Parents struggle as schools reopen
DALLAS, Ga. — Putting your child on the bus for the first day of school is always a leap of faith for a parent. Now, on top of the usual worries about youngsters adjusting to new teachers and classmates, there’s COVID-19.
Meanwhile in Washington, D.C., grinding negotiations on a huge COVID-19 relief bill were to resume Monday, but the path forward promises to be challenging and time is already growing short. Republicans are griping that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi won't drop her expansive wish list even as concerns are mounting that the White House needs to be more sure-footed in the negotiations.
Both the Trump administration negotiating team and top Capitol Hill Democrats remain far apart, and talks since Saturday — when the combatants announced modest progress — have yet to lend momentum. Both sides used television appearances over the weekend to showcase their differences.
Ahead of Monday's talks, all sides predict a long slog ahead despite the lapse of a $600-perweek supplemental COVID-19 jobless benefit, the beginning of school season and the call of lawmakers' cherished August recess. Several more days of talks are expected, if not more.
The White House is seeking opportunities to boost President Donald Trump, like another round of $1,200 stimulus payments and extending the supplemental jobless benefit and partial eviction ban. Pelosi, the top Democratic negotiator, appears intent on an agreement as well, but she's made it clear she needs big money for state and local governments, unemployment benefits, and food aid.
Rachel Adamus was worried Monday morning as she got 7-year-old Paul ready for his first day of second grade and prepared 5-year-old Neva for the start of kindergarten.
With a new school year beginning this week in some states, Adamus struggled to balance her fears with her belief that her children need the socialization and instruction that school provides, even as the U.S. death toll from the coronavirus has hit about 155,000 and cases are rising in numerous places.
As the bus pulled away from the curb in Adamus' Dallas, Georgia, neighborhood, the tears finally began to fall.
“We have kept them protected for so long,” said Adamus, who said her aunt died from COVID-19 in Alabama and her husband’s great uncle succumbed to the virus in a New Jersey nursing home. "They haven’t been to restaurants. We only go to parks if no one else is there.
We don’t take them to the grocery store. And now they’re going to be in the classroom with however many kids for an entire day with a teacher.”
The Adamus children are among tens of thousands of students across the nation who were set to resume inperson school Monday for the first time since March. Parents in Louisiana, Mississippi and Tennessee will also be among those navigating the new academic year this week.
Many schools that are resuming in-person instruction are also giving parents a stay-at-home virtual option; Adamus, like many other parents, decided against that. Other schools are planning a hybrid approach, with youngsters alternating between inperson classes and online learning.
But an uptick in COVID-19 cases in many states has prompted districts to scrap in-person classes at least for the start of the school year, including Los Angeles, Philadelphia and Washington.
President Donald Trump and Education Secretary Betsy Devos have urged schools to reopen. However, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious-disease expert, warned Monday: “There may be some areas where the level of virus is so high that it would not be prudent to bring the children back to school.
NEW YORK — A Manhattan prosecutor trying to get President Donald Trump’s tax returns told a judge Monday that he was justified in demanding them, citing public reports of “extensive and protracted criminal conduct at the Trump Organization.”
Trump’s lawyers last month said the grand jury subpoena for the tax returns was issued in bad faith and amounted to harassment of the president.
Manhattan District Attorney District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance, Jr. seeks eight years of the Republican president’s personal and corporate tax records, but has disclosed little about what prompted him to request the records, other than part of the investigation relates to payoffs to women to keep them quiet about alleged affairs with Trump.
In a court filing Monday, though, attorneys for Vance said Trump's arguments that the subpoena was too broad stemmed from “the false premise” that the probe was limited to socalled “hush-money” payments.
“This court is already aware that this assertion is fatally undermined by undisputed information in the public record,” Vance’s lawyers wrote. They said that information confirms the validity of a subpoena seeking evidence related to potentially improper financial transactions by a variety of individuals and entities over a period of years.
They said public reporting demonstrates that at the time the subpoena was issued “there were public allegations of possible criminal activity at Plaintiff’s New York County-based Trump Organization dating back over a decade.”
