Treasury: Arizona risks relief funds over anti-mandate rules

WASHINGTON – The Biden medication is threatening to recoup COVID-19 alleviation funds sent to Arizona implicit authorities provisions that it says discourage families and schoolhouse districts from pursuing national guidance recommending look coverings successful schools.

At contented are 2 authorities programs that are meant to assistance schools and students but that nonstop backing distant from jurisdictions with disguise requirements. Arizona's Education Plus-Up Grant Program provides $163 cardinal successful backing to schools, but districts that necessitate look coverings are ineligible. And its COVID-19 Educational Recovery Benefit Program provides for up to $7,000 for parents if their child's schoolhouse requires look coverings.

In a Friday letter, the Treasury Department warned that the authorities has 60 days to region the anti-masking provisions earlier the national authorities moves to retrieve the alleviation money, and it threatened to withhold the adjacent tranche of assistance arsenic well.

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The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends cosmopolitan mask-wearing successful school settings to forestall the dispersed of COVID-19.

“By discouraging families and schoolhouse districts from pursuing this guidance, the conditions referenced supra undermine efforts to halt the dispersed of COVID-19,” the Treasury Department wrote. “Accordingly, these schoolhouse programs arsenic presently structured are ineligible uses of (Coronavirus State and Local Fiscal Recovery Funds).”

Arizona has already received astir fractional of the $4.2 cardinal awarded to the authorities nether the 2021 coronavirus alleviation bill.

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