DeWine Top’s ‘Hall Of Shame’ List For Leading Push To Shut Down Schools

DeWine was the first governor in the entire country to lock kids out of the classroom. 

A new piece from the American Spectator runs through the "Hall of Shame" of the people responsible for keeping kids out of schools...and Governor Mike DeWine made the top of the list.

Mike DeWine was the FIRST governor in the entire country to shut down schools statewide because of the pandemic, giving cover to the Democrats and the Left-wing teachers unions to insist that closing schools was bipartisan safe policy despite the fact that there was no science to back it up. Now Mike DeWine is hoping voters forget the role he played in denying Ohio's children a year of education and causing massive hardship for low-income students and their families.

Check out the story below.

Hall of Shame: The People Responsible for Keeping Kids Out of Schools

The American Spectator
April 12, 2022

Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine was the first governor to shutter all schools statewide because of the pandemic, an order he made on March 12, 2020. “We have to take this action,” he said at the time. “We have to do everything we can to slow down the spread of this virus.” With that order, DeWine opened the floodgates. It would be another two years before governors, mayors, and superintendents would stop shutting school doors.

DeWine’s order, which at the time was universally declared to be the most drastic action in response to the virus in the United States, gave cover to Democrats to pretend closing schools was a laudable policy decision. Republicans also followed him, seeing DeWine’s decision as making school closures the norm.

Later, DeWine seemed to back off from the notion that school closures were ever a good idea. After the Cleveland public schools closed down in January of 2022, he said, “Well, I think that’s a mistake frankly. I think schools, kids need to be in school. And if they’re masked, people are careful, we’ve demonstrated that the spread in schools is not great when kids are masked and we’ve also found out the difficulty that kids have when they’re not in school.”

But both of those facts were established at the time DeWine announced his closure. Consider an essay published in the New York Times on March 10 by Jennifer Nuzzo, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. “There is no clear evidence that [school closures] will slow this outbreak,” she wrote, saying, “If children don’t experience severe illness from or contribute to the spread of Covid-19 — and so far we have found no clear evidence that they do — it’s likely that school closings will have little effect on its spread.”

She also wrote: “Interruptions in education can profoundly harm child development and make it harder to reduce the achievement gap between high- and low-income families.

And Nuzzo’s perspective was one of many that warned at the time that the spread of COVID-19 would not be decreased by school closures and that children would be harmed by them. A World Health Organization scientist published an article on March 6 using Chinese data to show that COVID-19 spread is not driven by spread in schools. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also issued guidance March 14 essentially dismissing the efficacy of closures in slowing the spread of COVID-19:

Available modeling data indicate that early, short to medium closures do not impact the epi curve of COVID-19 or available health care measures (e.g., hospitalizations). There may be some impact of much longer closures (8 weeks, 20 weeks) further into community spread, but that modelling also shows that other mitigation efforts (e.g., handwashing, home isolation) have more impact on both spread of disease and health care measures.

But DeWine ignored that information and unleashed school closures on Ohio’s — and perhaps the rest of the nation’s — children. Within one day of his announcement, 15 states had followed.