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Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton issued a guidance letter to the state’s private religious schools on Friday stating that they “need not comply” to recent local and county health orders barring in-person instruction until after Labor Day. (Smith, Tarrant and Morris, 7/17)

Milwaukee schools and universities that have been planning to offer face-to-face instruction this fall may need to shift gears after the city Health Department quietly enacted stricter guidelines for when in-person classes may resume. While Milwaukee Public Schools has opted to start the school year online, Marquette University, UWM and many of the city's private and independent charter schools had been working under the assumption they could reopen with precautions, based on the city's Moving MKE Forward Safely plan posted on the health department's website. (Johnson and Shastri, 7/17)

Eighty-seven doctors signed a letter to Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey urging the state leader to keep schools shut for at least the first quarter of the academic year. "Many of us are also parents of school-age children," the letter says. "The tremendous pressure to return to in-person schooling in August is ill advised and dangerous given the uncontrolled spread of Covid-19 in our community." (Maxouris, 7/20)

Arizona third-grade teacher Stacy Brosius has been called a “liberal socialist Nazi” and a “whiner and complainer” for leading car-based protests to delay in-person schooling, but she says she’s doing it to save lives in a pandemic. Inspired by Black Lives Matter demonstrations, hundreds of Arizona teachers like Brosius are putting on red t-shirts they last wore in a 2018 strike and driving around cities in cars daubed with slogans like: “Remote learning won’t kill us but COVID can!” (Hay and O'Brien, 7/18)

Also —

Former Vice President Joe Biden rolled out his plan to safely reopen schools amid the coronavirus pandemic on Friday as the debate over the issue rages across the country. "If I'm elected president, our students and educators are going to have all the tools and resources they need to succeed, to get us through COVID-19, to build the strong, resilient schools we need so that every child has a chance to succeed in the 21st century," Biden said in a video announcing his blueprint. (Manchester, 7/17)