LETTER: No excuse for keeping Clark County schools closed

Last week, I watched a briefing on the cornavirus from the panel that included Dr. Anthony Faucci and experts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. All of them reminded the audience that never at anytime during the pandemic has the CDC recommended closing our schools.

They mentioned that at the first signs of the virus, the recommendation was made with limited knowledge of the facts of the pandemic. Today the CDC has extensive data on school-age children. A comment was even made that children are probably safer at schools that not at school.

So who are the “medical experts” advising Gov. Steve Sisolak and the officials at the Clark County School District who are telling them that we should not open our schools? Why are we listening to those experts rather than the extensive evidence of the past eight months of data showing that we should not have closed our schools?

Of course, they recommended the use of masks, social distancing and tracking, but we can do those things in our schools.

Usually, it is “follow the money.” But I could not come up with an actual monetary incentive to keep schools closed. Is it the power of our education unions? If they really cared about our children, we would not have schools with less than 30 percent of students capable of reading at grade level after all the money that has been spent on new programs in the past five years.