San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
STUDY: REOPENING DIVERGES WIDELY BY DISTRICT
COVID rates, leaders, state rules all factor into school disparities
The amount of time students spent in front of a teacher instead of a computer varied dramatically this school year depending on their district and correlated with their socioeconomic status, data from San Diego County’s 42 districts shows.
Generally districts that serve few low-income students provided the most in-person instruction time, while districts that had a majority of low-income students spent the most time in distance learning, according to school reopening data.
“I do think that you see a pretty clear split, even in San Diego County, between the districts that are opening and the districts that are not opening,”
San Diego Unified Board President Richard Barrera said last year. “And a big factor there is how widespread is the virus in particular communities.”
From the start of the school year until Feb. 13, students in 11 San Diego County school districts spent the entire school year online, including three of the county’s biggest districts: San Diego Unified, Sweetwater and Chula Vista. All but one of those 11 districts enroll mostly low-income students.
By contrast, students in two smaller districts — Encinitas and Ramona — got to spend their entire school year in person.
In total, 10 districts provided in-person learning for at least 80 percent of their school year. Only two of those districts, Cajon Valley Union and Warner Unified, enrolled mostly low-income students.
The rest of the county’s districts fell somewhere in between, with some holding in-person classes as little as 9 percent of the school year, like the Jamul-dulzura district, while others provided in-school instruction as much as 92 percent of the year, like Warner and Rancho Santa Fe districts.
Even districts that were open for instruction had inperson learning disrupted by unexpected events.
Several districts closed during the winter COVID surge or closed because of staffing shortages caused by COVID. Some classrooms and schools had to close if multiple positive COVID cases showed up in classrooms.
As if COVID weren’t enough, some East and North County districts had to close due to high winds.
There also were disparities within districts. Some districts reopened campuses for elementary students but not their middle and high school students, partly because the state’s reopening rules made it harder to reopen secondary schools.
Also in-person education has not been the same experience for everyone.
For some students, it has meant going to school just one or two days a week, as some districts had limited capacity to make room for social distancing. For others, it meant going to school four or five days a week.
Officials and parents in school districts that have stayed closed point out that some families, particularly families of color who have been hurt by COVID, don’t want their children to return to school out of fear of bringing COVID home.
Recently, however, studies show the vast majority of U.S. parents supporting inperson schooling. About 79 percent of parents in K-12 schools support it, according to a Gallup poll released earlier this month.
While support is higher among working parents and Republicans and lower among Democrats and Western states, there is at least 60 percent support for in-person schooling across all groups, according to Gallup.
Two families, two different school years
Disparities in in-person learning days have created major inequalities in the quality of schooling for students, some advocates and a San Diego County judge said recently.
On one end of the spectrum are families like Sanna Depew’s, whose three sons attend Del Mar Union School District.
The Depew family spent the first two weeks of their school year online. Since Labor Day, they have been attending school in person five days a week, from 8 a.m. to 1:30 p.m.
“Just having them be back in that school community has really been lifechanging in our house,” Depew said.
No longer did Depew, a teacher turned stay-athome mom, have to juggle helping three children in three different grade levels with schoolwork. Now her sons are doing better with academics and making friends, especially her fifthgrader, she said.
“He was able to grow and really connect with a few kids instead of feeling lost in the mix in Zoom and staring at a screen of faces,” she said.
When asked why she thinks Del Mar was one of the first districts to reopen, Depew credited the superintendent, who started planning early last spring to reopen schools.
“That early commitment is really the early difference that we had; there was no vacillating back and forth,” Depew said. “We as a family have just been so grateful that someone was looking out for the good of our students. Our superintendent, she made a decision really early on and showed true leadership.”
The school year has been vastly different for Frank Powell, whose sixth-grade daughter attends San Diego Unified’s Standley Middle, a 12-minute drive away from the Depews’ school.
Powell spends about six hours every school day helping his daughter, Angelina, with distance learning. It’s taking away hours from his job as a Realtor.
Angelina has cerebral palsy and can’t walk or talk. Not only does Powell help her understand her Zoom lessons, but he has to help her do basic tasks like write with a pen, turn a page and go to the bathroom.
“I’m the teacher,” he said.
Powell knows the school board and teachers union have cited safety as the main reason for not reopening sooner. But Powell has seen private schools reopen safely and wonders why his daughter’s school couldn’t do the same.
Why there were disparities
Disparities in in-person schooling are born from a host of factors. Many advocates of in-person schooling have blamed teachers unions for keeping districts closed, but the reopening story includes many more actors.
Many of San Diego County’s disparities can be traced to one crucial date: Nov. 12, when the county fell to the state’s most-restrictive purple tier.
That tier’s rules forced schools that had not yet reopened to stay closed for months but allowed schools that had reopened before then to continue in-person instruction, regardless of a community’s COVID rates.
In January, the state came out with new rules, including a new definition of reopened schools and a minimum 4-foot distancing rule for students that also forced some districts to cancel reopening plans.
Recently, a San Diego County judge temporarily blocked some of the state’s school reopening rules, siding with parents who had sued the state.
The state has said the rules are meant to minimize the risk of COVID in schools, but the judge said they were too arbitrary to accomplish that specific goal. The judge argued they had instead created inequalities in quality and access to education by forcing some schools to stay closed or offer less inperson instruction.
“Indeed, there can be no dispute that students throughout the districts at issue have, as a result of frameworks or rules adopted by various governmental agencies, received differing forms and levels of education, which the evidence demonstrates have significantly affected the quality of education being delivered to students,” wrote Judge Cynthia Freeland, granting a temporary restraining order last week against the state.
Regardless of state rules, many districts that stayed closed the longest did so at their own discretion.
Closed districts like San Diego Unified and the South County districts encompass communities that long had disproportionately high rates of COVID. District leaders said they wanted to avoid potentially exacerbating the spread and hurting already disadvantaged communities even more.
District leaders agreed that students need to be back in school but followed that statement with a qualifier — only when they believed it was safe.
Several districts that were first to open not only had lower community COVID rates, but they had superintendents who set their sights on reopening early in the pandemic.
Alpine Union offered inperson learning for 81 percent of its school year. Its superintendent, Richard Newman, has repeatedly said he believes it was his moral responsibility to open schools.
To get teachers on board, he first asked educators to teach distance-learning lessons from their classrooms, so he could prove to them that the district’s safety measures, like universal masking, frequent cleaning and distancing, would keep them safe.
“We all have concerns about the uncertainty and about COVID and its impact,” Newman said last year. “But a very strong plan that is focusing on the health and safety, that’s done in collaboration with your staff and community ... we’ve proven you can open schools safely.”
Another district, Cajon Valley Union, was an outlier, proving early in the pandemic that schools didn’t need to have disproportionately low COVID rates or a high-income student body to open for in-person instruction. Cajon Valley’s communities did have disproportionately high COVID rates, and about 70 percent of its 16,000 students qualified as low-income.
Yet the district opened in September, just after Labor Day. Its superintendent, David Miyashiro, early in the pandemic was intent on offering in-person learning as a choice to families.
The district sought feedback from parents, employees and others early, last spring. Then it opened a free, in-person child care program for essential workers last April, becoming one of the first districts in California to bring students back to campus.
It used that child care program to practice safety protocols for reopening schools, Miyashiro said.
In addition to in-person enrichment programs during the summer, Cajon Valley offered in-person learning to all students for 87 percent of this school year.
Now that San Diego County is no longer in the purple tier, more schools are announcing reopening plans and more students will be heading to school in person, mostly part-time. San Diego Unified is among several districts expecting to reopen campuses during the week of April 12.