Today, it was further proved that electing Catherine Truitt as the NC State Superintendent would be handing the power over our state’s public school system to Phil Berger.

Just like what happened with Mark Johnson.

It was also shown today that Lt. Gov. Dan Forest is pulling any stunt possible to make himself the state governor. A man whose job attendance record would have him fired in almost nay other job in this At Will and Right to Work state wants to fully open up all of the public schools in the state using the “world as an example.”

At a press confernece in Raleigh, Phil Berger, Dan Forest, and Catherine Truitt all made a baseless overture for opening schools.

The News & Observer opened its report with this:

North Carolina Republican leaders, joined by a group of parents, demanded Wednesday that families be given an option for full-time, in-person instruction at schools.

Few, if any, of North Carolina’s 1.5 million public school students are getting daily face-to-face classes at the start of the school year. Senate leader Phil Berger, Lt. Gov. Dan Forest and GOP state superintendent candidate Catherine Truitt said Wednesday that they intend to mobilize people across the state to pressure Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, to give parents the option of in-person, full-time school. They held a news conference at the Legislative Building in downtown Raleigh.

Funny that these three are trying to open up schools statewide when so many local school boards voted to go remote or go to a rigid Plan B version when they had a choice to use a hybrid approach.

Below is a map from Dane West, who kept direct tabs on each LEA in the state and their plans for reopening school buildings. 

Most of the LEAs in Sen. Berger’s district were on remote plans because the local school boards voted it that way. But Berger knows better. Not just for his district.

But for the whole gerrymandered state.

Maybe if he could demand his district to open up first?

What’s also funny is that some of the bigger college campuses are totally remote. High school graduates who are paying tuition to attend school on rather big campuses were sent home. Public secondary schools are a little more crowded and easily allow for more transmission.

It’s also ironic that Berger talk about virtual learning in such negative ways in this report.

“Virtual learning is a slow-motion train wreck,” Berger said at the news conference. “It’s a slow-motion train wreck from which Harvard’s public health experts are telling us that some children will never recover.”

The man who was standing next to a woman who leads an ONLINE college campus and who just recently extolled the values of the for-profit virtual charter schools “quoted” Harvard, the same place that said,

Some proponents of reopening schools across the U.S. have argued that children infected with the coronavirus either won’t get sick at all or will recover quickly. But Williams said it’s important to think about the health of the entire community—because science suggests that kids, particularly older ones, can transmit the coronavirus at roughly the same rate that adults do. “This is not the kind of disease where it’s only about the individual that’s positive,” she said. “It’s about breaking the cycle of transmission to vulnerable individuals.”

Here’s where we are in NC right now according to WRAL.

Forest offered vintage Dan Forest politics: a plan with no specifics.

“As governor, I would open the schools. That would be the plan,” said Forest, the Republican running against Cooper.

Forest did not offer specifics about reopening schools. “You really don’t need a plan. You can follow people that are doing this all over the world,” Forest said.

He might want to pay attention to what actually is going on around the world.

It was interesting that Catherine Truitt was not really quoted or featured in the report except for this:

Forest and Truitt also said that state health officials should be more concerned about the anxiety, depression and addiction among students during remote learning.

Again, Truitt is a chancellor of a college that is virtual.

Or “remote” if you want to use that word. Plus, her campaign seems to run alongside that of Forest.

But it’s what the nurse who was brought in to bolster the argument to open all schools without a plan said that really made this press conference a stunt.

Michele Morrow, a parent and nurse, said teachers have a ‘great immune system” and shouldn’t worry about returning to classrooms. She said those teachers who are immunocompromised should be teaching online classes and not delaying students from returning to school.

“If you’ve been a school teacher for years, you have the immune system of steel because just like healthcare workers, you are around children all day long who aren’t the best at covering their mouth or nose when they sneeze or cough,” Morrow said. “They’re not good at washing their hands after they go to the bathroom.”

Children are not good at “covering their mouths or noses when they sneeze or cough?”

Children “are not good at washing their hands after they go to the bathrooms?

So let’s put them all together anyway and create more carriers?

It would mean more to hear from an actual school nurse or even a medical expert from one of the medical schools in North Carolina. Two are in the Triangle area near Raleigh. If Berger and Forest want to quote Harvard, why not just go down the road to UNC-CH or Duke or ECU’s medical school even Wake Forest?

But if we want to just stay with Harvard, then…

Some proponents of reopening schools across the U.S. have argued that children infected with the coronavirus either won’t get sick at all or will recover quickly. But Williams said it’s important to think about the health of the entire community—because science suggests that kids, particularly older ones, can transmit the coronavirus at roughly the same rate that adults do. “This is not the kind of disease where it’s only about the individual that’s positive,” she said. “It’s about breaking the cycle of transmission to vulnerable individuals.”

And she might also want to make sure that all of those front-line healthcare workers have been infected and been affected by the virus sustain her claims.

And as a teacher, I sure as hell have not seen Berger and his cronies offer anything like what healthcare workers have as far as PPE.