being questioned, that were questioned at the 
time. Most of the actions were being taken by public health 
officials or public health agencies. The question is, what was 
done? What wasn't done? Was it helpful, or was it hurtful, or 
did it make no difference whatsoever? That is what we need to 
be talking about.
    You know, we look at the idea of restricting travel from 
China. Well, I would say that is pretty much the ultimate 
contact tracing there when that was called for, and it 
certainly was extreme social distancing, which was recommended. 
Yet, it was ridiculed, deemed hatred. And why? Obviously, it 
was political reasons. We didn't need political influence on 
what we are doing here then, and we don't need it now if we are 
to be successful in the mission of this Committee.
    We heard a lot about the American Rescue Plan today. We 
heard about the dollars spent, but what we haven't determined 
fully is whether it made a difference, whether it was 
necessary, what it did, what it didn't do. You know, I heard 
well, we were able to get more money for vaccines for the 
children. We don't know fully if they needed it. I mean, a lot 
of data would show they don't need to be vaccinated. They are 
not at risk. They may have infection-acquired immunity.
    All of these things, you know, if somebody says, hey, Dr. 
Wenstrup, we got you some more blood pressure medicine. Well, I 
don't have high blood pressure, so it really doesn't matter. So 
was this worthwhile to give me more blood pressure medicine 
when I don't need it? Those are the questions we have to ask 
and be serious about it. You know, our job is oversight, and 
whether it is the bills that we passed in a bipartisan fashion, 
or the American Rescue Plan, we have an obligation to see if it 
was effective, if it was helpful. Are we spending money wisely? 
Are we actually producing something that has made America 
better, healthier?
    Ms. Mazyck, I appreciate what you said. You said after 
action. I have been saying that from the start that this is 
what this Committee is about. It is an after-action review, 
lessons learned, build a path forward, not only for school 
children, but for all of America, and, for that matter, for the 
globe. We can do great things, but only if we are courageous 
enough and able to honestly and smartly critique ourselves and 
our political allies. That is when we can have success. And 
with that, I yield back.
    And without objection, all members will have five 
legislative days within which to submit materials and to submit 
additional written questions for the witnesses, which will be 
forwarded to the witnesses for their response.
    Dr. Wenstrup. If there is no further business, without 
objection, the Committee stands adjourned.
    [Whereupon, at 12:27 p.m., the Subcommittee was adjourned.]

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