Twenty years ago, Bill Frist shuttled back and forth between Nashville and Washington, D.C., where he set the national GOP agenda as Senate majority leader. First winning his U.S. Senate seat in 1994 over incumbent Democrat Jim Sasser, Frist — a physician and the son of Hospital Corporation of America founder Thomas Frist — led the chamber from 2003 to 2007. Under President George W. Bush, Frist helped bring the United States into the Middle East, opposed abortion access and helped modernize Medicare and Medicaid. He left elected office in 2007.
Though Frist consolidated power as a Republican, his politics buck today’s Trump-run party. Among his major legacy policies is the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), a comprehensive global health initiative to treat and reduce HIV/AIDS that was intentionally disrupted by President Trump this summer. Frist’s incredulous defenses of the climate and vaccines sound like the stuff of #resist liberal Facebook posts. He spoke with the Scene just after delivering opening remarks at Connecting the Dots: The Environment’s Impact on Student Success, a conference hosted by the Frist-funded State Collaborative on Reforming Education (SCORE) at the Noah Liff Opera Center in Sylvan Park.
The event brought in speakers and experts to discuss how environmental factors can positively affect student success and education outcomes, combining Frist’s interest in health, the natural environment and education.
Thanks for taking the time to sit down with the Scene. What’s your goal for this event, and what are you excited for?
To stand before a room of 75 people who come together aligned around exploring the intersection between the environment and K-to-12 education for the first time is inspiring to me. That’s the purpose — to get conversation kicked off that would not otherwise occur if we hadn’t brought in groups who intersect from the K-through-12 world with the environment in which K-to-12 education is taking place.
It seems like that intersection is where your head has been since leaving elected office.
SCORE started 15 years ago to focus on kids and the success of kids in education and in life at a time where Tennessee had an F — failing — in everything. So we created SCORE. It has not been perfect, but it’s exceeded my expectations, taking us from the bottom to around halfway to where we need to be. Other states use Tennessee as a model now. We want to be thinking about that, combined with the environment. The environment, to me, means safety. It means climate. It means how hot it is, it means wildfires, it means asthma in the classroom and pollution in the classroom. It makes sense to look at all that together as a physician thinking about long-term health and well-being.
Amid the city’s development boom, advocates try to conserve the mature tree canopy
What do you hope people take away when thinking about those things together?
We want to set the foundation around goals, processes, action items that can take us to higher likelihoods of success in K-to-12 success. Success we define as being prepared for your life and career and the workplace. To maximize that, you have to pay attention and maximize the environment to make it safe and healthy.
Both are critical issues. I know you’ve been out of D.C. for a while, but we’re seeing changes at the federal and state level around vaccine policy and vaccine requirements that might jeopardize student health. Do you think that’s a move in the right or wrong direction?
We won’t be addressing that at this event, but I do think that every American needs to be sensitive to what’s going on in Washington. Every American needs to see a cautionary flag if there is a destruction and mistrust built around what we know is scientific evidence.
Like vaccines?
Yes, like vaccines. If you’re looking at any policy through a lens of health and well-being, you’d have to say that the current administration’s approach to vaccines is wrong. It will hurt people, and thousands of people will die if it’s fulfilled.
What other trends are you looking at in the intersection of health and education?
Ten or 11 schools in Memphis had to close down this year because they weren’t prepared for [heat] — they didn’t have air conditioning, and so they didn’t have adaptability. Same thing in Oak Ridge. We need to sensitize people to think about that. Right now, the general accounting office looking at HVAC and cooling says that 36,000 schools have inferior systems that will be destructive to kids’ health and learning.
It’s not just heat. It’s pollution and asthma in the classroom. Hotter days aggravate asthma. That gets translated into less cognitive development and less learning. We’re getting more sophisticated with heat maps and urban heat maps to see that these impacts are disproportionate on communities that don’t have the resources to adapt.
Why haven’t you chosen to orient your work more on the cause of pollution, like industrial polluters or corporations?
Much of the failure of the environmental movement has been beating down on the emissions part of it. It’s been a total failure. I look at pulling more people together to look at issues like adaptability and awareness and bringing people to the table. Not just beat down just oil companies, but if we as parents, as grandparents, do these things, then our kids are gonna learn more. They’re gonna be healthier, and they’re gonna be more successful in life. As a scientist, I know we’ve got data today that will improve the K-to-12 success of our kids. We want to sensitize people, and we have hopeful messages.
What kind of future are you imagining for your grandchildren, and what do you think we should be preparing for in the next 10 or 20 years?
I am optimistic. There’s a lot of doom and gloom out there, but the science pretty much tells us what we need to do. I see technology coming that we just didn’t have in the past, like pulling carbon out of the air. Nature-based solutions, like how 50 percent of the carbon is pulled out of the air by these trees. As we move toward conservation and appreciation of conservation, all of a sudden we have these nature-based solutions out there. Solar is one engine, but we’re gonna need all the energy that we can get. We just wanna make sure that it’s clean and sustainable. If we do that, things like asthma and heart disease will not be going on.
