Newsom proposes $2B package for return to in-person classes
Gov. Gavin Newsom on Wednesday unveiled a $2 billion package of financial incentives to encourage California school districts to bring young students back into the classroom for inperson instruction as early as mid-February.
The program would also provide support for coronavirus testing, including weekly tests at schools in communities with the highest rates of transmission, though it doesn’t appear to mandate testing. Teachers are expected to be in the mix of essential workers next in line to recieve the coronavirus vaccine along with people 75 years of age or older this Spring, but the distribution of vaccines has been lagging and it is unclear whether they would recieve the vaccine by a mid-February return to inperson classes.
In announcing his new plan, Newsom cited growing evidence that younger children are at a lower risk of contracting and transmitting COVID-19 and that with adequate precautions in place, schools could operate effectively in-person without fueling the spread of the virus.
“As a father of four, I know firsthand what parents, educators and pediatricians continue to say: inperson is the best setting to meet not only the learning needs but the mental health and social-emotional needs of our kids,” Newsom said. “In the midst of this pandemic, my administration is focused on getting students back into the classroom in a way that leads with student and teacher health.”
To be eligible for the program, a school district must submit a safety plan to local and state agencies. Students and school staff will be required to wear masks at all times while on campus.
Only schools in counties with a seven- day average of fewer than 28 new coronavirus cases reported a day per 100,000 residents would be eligible to open — a threshold that would keep schools in areas of the state with high transmission rates, including all of the Bay Area and Los Angeles County, shuttered for the foreseeable future.
E. Toby Boyd, president of California’s Teachers Association, said in a statement that he appreciated the governor pushing for rigorous safety standards and transparency requirements tied to the reopening of schools but that there are still “many unanswered questions.”
“The devil is always in the details, particularly as it relates to implementation and execution,” Boyd said. “We look forward to hearing more information and hope the new guidelines that the Governor said would be released next week will create a coherent statewide plan rather than creating more confusion for parents and school districts.”
The proposed program, which will be submitted to the state legislature as an adjustment of the state budget, first prioritizes returning students from transitional kindergarten to 2nd grade and students with higher needs, such as English learners, homeless, foster and low-income students, into the classroom as early as mid-February. The remainder of elementary school students would follow shortly thereafter, with a goal to be “back on track across the spectrum by spring 2021.”
Under the governor’s plan, districts that choose to transition to in-person instruction would receive about $ 450 per student, with the potential for additional funding up to about $700 per student for lowincome students, English learners and foster youth, he said Wednesday.
Even if a district decides to reopen, parents can opt to continue distance learning if they are not comfortable with sending their students back into a classroom, Newsom said.
Tony Thurmond, state superintendent of public instruction, said he recognizes that not every school will reopen but that the new funding will make it much easier for those that choose to.
“Our educators are leaning in and trying to provide everything they can, but we literally moved into distance learning overnight, and so there are unavoidable impacts that unquestionably have occurred,” he said. “… We know that many families, foster families and homeless families, English learners, free and reduced lunch families, have been impacted in different ways, and so we’ll be continuing our work to strengthen family engagement strategies to ensure our kids are connected to their schools.”
The governor’s announcement comes during the state’s most dangerous surge of the pandemic and after the majority of schools across the state have been shuttered for nearly a year due to concerns over the potential spread of the coronavirus. And also on Wednesday, the government announced that a mutated strain of COVID-19, one that has been found to be more contagious and was traced to the United Kingdom had been discovered by a lab in Southern California.
With more than 5,700 fatalities reported through the month’s first 29 days, December has already been the deadliest month of the pandemic in California, and the average number of deaths and cases each day are still rising, though more slowly than before Christmas.
Prior to the December surge, elementary school districts were permitted to apply for waivers to reopen schools for in-person classes but only a small portion of schools across the state had done so.
Newsom has been facing considerable pressure from parents and some legislatures to establish a uniform plan to transition back to in-person instruction. Assemblyman Phil Ting, D-San Francisco, earlier this month introduced a bill that would require schools allowed to open under state and county health orders — those in the state’s red, orange or yellow reopening tiers — to implement a plan to do so within two weeks. The governor’s new plan would go further to permit some counties in the purple tier to reopen as well.
Along with the additional funding, Newsom has called for the creation of a new state dashboard that would enable all Californians to see their school’s reopening status, level of available funding and data on school outbreaks.