Weingarten: ‘I Don’t Know if it Was Right’ for Europe to Prioritize Schools over Bars — ‘I Regret COVID’ 

On Thursday’s broadcast of “CNN Tonight,” American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten stated that she doesn’t “know if it was right or wrong” for Europe to prioritize opening schools over bars and restaurants and responded to a question on whether she regrets failing to push for in-person schooling earlier by stating, “I regret COVID. And I regret that we didn’t know sooner what was key to keeping people safe and keeping schools open.”

Host Alisyn Camerota asked, “In retrospect, in hindsight, now that the smoke has cleared, do you regret not pressing for a full school — full in-person school sooner?”

Weingarten answered, “I regret COVID. And I regret that we didn’t know sooner what was key to keeping people safe and keeping schools open. Both of those things were really important. I had many members who died in the first few months, in terms of COVID. We had members die in New York City. We had many people who got really, really sick. And black and brown folks got more sick than white folks. So, what we were trying to figure out was how to re-open schools and how to do it safely. And the problem is that, you already have, in city schools, bad conditions that are hard for teachers to teach in, and what we were trying to do was make sure that they and families were safe.”

Later, Weingarten stated, “The schools in Europe that opened sooner than we did — and most of them did — had the mitigating strategies…and it wasn’t negotiable. It wasn’t, oh, well, it’s inconvenient to have six feet or it’s inconvenient to have masks. They had these things. And the other thing they did — and I don’t know if it was right or wrong, the other thing they did is they prioritized schools over commerce. They prioritized schools over bars and restaurants and things like that. They did.”

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