“These reports describe transactions involving individual and corporate actors based in New York County, but whose conduct at times extended beyond New York’s borders. This possible criminal activity occurred within the applicable statutes of limitations, particularly if the transactions involved a continuing pattern of conduct,” the lawyers said.
The lawyers urged Judge Victor Marrero to swiftly reject Trump's arguments, saying the baseless claims were threatening the investigation. Marrero, who ruled against Trump last year, has scheduled arguments to be fully submitted by mid-august.
“Every day that goes by is another day Plaintiff effectively achieves the ‘temporary absolute immunity’ that was rejected by this Court, the Court of Appeals, and the Supreme Court," Vance's lawyers said. “Every such day also increases the prospect of a loss of evidence or the expiration of limitations periods — the precise concerns that the Supreme Court observed justified its rejection of Plaintiff’s immunity claim in the first place."
The Supreme Court last month rejected claims by Trump’s lawyers that the president could not be criminally investigated while he was in office.
Vance’s lawyers said Trump was not entitled to know the scope and nature of the grand jury investigation. But they said information already in the public domain about Trump’s business dealings provided satisfactory support for the subpoena of his tax records.
They cited several newspaper articles, including one in the Washington Post examining allegations that Trump had a practice of sending out financial statements to potential business partners and banks that inflated the worth of his properties by claiming they were bigger or more potentially lucrative than they were.
Trump’s former personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, described such practices during congressional testimony.
Vance sought the tax records in part for a probe of how Cohen arranged during the 2016 presidential race to keep the porn actress Stormy Daniels and model Karen Mcdougal from airing claims of extramarital affairs with Trump. Trump has denied the affairs.
Cohen is serving the last two years of a three-year prison sentence in home confinement after pleading guilty to campaign finance violations and lying to Congress, among other charges.
“So you can’t make one statement about bringing children back to school in this country. It depends on where you are,” he said.
In Georgia's Paulding County, both of Adamus' children wore masks, though that is not mandatory for the 30,000 students in the county, about 25 miles northwest of Atlanta. Adamus said her son and daughter understand what’s happening at a basic level — that there are germs and they need to stay home.
“My daughter’s been saying a lot lately, `I can’t wait for the germs to go away,’” she said.
Adamus lives near North Paulding High School, where the principal sent a letter over the weekend announcing a football player tested positive for the virus after attending practice. The Georgia High School Association, in a memo last week, said it has received reports of 655 positive tests since workouts for football and other sports started on June 8.
In Mississippi, where the virus is spreading fast, Emily Thompson’s son started the sixth grade at Newton County Middle/high School in Decatur. Thompson, a pharmacist, said she felt relief watching him get in line to have his temperature taken before entering the building.
She and her husband, who also works in health care, found it was a “nightmare” trying to keep the boy and their two other elementary school-age children on track with their studies. She said she is not overly worried about her children getting sick at school.
“It would be more detrimental not to send them, in my opinion, than for them to hang out and do the virtual learning,” she said. “I think they’re going to get more interaction at school. They are going to learn more at school. They just need to be in that setting.”
In Indiana, where schools reopened last week, a student at Greenfield-central Junior High tested positive on the first day back to class and was isolated in the school clinic.
“This really does not change our plans,” School Superintendent Harold Olin said. “We knew that we would have a positive case at some point in the fall. We simply did not think it would happen on Day One.”
Elsewhere in Indiana, Elwood Junior
Senior High suspended in-person classes two days into the school year after at least one staffer tested positive.
One student who wasn't starting at North Paulding on Monday was Aliyah Williams. Her mother, Erica Williams, said she is keeping the 14-year-old freshman home because two of her younger sons have cystic fibrosis and she can’t risk their being exposed. Williams said she thinks her daughter will be OK academically with online classes, which up to 30% of the district's students have enrolled in. But she is worried about Aliyah’s inability to see her friends.
“She’s a social butterfly. That’s a big part of her personality," Williams said.
Aliyah has been participating in color guard with the school band, but Williams said she is now “conflicted” about that too, considering the football player’s positive test.
Elsewhere around the world, schools remained closed across much of Europe, which is still in its summer vacation season. But schools in Germany's Mecklenburg-western Pomerania state became the first in the country to reopen since March. Students were split into groups to help contain any outbreak, and some of the schools imposed mask rules.