Trump Wants Schools to Reopen. Americans Worry It’ll Happen Too Fast.

“I have yet to see any data where there are appreciable numbers of people who say, ‘Yes, I want my kids back in school,’” Glen Bolger, a veteran Republican pollster, said in an interview. “They want their kids back in school, but not right now. I think safety is taking priority over education.”

“It shows you how nervous Americans are about coronavirus,” he added. “Because let’s face it, virtual learning couldn’t be worse — yet large numbers of parents say, ‘We’re not putting our kids back in school.’”

Sixty percent of respondents to the A.P./NORC poll said it was “essential” that schools be able to provide a mix of in-person and virtual learning. Another 24 percent viewed this as important, though not essential.

Seventy-seven percent of Americans said in the poll either that K-12 schools should reopen only if they made major adjustments (46 percent), or that they shouldn’t reopen at all (31 percent). Even among Republicans, 57 percent of respondents chose one of those options.

By a two-to-one margin, Americans said in a Quinnipiac University poll released last week that they thought it would not be safe to send children back to elementary school in the fall. And by roughly the same spread, they said they disliked how Mr. Trump was dealing with the reopening of schools.

According to a Kaiser Family Foundation poll released on Thursday, 60 percent of parents with children in elementary school said that they would rather schools reopen more slowly to ensure safety, versus 34 percent who said they wanted schools to prioritize reopening swiftly so that parents can get back to work and students can return to a normal learning environment.

Mollyann Brodie, the director of Kaiser’s polling operation, said her team’s research showed that many Americans — particularly working-class people — were indeed worried about getting the economy back up and running. But safety concerns won out.