School board explores reopening amid rising tensions
Unions say undrafted agreement will need further review
West Contra Costa Unified’s plans to reopen classrooms has hit numerous roadblocks over the past month, and its latest one — this time to bring all willing students back into classrooms by April 19 — remains tenuous.
After a long, contentious meeting Wednesday night that spilled into early Thursday morning, the school board didn’t vote on the plan but indicated it may do so today.
“We are going to commit to negotiating differently going forward,” Associate Superintendent Tony Wold said during the meeting. “This has created way too much conflict, and it has been way too emotional of a process, so we have to do it better.”
Though many other school districts in California have approved reopening plans, including Mount Diablo Unified, West Contra Costa Unified has lagged, even as the number of COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations have declined the past two months and the county has been aggressively giving vaccine shots to eligible residents.
The district presented the latest reopening plan to emerge from last-minute negotiations Wednesday after the one the board had been set to consider was scrapped because it outraged families. The earlier plan would have brought back students needing intervention first and others later depending on how many teachers decide to voluntarily return to their classrooms.
Under the district’s latest plan, most of the students who choose to return would attend “instructional hubs” with or without teachers in four- or five-hour blocks, three or four days a week. A three-hour block would be set aside on a separate day for “social emotional activities” such as storytelling or art classes, Wold said at the meeting.
Students who need intervention — additional help to catch up on their learning — would attend in-person instruction for two hours in either the morning
or afternoon.
Families would have the option of keeping their students in distance learning only.
Teachers would have the same option. Those who decide to continue distance learning would videocall into classrooms where students have gathered, overseen by any available school staff. District officials did not explain what would happen if there aren’t enough nonteaching staff available to supervise the students.
The plan guarantees that summer and fall instruction will be in person as long as COVID-19
cases continue to decline. The summer program will be the “biggest the district has ever offered,” Wold said, giving students the opportunity to make up for what they lost during distance learning.
District staffers still are drafting the formal plan for the school board to review and consider approving at a special meeting today.
“For transparency purposes, we did not want to bring in a new proposal at the eleventh hour that no one has seen, and then just turn around and vote on that,” board President Mister Phillips said.
Phillips asked union representatives attending Wednesday’s Zoom meeting if enough staff and teachers would voluntarily
return to instruct the students who show up.
Although the presidents of unions for adult education instructors and for classified employees said they were confident there would be enough volunteers to help, leaders of the teachers union and other unions declined to answer.
“I don’t bargain in public, and I’m not prepared to bargain in public right now,” said Marissa Glidden, president of the United Teachers of Richmond. Glidden noted that she and other union representatives had requested to speak at previous public meetings, when they were more prepared, but hadn’t been given the opportunity.
Labor representatives
said later in the meeting that they would need to fully review a formal plan before their members vote to ratify it.
The board spent a large part of the meeting attempting to flesh out the plan’s details. Trustee Jamela Smith-Folds grilled Wold about what would happen if there aren’t enough teachers or staff to properly supervise the students.
Some parents who called into Wednesday’s meeting urged the trustees to be decisive about reopening classrooms, saying their children had greatly struggled in distance learning.
But a few teachers said in-person instruction may still be too unsafe for families in communities
harder hit by the pandemic. Helen Kang, a teacher at Harding Elementary in El Cerrito, suggested the board should reach out more to families in Richmond and San Pablo who do not feel comfortable sending their students back.
“We are constantly silencing Black and brown parent voices,” Kang said. “Many of them do not have the time or energy to come and comment at meetings like this, because they’re too busy working two or three jobs.”
Ernesto Falcon, a parent in the district who is also an attorney, wrote a letter to the district Monday threatening legal action if reopening plans don’t take into account the latest guidance from the California Department of Public Health.
In the state’s current recommendations, masked students can be within 3 feet of distance from one other, instead of 6 feet.
Despite tensions among district staff, the trustees, unionized teachers and the community at Wednesday’s meeting, Superintendent Matthew Duffy maintained there was “goodfaith optimism” among educators and staff who “want to come back and work with students.”
“We were proud of the fact that we were able to be one of the first districts to get into distance learning,” Duffy said. “We are now ready and open to serve (students) and be open for them.”