Will new school reopening plan work?

The school reopening deal Gov. Gavin Newsom and top lawmakers unveiled Monday stops short of requiring campuses to reopen — raising questions about whether it will actually accelerate students’ return to the classroom.

The $6.6 billion proposal would incentivize schools to bring their youngest and most vulnerable students back by April 1 while financially penalizing campuses that remain closed past that date, CalMatters’ Ricardo Cano, Laurel Rosenhall and Barbara Feder Ostrov report. The plan does not require teacher vaccinations, as Newsom has already set aside 10% of the state’s weekly doses for education workers, in addition to all Thursday and Friday appointments this week at two federally run mass vaccination sites in Oakland and Los Angeles. • Newsom: “We expect that all of our (transitional kindergarten) to (grade) two classrooms open within the next month … Once you build trust, then we will start to see the cadence of reopening across the spectrum.”

Two of the state’s most powerful teachers unions, the California Teachers Association and the California Federation of Teachers, appear generally amenable to the proposal. But it may not be enough to bring kids back to campus in some of the state’s largest districts. Though Los Angeles Unified confirmed Monday it has enough staff vaccine doses to fully reopen elementary schools, it also pushed back its target reopening date from April 9 to midApril — and the United Teachers of Los Angeles slammed the new proposal as a “recipe for propagating structural racism.” Negotiations also remain stubborn in San Francisco.

• San Francisco Unified spokeswoman Gentle Blythe: “Though I wish it could, the governor’s announcement does not change our timeline because there are still many steps we need to take to get there and many of those aren’t expedited even with financial incentives.”

Meanwhile, parents’ frustration has reached new heights. Fed up with the demands of the Berkeley teachers union, a group calling themselves Guerilla Momz filmed the union’s president dropping off his 2-year-old daughter at a private in-person preschool.

• Guerilla Momz: “We hope to highlight this discussion has never been about safety, it is only about power.”