Even though President Donald Trump is pushing to have schools reopen their classrooms in the fall, his son Barron won’t be sitting in class at his private St. Andrew’s Episcopal School in Maryland full-time anytime soon. And even though Florida Senator Rick Scott is cool with schools opening amid the pandemic, his grandchildren will not be attending classes to “make sure they are safe.” Teachers have been expressing concern, too, since reopening schools will put them on the front lines of the pandemic.
One such teacher is lifelong Oklahoma Republican Nancy Shively who has two autoimmune diseases, who says she is “terrified” at the possibility of having to return to the classroom amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
In an op-ed published in USA Today on Thursday, Nancy Shively, 60, slammed Trump’s push to reopen schools during the coronavirus pandemic. Shively voted for Trump in 2016, but she’s voting for presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden this November.
Shively believed that Trump was “the less bad of two choices” over Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. And, I recall all the voters who said they would rather die than to vote for Clinton, but here we are.
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“So even though I had voted Republican in every presidential election since 1976, I changed my voter registration to independent and I will be voting for Joe Biden in November,” Shively writes.
“When the pandemic hit, the incompetence of the man for whom I had voted and the complicity of everyone around him forced me to admit that I could no longer maintain any kind of self-respect as a Republican,” Shively wrote.
“I am still haunted because, deep down, I fear that with that vote I may have signed my own death warrant,” she said.
“Officials from the president down to the local school board are kicking this can down the road, pretending it will all be OK,” she continued. “Teachers know it won’t. For Trump and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, who have little to no experience in our public schools, to preach to career educators about the benefits of children being in school, is not only unnecessary but downright insulting.”
While we welcome Shively’s vote for Biden in November, conservatives only seem to care when they are affected by something — and not when others are hurt by Trump’s disastrous policies. It’s not too late to change, though, even for a teacher.
You can read the entire op-ed here.
Featured image via Political Tribune gallery
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