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And while keeping herself largely physically distanced as the coronavirus continues to spread, DeVos has been a forceful advocate for President Donald Trump’s demand that schools reopen in full and in person — potentially placing millions of teachers and students at risk of infection.

It’s a striking bit of mixed messaging for DeVos, a billionaire heiress, major GOP donor and charter school advocate who had no experience with public education before she became education secretary. DeVos is the nation’s top education official as school administrators deal with one the biggest health crises facing the nation: how to safely bring 51 million American children back into classrooms or administer virtual education during a pandemic.

The Marshals Service wouldn’t comment on the arrangement or any specific security threat DeVos faces.

schools as they struggle with the immense financial and logistical challenges of reopening, DeVos told the Washington Examiner in June that she was working mostly remotely from Michigan, her home state — where she owns the 22,000-square-foot estate on Lake Macatawa — with a public schedule that has been mostly empty for the past several weeks, including no events on her public schedule for this week.

Education Department spokeswoman Angela Morabito said DeVos has been dividing her time among Michigan, Washington and road trips.

DeVos has been holding events not listed on her public calendar, including several sponsored by the conservative Federalist Society, according to Federalist Society postings. She has also participated in a few events related to private schools and advocacy for vouchers, including a roundtable July 23 at a private Christian school in Ohio and two events in the Carolinas with Vice President Mike Pence.

Her press office said she has been in constant contact with governors and state superintendents virtually and in person. Yet NBC News couldn’t find a record of similar events with public school officials; Noelle Ellerson Ng, associate executive director for advocacy at AASA The School Superintendents Association, representing public school superintendents in 49 states, said the group hasn’t heard from DeVos this year.

“We would stand ready to answer that call. That’s my job, to be a direct liaison to the federal government,” said Ellerson Ng, who said she facilitated many such meetings for previous education secretaries of both parties. The group has been critical of DeVos’ proposed education budget cuts.

State officials are also pleading for more assistance.

With school reopening in three weeks, Gov. Ned Lamont, D-Conn., told MSNBC on Friday that he still doesn’t know “what, if anything, the feds are going to do to help.”

Days after DeVos’ and Pence’s visit July 29 to a classroom at Thales Academy, a network of private nonsectarian community schools in North Carolina, to highlight the school as a model for reopening, several fourth-grade students were asked to quarantine after a student tested positive for COVID-19. “Thales is a great example more schools could emulate,” DeVos said during the visit. “You didn’t wait for guidance from the Department of Education. You didn’t ask for permission.”

DeVos had no events on her public calendar last week.

Still, she continues to echo the president’s demand that public schools reopen for in-person instruction, regardless of the levels of infection in their communities. She also insists that it isn’t her job to help localities determine how to do so safely.

“The secretary of education isn’t the nation’s superintendent,” DeVos said July 21 at a roundtable in South Carolina with Pence.

DeVos declined to appear at a House coronavirus subcommittee hearing on safely reopening K-12 schools “so she could explain why she is pressuring schools to fully reopen, despite the risks,” James Clyburn of South Carolina, the No. 3 House Democrat, said Thursday.

“I offered to accommodate her schedule. But she refused to appear,” Clyburn said. DeVos’ press office said it offered Assistant Secretary Frank Brogan to appear on 11 alternative dates in August and September. Among the witnesses: Angela Skillings, a second-grade teacher in Arizona who contracted COVID-19 this summer after working in a classroom with a teacher who died.

DeVos’ absence as schools struggle with their next steps hasn’t been lost on public education advocates.

A Michigan-based group, Protect Our Public Schools, is sponsoring a mobile billboard calling on DeVos to “stop hiding in your mansion.” This week, the billboard will travel to Grand Rapids and Holland, Michigan, where DeVos’ summer home is located. Critics also point to the Grand Rapids aviation charter school that DeVos’ husband, Dick, founded, which is offering a fully virtual option for the fall.

“What Betsy DeVos and Donald Trump are doing is equivalent to sending our military in harm’s way without ammunition or bulletproof vests. Except nobody signed up for this,” said the group’s vice president, Ellen Offen, a former Detroit Public Schools teacher. “It is simply gambling with the lives of our children, teachers and school parents. It is totally unacceptable.”

A Politico/Morning Consult poll last month found that 65 percent of voters said they disagree with Trump’s threat to cut federal funding for schools that don’t reopen.

