Rural schools have been open for months. It’s taken a learning curve
WEAVERVILLE — Tabatha Plew quit her good-paying construction job in August, pulled her kids out of a Central Valley school they loved and moved seven hours north to this tiny town in Trinity County.
Like a lot of rural communities, Weaverville in recent years has seen more people leaving than arriving, but it had a golden commodity Plew couldn’t find at home in Fresno County for her three children: open classrooms that promised a desk in front of a teacher.
“I packed them up, and I told my husband, ‘We love you. See you on the weekends,’” said Plew, who moved into her in-laws’ home in Weaverville. “This was the highest-paying job I’ve ever had, and, you know, the money didn’t mean anything when my kids were struggling.”
As schools in Los Angeles and elsewhere debate the particulars of bringing students and teachers back to classrooms after a year of distance learning during the COVID-19 pandemic, numerous public school campuses have been open for months in rural Northern California.
There were far fewer COVID-19 hospitalizations and deaths in this sparsely populated region than in urban areas, where campus reopenings have hinged on lengthy teachers union negotiations and hesitancy among parents about returning often reflects the disproportionate horrors wrought by the coronavirus in workingclass Latino and Black neighborhoods. In hard-hit Los Angeles County, schools in wealthier, whiter areas with fewer cases have opted to reopen faster this spring than those in less affluent communities of color.
When the academic year began, state rules allowed K-12 campuses to resume in-person instruction if a county stayed off the nowdefunct state watchlist for 14 consecutive days. The counties that first met the reopening criteria were primarily rural.
For those that reopened first, this school year has been an education.
In Weaverville, population 3,100, the lure of inperson instruction proved so great that the roughly 700-student K-12 Trinity Alps Unified School District, which had budgeted for declining enrollment, gained about 30 pupils whose families moved in from other areas, administrators said.
The district opened its elementary, middle and high school classes in August, when there had been just 10 confirmed coronavirus cases in mountainous Trinity County.
It was a decision for which Supt. Jaime Green said he caught a lot of flak from outside the community. He was bombarded with emails calling him irresponsible and reckless. In the days before the school year started, he spoke often with superintendents in neighboring counties who kept asking one another: “OK, are you really reopening?” because they didn’t want to go it alone.
Green said that he did not have any staff members object to teaching on campus and that the vast majority of students have returned. Masks are required for students in grades three and up. There were no sports or pep rallies before last month. Prom is canceled. Hand sanitizer is everywhere.
“There are risks. COVID’s dangerous. We have never said that it wasn’t. We are very apt to that, and we keep our eyes on it, and we have medical personnel checking our schools all the time,” Green said. “If we have to close, we close.”
Since August, the high school closed its campus and switched to distance learning for 17 days because too many staff members and students had been potentially exposed to the virus. At the elementary school, the transitional kindergarten and kindergarten each has been quarantined because of potential exposure, but administrators say there have been no cases connected to the site.
Green was stuck in bed with COVID-19 for several days last month. He said the financially strapped district is using COVID-19 relief money to pay teachers’ salaries if they have to stay home so they don’t burn through their sick time and come to work while feeling ill.
Sophomore James Norman, 15, said he was grateful for a fairly normal school year.
“I don’t really like talking through the screen,” he said. “I feel like I’m talking to nobody, and I can’t focus as much as when I’m in the classroom. From here, I feel like the only way is up.”
At Weaverville Elementary, Principal Katie Poburko said young students are still catching up. Reading scores tumbled after schools closed last spring, but students in transitional kindergarten through fifth grade read for 90 minutes each day and have made gains. Saturday school is offered once a month. Summer school is planned.
Middle schoolers were given planners a few months into the school year “because they just forgot how to be students and what time management looks like,” Poburko said.