A viral and factually false Facebook post claimed U.S. Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, stated reopening schools in the fall would likely result in the deaths of children.
The post read, “So Betsy Devos today said ‘only’ .02% of kids are likely to die when they go back to school. That’s 14,740 children.”
https://www.facebook.com/Iamnotyourbuddypal/posts/1313683162165817
The post caused hysteria among FB users who also took to Twitter to shame DeVos for her alleged disregard for the lives of American children. One user denounced the Secretary’s callousness saying, “That’s about 40 times the number of school shooting victims from the last 10 years.”
Betsy DeVos says that "only" 0.02% of children will probably die as a result of schools re-opening.
That's 14,740 children.
That's about 40 times the number of school shooting victims from the last 10 years.
— madeline lane-mckinley (@la_louve_rouge_) July 12, 2020
DeVos’s press secretary, Angela Morabito debunked the viral quote as false. “The secretary has never and would never say such a thing,” in an email to the Daily Caller. “This is a total lie. She would not be working to get kids back to school if it were unsafe.”
In a FOX News Sunday appearance, DeVos affirmed her commitment to sending children back to school in the fall saying, “There’s nothing in the data that suggests that kids being in school is in any way dangerous.”
A Check Your Fact article also discredited the Twitter post.
67,000+ retweets on this aaaaaaaaand it's a lie https://t.co/IcZLIaX0SP https://t.co/SeJ7jDddTz
— Peter J. Hasson (@peterjhasson) July 14, 2020
Since her appointment by president Trump in 2017 DeVos has been a favorite target of the Left.
DeVos is a passionate supporter of school choice, which works to give all children, especially minorities, the opportunity for a better education. Democrats have been almost unanimous and unwavering in opposition to school choice, in part because they receive millions of dollars in campaign contributions from teachers unions who are firmly opposed to parental choice in education.
Secretary DeVos joins the American Pediatric Association in her concerns for children not returning to school in the fall, something both say is harmful to kids.
Studies have shown that online learning has been detrimental to students’ education. In the second largest school district in America, the Los Angeles Unified School District, 40 percent of elementary school students did not even log into class once as of the first week of April, three weeks after the system closed. For students who did log on, superintendent Austin Beutner, stated that “merely logging in does not tell us anything more than the student turned on their computer.”
Despite these dismal statistics and countless anecdotal reports from students and parents who homeschooled during lockdown with little success, America’s teachers’ unions continue to advocate for keeping students and teachers home in the fall.