Beth DeShone, executive director of the Great Lakes Education Project, a Michigan-based school choice advocacy group founded by DeVos, said, “There is no one-size-fits-all solution.” School districts and communities must “work together to provide guidance and plans for their own school buildings,” she said.

Rep. Steve Scalise, R-La., the ranking member of the subcommittee, said there “are road maps everywhere” on reopening schools, including one from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Furthermore, he said, children are suffering in other ways. “When children aren’t in school, there are very devastating things happening to them,” he said Thursday.

Public school officials say there is a strong need for greater federal involvement as schools approach reopening. Glenn Maleyko, superintendent of schools in Dearborn, one of Michigan’s largest districts, said he’s gotten little direction from the federal government.

“The guidance that we’ve received, if anything, from a health perspective is from the county,” Maleyko said.

Given the pandemic and its potential mental and physical health effects on schoolchildren, the education secretary could have, for example, convened an emergency interagency task force to ensure coordination with the Department of Health and Human Services, states and school districts to provide detailed guidance, said Chris Lu, who was President Barack Obama’s Cabinet secretary.

“You have a secretary who has expressed, philosophically, little interest in public schools and in terms of her travel has visited very few public schools,” Lu said. “So the idea of her actually convening an interagency task force on public schools is so antithetical to everything she’s done or believes.”

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© Stew Milne/AP/FILE Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont speaks at a news conference on July 22, 2020.The law institutes a new statewide watchdog for police misconduct, bans “chokeholds” in most instances and puts limits on the ability of police departments to withhold officers’ disciplinary records. It also allows individual officers to be held financially liable in civil suits over their actions.

The law requires all departments statewide to equip officers with body-worn cameras and places limits on the military equipment Connecticut police departments can acquire or use.

The bill, officially known as H.B. 6004 and titled “An Act Concerning Police Accountability,” passed the Connecticut State Senate by a 21-15 vote early Wednesday morning after hours of deliberation.

“These reforms are focused on bringing real change to end the systemic discrimination that exists in our criminal justice and policing systems that have impacted minority communities for far too long,” Lamont said in a news release.

“Ultimately, what we are enacting today are policies focused on providing additional safeguards to protect peoples’ lives and make our communities stronger. Our nation and our state has been having a conversation on this topic for decades, and these reforms are long overdue.”

The ACLU of Connecticut tweeted its support for the bill Wednesday evening.

“Ending police violence will not be solved by any one bill, but the bill passed out of the legislature today is a start,” Melvin Medina, the ACLU of Connecticut’s public policy and advocacy director, said in a statement. “To the legislators who instead voted to shield the profession of policing from accountability, do better.”

The law is the latest state-level effort to reform American policing since George Floyd died in the custody of Minneapolis police in May.

Colorado Gov. Jared Polis signed a bill in June that mandates police officers wear body cameras and banned chokeholds.

Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf signed a pair of bills earlier this month that require officers seeking new positions to reveal previous employment records and mandate mental health evaluations of officers and training in use of force.

The Connecticut law creates an independent Office of the Inspector General at the state level to investigate all uses of deadly force by police in the state, or all instances of death in police custody. The legislation grants the inspector general’s office subpoena power, and charges it with referring possible prosecutions to the state’s Division of Criminal Justice.

It also allows the state’s police accreditation body to revoke a law enforcement officer’s credentials if they have been found to have used excessive force.

To that end, the law bans neck restraints, or “chokeholds,” unless a law enforcement officer “reasonably believes” such a hold to be necessary to defend from “the use or imminent use of deadly physical force.”

The law requires officers who witness other officers using excessive force or banned holds to intervene.

One of the most heavily debated sections of the law is a blow to “qualified immunity,” the idea that government officials are protected from civil suits while performing the functions of their job.

Under the law signed Friday, Connecticut police officers can be subject to civil suit and can only claim immunity if the officer “had an objectively good faith belief that such officer’s conduct did not violate the law.”

The law also stipulates that, should a court find against an officer for having committed a “malicious, wanton, or willful act,” the officer in question must reimburse the government for his legal defense.

Other notable stipulations of the law include a ban on military designed equipment, which the law refers to as “controlled equipment.” Several classes of weapons are included in that ban, ranging from flash-bangs and explosives to armored drones and “highly mobile multi-wheeled vehicles.”

Officers’ disciplinary records are also prohibited from being shielded by any future collective bargaining agreements. Records are also now subject to the Freedom of Information Act.

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