COVID-19 school closures turn parents into swing voters

Some parents hadn't considered themselves issues-driven swing voters in the midterms — until school closures during the COVID-19 outbreak caused a reckoning.

Sally Persons is a senior producer for Fox News Channel. You can follow her on Twitter, @sapersons.

"I'm a scientist, I study infectious diseases, I analyze data," said Dr. Margery Smelkinson, an infectious disease scientist and mom of four school-aged kids. "And even as early as spring of 2020, if you looked at other countries that opened their schools, they were fine. They weren't these like crazy viral hotspots and like everyone feared. And so, I thought that was really encouraging. I was hoping this would drive our schools to open in 2020, in the fall of 2020. But here they didn't." Enriched Literacy Education co-founders Brooke Ooten and Mary Cantwell emphasized 'one-to-one' learning as a tool to bridge the learning gap created by the pandemic on 'Sunday Night in America.'

Smelkinson said she wrote letters and op-eds, and testified in front of her local school board in Montgomery County, Maryland, but nothing changed. As a scientist, she said she assumed the data would drive the decision, but said she felt the response was more political.