WILMINGTON, Del. — Today, U.S. Senator Chris Coons (D-Del.) and former U.S. Secretary of Education John King joined MSNBC’s Morning Joe to discuss the role of national service programs in supporting students and combatting learning loss.

Students are facing up to 12 months of learning loss a year after the COVID-19 pandemic began. Decades of research demonstrate that high-intensity tutoring can help students make up lost ground academically very quickly. A recent Brookings study calls for an expansion of AmeriCorps to meet the needs of students in school districts most adversely impacted by COVID-19.

The American Rescue Plan, signed into law by President Biden on Thursday, includes $1 billion in funding for AmeriCorps. Senator Coons and Secretary King have led the call for an expansion of AmeriCorps, in part to deploy more tutors and mentors across the country.

“This period of COVID-19 has been an equity disaster in schools. Low-income students, students of color are less likely to have internet access, less likely to have devices. We have studies to suggest that there may be 3 million students who are disconnected from school. We have districts where a significant number of students haven't logged in since last March. We have a study from McKinsey that suggests 6 to 12 months of lost learning for low-income students and students of color,” said Secretary King. “So what AmeriCorps will make possible with this $1 billion investment […] is to launch a national tutoring corps, to connect young people with mentors who can help them make up ground academically but also build powerful relationships that will help them feel reconnected to school.”

On the new AmeriCorps funding, Sen. Coons added, “One important piece of this is the billion dollars out of this whole American Rescue Plan is also to improve the accessibility of AmeriCorps so people of all backgrounds can serve. It increases the living stipend, it increases the education award, it invests more in outreach so that there is a more diverse cadre of young people joining AmeriCorps to be tutors in our schools. It also means there’s going to be an expanded number of AmeriCorps positions. Year after year, four or five times as many young people apply to serve our nation through AmeriCorps as there are slots available for them to do so, so there will be more opportunities to serve. Looking forward, given President Biden's announcement of his intention to create a Climate Conservation Corps, it's my hope that we will continue to expand AmeriCorps so that it can meet unmet needs in housing, in hunger, in conservation, and in education.”

Full audio and video available here. A transcript is provided below.

Q: Joining us now, Democratic Senator Chris Coons of Delaware along with former U.S. Secretary of Education under President Obama, John King. Good to have you both. I'll start with Secretary King on what is the safest plan to reopen schools and can we get everybody on the same page on this? 

Sec. King: Well, we are certainly making progress, getting all teachers and school staff vaccinated is an important first step so that they can feel safe at school. We've got to have good COVID testing in place in schools to make sure we identify cases where they occur. And the CDC has put out clear guidance now to help schools figure out how to do masking, physical distancing, and other procedures in the school building to keep things operating safely. I'm hopeful that President Biden's goal will be accomplished relatively quickly this spring. 

Q: Senator Coons, we had Anthony Fauci on the show a few weeks ago when he said he agreed with the CDC guidelines. His quote was, “it is less likely for a child to get infected in the school than if they were in the community.” How important is it not only for Joe Biden to do everything he can to make it possible to get kids back in school within his first 100 days but also to apply pressure on school districts that may be dragging their feet across the country?

Sen. Coons: Joe, it is really important to get kids back in school. That's why the dramatic investment in reopening K-12 schools safely that’s in the America Rescue Plan is such a big deal. There's $170 billion in resources that will help schools purchase more PPE, implement those CDC recommendations about how to reopen safely, and a supply of vaccines to make sure that educators, paraprofessionals, support staff are all vaccinated. Everyone I work with who is a parent of school-aged kids is eager for their children to go back to school and so many kids have lost up to a year of learning as a result. As we all know, it is hard enough to work by Zoom, but to learn by Zoom as a young person, to miss all that socialization, all the different ways that young people engage in learning and growing in school, that's a real loss. That's why John King and I are working together to support an expansion of AmeriCorps that would provide more staffing and more resources to help safely reopen schools and to help address learning loss.

Q: Secretary King, it's Willie Geist. Good to see you this morning. I'll let you fill in some of the details on that proposed expansion of AmeriCorps, but I'm curious about your concerns over what we have seen the last year or so among young students. Even for people who have access to Wi-Fi and laptops, it’s been tough. You think about all the students who don’t have that access or who have been loss to the system or haven't even checked in with their school for the last year, and you think about what that means for their entire lives – what's happened over the last year. What are your concerns, both from an education standpoint and from a mental health standpoint and from a social standpoint, what is your opinion on kids missing all of this time in the classroom? 

Sec. King: You're exactly right. This period of COVID-19 has been an equity disaster in schools. Low-income students, students of color are less likely to have internet access, less likely to have devices. We have studies to suggest that there may be 3 million students who are disconnected from school. We have districts where a significant number of students haven't logged in since last March. We have a study from McKinsey that suggests 6 to 12 months of lost learning for low-income students and students of color. We have districts like mine – Montgomery County, Maryland – where the failure rate in freshman English went up six-fold. We have a new study out in Boston that showed for 11th and 12th graders, 40% of them are chronically absent, missing a ton of school. So we have a lot of work to do to address that. Then we have the socio-emotional and mental health impact of being disconnected from relationships with teachers and peers. So what AmeriCorps will make possible with this $1 billion investment […] is to launch a national tutoring corps, to connect young people with mentors who can help them make up ground academically but also build powerful relationships that will help them feel reconnected to school.

Q: So, Senator Coons, this is inside the COVID relief package, the billion dollars is there. So what happens from here? What do you want people to know who may want to get involved in AmeriCorps and step in to fill this void we’ve seen over the last year? 

Sen. Coons: Well, Willie, three things. One important piece of this is the billion dollars out of this whole American Rescue Plan is also to improve the accessibility of AmeriCorps so people of all backgrounds can serve. It increases the living stipend, it increases the education award, it invests more in outreach so that there is a more diverse cadre of young people joining AmeriCorps to be tutors in our schools. It also means there’s going to be an expanded number of AmeriCorps positions. Year after year, four or five times as many young people apply to serve our nation through AmeriCorps as there are slots available for them to do so, so there will be more opportunities to serve. Looking forward, given President Biden's announcement of his intention to create a Climate Conservation Corps, it's my hope that we will continue to expand AmeriCorps so that it can meet unmet needs in housing, in hunger, in conservation, and in education. This is something I have already talked to Dr. Miguel Cardona, the new secretary of education, about, and I have a lot of colleagues supporting this in the Senate. Senator Booker has been really leading on creating a specific tutoring corps. And Senator Reed just held a hearing in the Armed Services Committee about the importance of national service. He and Senator Duckworth, both veterans, have been real champions of national service. And this has been bipartisan. As you know, in the last Congress, Senator Wicker and I had 16 senators, eight from each party, join in supporting a bill to significantly expand AmeriCorps as an opportunity for young Americans. Anyone who is interested in a year of service to our country across a wide range of opportunities should be logging in to the AmeriCorps website and expressing their interest. Those programs should be expanding soon.

Q: Senator Chris Coons and former Education Secretary John King, thank you both for coming on the show this morning. A monumental task – we appreciate it – ahead for both of you.

###