Good.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott may soon be fighting a war on two fronts — with local officials and the federal government — to stave off mandatory COVID-19 prevention efforts after the Biden administration announced Wednesday it was going after states like Texas that try to ban universal masking at schools.
Saying that the federal government will not “sit by as governors try to block and intimidate educators from protecting our children,” Biden said he will use the U.S. Department of Education’s civil rights enforcement authority to deter states from blocking mask mandates in classrooms.
“I’m directing the Secretary of Education, an educator himself, to take additional steps to protect our children,” Biden said. “This includes using all of his oversight authorities and legal action, if appropriate, against governors trying to block and intimidate local school officials.”
“If you aren’t going to fight COVID-19, at least get out of the way of everyone else who’s trying,” Biden added.
Biden didn’t directly name Texas or Abbott in his Wednesday remarks, but both Florida and Texas have made national headlines for efforts to block schools from requiring masks, even as children under 12 remain ineligible for the vaccine and the delta variant affects mostly the unvaccinated.
Biden’s announcement could tee up another legal battle for Abbott, who is already fighting in state court Texas school districts which have implemented mask mandates as school kicked off this month. Abbott’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
More than 50 school districts and at least eight counties are currently defying or have recently violated Abbott’s executive order banning mask mandates, according to a tally released Wednesday by Attorney General Ken Paxton.
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Last week, U.S. Education Secretary Miguel A. Cardona sent Abbott and Texas Education Agency Commissioner Mike Morath a letter expressing support for local school districts that have implemented mask mandates.
Cardona said in the letter that school districts had received COVID-19 relief funds to use for “contact tracing, implementing indoor masking policies, or other policies aligned with CDC guidance” and that the federal government was monitoring whether the state’s ban was in line with fiscal requirements attached to those funds. Texas has received $18 billion for public schools in COVID-19 relief dollars from the federal government and has already released $11 billion of it to the districts to spend.
Hard to know exactly what this means right now. Most likely, we’ll learn more in the coming days, and this is just an early flare to give some warning that stuff is about to happen. There needs to be a clear statement about what is expected, and what will happen if a state isn’t living up to it. As with the school districts defying Abbott on his mask mandate ban, if there’s no known mechanism of enforcement, it’s all voluntary. As I noted yesterday, the Biden administration can also get involved with the lawsuit filed by Disability Rights Texas, but that’s independent of whatever this will be. I want ’em both, and the sooner the better.
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