[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
[GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Available on: govinfo.gov,
oversight.house.gov or
docs.house.gov
_________
U.S. GOVERNMENT PUBLISHING OFFICE
51-719 PDF WASHINGTON : 2023
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
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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
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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.]
[all]