An LA councilman wants to sue the nation's 2nd-largest school district to reopen for in-person instruction
- An LA councilman wants to sue the school district to reopen, the Los Angeles Times reported.
- The Los Angeles Unified School District, the 2nd largest in the country has been closed since March.
- There have several other calls to reopen schools for in-person learning.
A Los Angeles city councilman says he wants to sue the country's second-largest school district to reopen schools for in-person instruction, the Los Angeles Times reported.
Schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District have been closed since last March.
"I stand with the 1,500 pediatricians in Southern California as well as the Director of the CDC who are calling for the safe reopening of our schools," LA councilman Joe Buscaino said in a statement.
Buscaino said that next week he plans to submit a resolution to the council that would instruct the city attorney to file a lawsuit against the district.
The Times added that the resolution would be modeled after the lawsuit San Francisco officials filed this week against their school district.
Branimir Kvartuc, the Senior Advisor and Communications Director for Buscaino told Insider in an email statment: "He will be formally asking the City Attorney to evaluate what legal mechanisms can move used to reopen our schools."
On Wednesday, pediatricians affiliated with the Southern California branch of the American Academy of Pediatrics called for schools to reopen and said the harm of keeping children out of school is greater than the risks of safely reopening in-person learning, KABC reported.
CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky also said on Wednesday that schools would be able to safely reopen even before teachers are vaccinated, CNBC reported.
"There is increasing data to suggest that schools can safely reopen and that safe reopening does not suggest that teachers need to be vaccinated," Walensky said.
But Superintendent Austin Beutner has said there are no plans to reopen schools any time soon, KABC also reported.
COVID-19 cases in Los Angeles County are now declining, but numbers are still high. KNBC reported that the county's adjusted case rate was 38.7 per 100,000 people, far from the 7 out of 100,000 needed to get out of the county's most restrictive lockdown tier. Over 1.1 million people in the county have so far been infected with the virus.