If the school does opt for the hybrid model, students in seventh through 12th grades would rotate between on-campus and distance learning, with half of the students learning remotely each week. Barron Trump, 14, the youngest of the president’s five children, has spent the last three years at St. Andrew’s.
The president has repeatedly insisted that schools fully open and has threatened to withhold federal money from districts that do not, but states, localities and private schools increasingly are defying him.
Teachers union leaders said the St. Andrew’s situation should bring home to Mr. Trump how complicated reopening is for schools trying to balance the educational needs of their children and the health concerns of the staff, students and community.
“The president now has to face what every other parent in America and every other teacher in America is grappling with right now, which is: In the midst of a pandemic, how do schools keep their kids and their faculty safe?” said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers. “It’s about safety, not bluster. It’s about a plan and resources, not threats.”
Ms. Weingarten said Mr. Trump’s confrontational approach had made it harder to find practical solutions to a problem everyone wants fixed.
“Hopefully, Donald Trump will have a scintilla of empathy and consideration for what Americans are going through now that he is experiencing it himself,” she said.
The Milton Gottesman Jewish Day School of the Nation’s Capital — where Ivanka Trump, the president’s oldest child, and her husband, Trump senior adviser Jared Kushner, send their children — has not decided whether or how to reopen in the fall.
