Weingarten: Returning to School Full-Time Will ‘Depend’ on Physical Distancing, COVID Variants

On Thursday’s broadcast of ABC’s “GMA3,” American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten stated that returning students to classrooms full-time “is going to depend upon what’s going on with physical distancing, and what’s going on with the variants.”

Co-host Amy Robach asked, “When and how are we getting our students, our children, back into those classrooms full-time?”

Weingarten responded, “So, full-time is going to depend upon what’s going on with physical distancing, and what’s going on with the variants. What I can tell you is that, at this moment, 18 of the 20 biggest school systems are now open for in-person learning, for the parents who want to send their kids for in-person. What they’ve done is they’ve done the layered mitigation strategies that CDC has now announced, had testing so that, like with the NFL, we can really manage and see what’s unseen. That’s how New York City is really opening, and opening far more robustly than it did in September and October. And then also, as an added layer of protection, we’ve been trying to get teachers and other school employees the vaccine as quickly as possible.”

Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett