The head of the Florida Education Association says teachers 'don't want to be the Petri dish for America'

• The president of Florida's largest teachers union pushed back against the state's plans to return students and teachers to classrooms in the fall for in-person instruction.
• On Monday, the union filed a lawsuit in Miami against the plan to put Florida teachers and students back in the classroom by August 31.
• Whether schools reopen amid the US' continued record increase in coronavirus infections has become the latest political debate surrounding the virus, with the White House press secretary last week arguing "the science should not stand in the way."
• "We don't know what the fallout is going to be when you start to cram hundreds of thousands of children in our schools," union president Fedrick Ingram said on NBC's "Today" show Tuesday.

The president of the largest teachers' union in Florida is pushing back against the state's plan to send students back to classrooms for in-person instruction by the end of August.

In an interview on NBC's "Today" show Tuesday, a day after the union filed a lawsuit against the state, Florida Education Association president Fedrick Ingram said even debating the issue was "nonsensical."

"We have over 23,000 children that have been tested and tested positive for coronavirus," Ingram said. "That is not an insignificant number with a positive rate [of] 13.4%."

"Any sensible person would tell you that we have to get the positivity rate down, and we don't know what the fallout is going to be when you start to cram hundreds of thousands of children in our schools," he added.

According to data analyzed by Johns Hopkins University, Florida has the third-highest number of confirmed coronavirus cases in the US since the pandemic began, with 360,394 cases, putting it behind New York and California but ahead of New Jersey and Texas.

Approximately 19% of all tests administered over the past week have returned a positive result, according to the Johns Hopkins data, compared to the 8.5% positivity rate in the US as a whole. The positivity rate in New York, which saw the worst outbreak early on but worked to flatten the curve, has a 1.2% positivity rate for tests administered over the past week.

"That's going to create a problem for us," Ingram said. "We don't want to be the Petri dish for America. In fact, we need a survival kit. We need our state government to lead in our issues."

The union is trying to stop the state from forcing schools to reopen

As the Tampa Bay Times reported, the FEA filed a lawsuit in federal court in Miami Monday against GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis and education commissioner Richard Corcoran over the state's July 6 executive order. The order requires schools to open to students for classes by the end of August, should parents choose to send their kids to classes.

Corcoran and members of the state board of education have argued their executive order only provides an option for parents who want to send their children to schools for in-person instruction. Local school districts have interpreted it as a mandate to open, as it's tied to receiving from the state, according to the report.

Corcoran called the lawsuit "frivolous" and "reckless," according to the Tampa Bay Times.

While the novel coronavirus has shown to have a less severe impact on children, roughly 31% of children tested for COVID-19 in Florida have returned a positive result, according to data released by the state health department last week. There is also the risk for asymptomatic spread from children to more at-risk individuals, as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has noted.

—TODAY (@TODAYshow) July 21, 2020

"We don't need to hoist this as a problem for the schools," Ingram told the "Today" show. "This is a problem for our community-at-large and it is nonsensical to think we are ready to open brick-and-mortar and do in-person teaching in just two weeks."

The decision on whether to open schools in August for in-person classes has become the latest political battle related to the coronavirus in the US. The Trump administration for weeks has pushed schools to reopen, publicly disparaging CDC guidelines released about what it would take for schools to safely reopen for face-to-face instruction.

At a press briefing last week, White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said that "the science should not stand in the way" of school reopenings.