Trump administration officials said Tuesday it is their “goal” to work “hand in hand” with local governments and jurisdictions to safely reopen schools in the fall after the coronavirus closings, while claiming the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention did not recommend closing schools to begin with.

President Trump and first lady Melania Trump are scheduled to host a “dialogue” Tuesday afternoon at the White House, focused on reopening America’s schools safely.

A senior administration official on Tuesday told reporters that it is “important to get our schools open.”

“I think it’s worth noting that the CDC in guidance, we never recommended that schools close,” the official said. “Those were local jurisdictional decisions made.”

The official noted that there are “a variety of different strategies that schools can adopt so that they can open schools safely.”

“The CDC never recommended school closures because they didn’t believe that was an effective strategy,” the official continued. “But these decisions are local decisions, and our goal is to work hand-in-hand with local jurisdictions to make sure to see the best ways to reopen schools in a safe way, and get back to where we would have really preferred to have been in spring, which is to have an active educational component available to the students.”

The official added: “It is such an important component of our communities and important for the well-being and health of individuals that are school age.”