Governor Mike DeWine (R-OH) said Ohio schools could be closed for the remainder of the school year in response to the coronavirus outbreak on Sunday’s broadcast of CNN’s “State of the Union.”
Anchor Brianna Keilar asked, “The CDC said school closures of two to four weeks are actually unlikely to have an impact on mitigating the spread of this virus. You do have schools close there can in Ohio for three weeks. I wonder if there’s a possibility that Ohio schools will be closed actually for the remainder of the school year. Is that possible?”
DeWine said, “Absolutely. Absolutely. One, the projections—and again, this is all projections, I’m just going by what medical experts are telling us. You know, this may not peak until, you know, the latter part of April or May. We’ve informed the superintendents, while we’ve closed schools for three weeks, that the odds are this is going to go on a lot longer, and it would not surprise me at all if schools did not open again this year.”
He added, “When we closed the schools, we wanted to make sure kids continue to get food so the department of agriculture gave us a waiver within 24 hours so we could take food out to kids and distribute it in different areas, and some school districts in Ohio will take that out, put it on a bus and travel around and distributing it. So each school is making up its own mind about how to do it. But we had to get a waiver from the federal government, and we were happy to get that waiver.”
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