School board to decide instructional model

New members Caitlin Dalby, Matt Tennis to be sworn in

CHICO » The issue of reopening schools will be brought up once again as the Chico Unified School District Board of Trustees will determine that instructional model for the spring semester during Friday’s school board meeting.

With the spring semester beginning Jan. 4, the board will decide whether to opt into the modified traditional schedule, which is the a.m./p.m. model, onlineonly or a traditional schedule with safety guidelines in place. The meeting begins at 4 p.m. at the Center for the Arts at Pleasant Valley High School. Attendance will be limited to 40 people and masks are required. The meeting can also be live- streamed at https:// bit.ly/3a0g6Fs.

The board can also decide whether to adopt a combination of options; for example, having elementary schools in modified traditional schedule and secondary schools in an onlineonly format.

Since schools within the district were permitted to reopen for in- person instruction Oct. 19, students and teachers had been operating in the a. m./p. m. model. The model limits the number of students on campus at a time. Schools that have already opened can remain open despite the stayat-home order.

New members

On top of a loaded agenda, newly elected board members Caitlin Dalby and Matt Tennis will be sworn in. The board will also delegate a new president, vice president, clerk and appoint a secretary to the board.

Tennis, who formerly led the parent group, Chico Parents for In Person Learning, has been pushing for schools to fully reopen.

“I want to take the information we’ve gathered over the last several months and take the right step. That means we need to get our schools back open as soon as possible,” Tennis said. “This am./pm. model is better than nothing, but it’s still very incomplete. We need to make our kids whole. They’re suffering. Their academics are suffering, their mental health is suffering and our society has evolved in such a way that school plays a very very important role in how kids grow up and live a healthy life.”

Tennis said he’s already received a stream of emails from parents expressing frustration because their children have gone from straight-A students to failing.

Tennis has also been vocal about criticizing the board and the district in the past about hesitating to fully reopen, but said he’s moving past that.

“I don’t want to dwell on events that have passed. I want to look at the future,” Tennis said. “I have been just basically fixated on the goal of putting students first.”

Dalby, who resigned as a teacher at Marsh Junior High to serve on the board, said she has heard from several teachers, both elementary and secondary, on the matter of reopening schools.

“Some teachers feel safe and some feel very unsafe,” Dalby said. “It seems directly related to the number of daily contacts they’re making every day.”

Dalby noted that librarians, special education teachers and school psychologists are making more contact with students since they don’t have a specific classroom of students to tend to.

Dalby also said that at the secondary level, an increase of COVID-19 cases have spiraled into more quarantining of students and staff. When a student tests positive, anyone who was within six feet of the positive case for more than 15 minutes must quarantine for a minimum of two weeks.

“At the secondary level, it’s not sustainable,” Dalby said. “Each day there are more positive COVID cases on campuses that are triggering quarantine of staff and students.”

Substitute shortage

When teachers are going into a precautionary quarantine, that increases the need for substitute teachers. However, because of the substitute teacher shortage, teachers and staff members are covering others during their prep periods which is increasing the number of student contacts.

“It is not sustainable (at the secondary level) while our community is experiencing widespread COVID transmission,” Dalby said.

So far, no CUSD schools have been forced to close because of COVID- 19 cases. Though most of the cases are in the district’s high schools, the numbers haven’t surpassed the state’s threshold to force closure. If at least five percent of a school’s population has tested positive within a 14- day period, then the school must revert to distance learning.

Dalby said she is coming up with a plan that has flexibility where targeted and at-risk students can be on campus for a full day with supervision.

“There are groups of students who absolutely need to be housed on campus,” Dalby said. “Zoom teaching is hard and not great, but having sick teachers and staff members with unknown long-term effects is also not ideal, “Dalby said.

Speaker lineup

Speakers on the topic for the district will include Tina Keene, director of State and Federal Programs; Diane Olsen, director of Student Support Services and district nurses Sherry Atkin, Tina Collins, Melanie Evans, Michelle Neves-Dean, Julie Parker, Julie Scalet and Cindy Steffen. Butte County Public Health will also be represented with speakers Danette York, director; Monica Soderstrom, division director of Community Health; and Dr. Linda Lewis, a health scientist and epidemiologist.

The final speaker scheduled to participate is Enloe Medical Center President and CEO Mike Wiltermood.

In an email exchange dated Dec. 2 between Tennis and Wiltermood which will be presented during the public comment portion of the meeting, Wiltermood wrote that the 3,500 employees at Enloe have at least 1,500 children under the age of 18 and that employees with school- aged children are “extremely stressed out, sometimes to the point of not being able to come to work because their children are not in school and daycare is inconsistent or unavailable.”

Wiltermood writes that “Enloe Medical Center would consider it a tremendous support of the health system if our schools were to reopen” because of the low risk to school-aged children, and “we do not believe that reopening our schools presents any appreciable risk to Enloe Medical Center and may be a significant benefit.”

“Our school district has more than 1,400 adult employees we need to take into consideration,” Dalby said. “The employee childcare needs don’t take precedent over the safety of our staff and students.”