SAN DIEGO UNIFIED WILL START FALL SEMESTER ONLINE ONLY
District joins L.A. Unified in citing spikes in COVID cases
San Diego Unified School District leaders will delay the physical reopening of schools this fall and instead start the school year with online learning for safety reasons, officials said, citing spikes in COVID-19 cases.
The announcement represents a setback in San Diego Unified’s intention to offer full-time, in-person learning as an option for students this fall.
“One fact is clear: those countries that have managed to safely reopen schools have done so with declining infection rates and on-demand testing available. California has neither,” San Diego Unified said in a joint statement released Monday morning with Los Angeles Unified School District. “The skyrocketing infection rates of the past few weeks make it clear the pandemic is not under control.”
San Diego Unified will reassess on Aug. 10 whether it can reopen and when.
The district is sticking to its original start date of Aug. 31 and will start by providing online-only learning for at least the first week.
When it reassesses, San Diego Unified will consider whether there is sufficient testing and additional federal funding to reopen, and to what extent COVID-19 is under control.
The two districts acknowledged that parents — many of whom were counting on schools to reopen to provide child care — will be disappointed.
About 58 percent of parents who responded to a San Diego Unified survey said they prefer full-time, inperson learning, while 11 percent prefer online learning and 31 percent want a hybrid version of the two, Superintendent Cindy Marten has said. As of June 30, about 59,000 parents had responded the survey.
San Diego Unified and Los Angeles Unified also acknowledged indirectly that school closures, online learning and incomplete access to technology are believed to have caused massive learning losses for many students, particularly lowincome students.
“This announcement represents a significant disappointment for the many thousands of teachers, administrators and support staff, who were looking forward to welcoming students back in August,” the districts said.
“It is obviously an even greater disappointment to the many parents who are anxious for their students to resume their education. Most of all, this decision will impact our students in ways that researchers will take years to understand.”
San Diego Unified has 102,000 students, while about 20,000 students attend San Diego charter schools, which are public schools run independently of the district. San Diego is the state’s second-largest district behind Los Angeles Unified, which serves more than 500,000 K-12 students.
They are not the only districts that have decided to delay reopening.
Sweetwater Union High School District, San Diego County’s second-largest district with 39,000 students, has already announced that it will start the school year with online learning. Sweetwater is in South County, where COVID-19 cases are higher than many other areas.
San Diego Unified’s teachers union said Monday it agrees with the district’s decision to delay in-person reopening.
Kisha Borden, president of the union, noted that some classrooms have windows that don’t open. There is a growing consensus among experts that ventilation is crucial to prevent spread of the virus indoors.
“We don’t feel it’s safe to bring 120,000 kids into enclosed spaces, into classrooms at this time, especially if we can’t guarantee social distancing, if we don’t have adequate ventilation in those classrooms,” Borden said.
In bargaining about details of reopening, the union and district have not yet decided how to ensure physical distancing in schools, district officials said. For now, the district said it is working with UC San Diego, which has agreed to provide health experts to help guide planning.
The union has said it does not want schools to reopen until there is a decline in COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations and positivity rates, and until the district has a robust system for contact tracing and frequent testing of students and staff.
“We ask that the community also help us get the infection rate to decline, because we see recently that the governor has had to close down bars and restaurants because we saw a spike,” Borden said. “It’s dangerous right now. So if people can’t be in a restaurant eating in close quarters, or a bar, why would it be safe to have 20 or 30 kids in a small space?”
Even if schools do reopen sometime this fall, it’s unclear how many teachers and staff would come back to school.
Only about 30 percent of teachers who responded to a union survey last month said they were prepared to return to in-person teaching, that was before the recent COVID-19 surge, Borden said. She said teachers want to see their students again but are very concerned about health and safety. Several teachers have underlying health conditions or live with family members who do.
Tammy Blevins, a parent whose 11-year-old son attends Longfellow K-8, said she is concerned about continuing distance learning in the fall.
She was hoping her son could do hybrid learning, meaning he would attend school in-person part of the week and learn from home on other days. That way she could minimize his potential exposure to the virus but still receive some in-person learning.
Blevins said her son learns better when he can work with a teacher face-toface. With distance learning this past spring, her son got what he said was an overwhelming number of assignments but little direct instruction or one-on-one help from teachers, she said.
This month, her son’s math teacher started offering him one-on-one tutoring, which Blevins said has been helpful, but she doesn’t think all of her son’s teachers would be able to provide that.
The district has said it is working on improving its distance learning from the spring.
“We acknowledge that the distance learning that occurred in the spring was not ideal. I call it crisis teaching, crisis learning, because it was just a reaction to the pandemic and something we were kind of thrust into,” Borden said. “So we recognize that in the fall, distance learning is going to have to be an improvement over what we experienced in the spring.”
Borden said the union has discussed with the district more training on how teachers, counselors, nurses and special education service providers can improve how they serve students remotely, as well as providing students with more supplies to learn from home.
kristen.taketa@sduniontribune.com