MAKE EDUCATION REAL
California Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom on Monday announced a $2 billion plan to entice the state’s schools to reopen this spring. The plan was hailed by many as a breakthrough after nearly a year of children being barred from in-person learning at the behest of the state’s formidable teachers unions.
But Newsom’s proposal, if approved by California’s legislators, won’t come close to achieving what he suggests. Dangling money to schools to reopen — and counting even a few hours per week as “open” — won’t restore children’s access to real education.
In the absence of leadership, the disaster of California’s school policy during the pandemic, which has been mirrored in many other states, is likely to continue through at least next fall and may haunt many children for a lifetime.
As a physician and director of COVID response for the University of California San Francisco’s emergency department, I have been part of the battle against this pandemic from the beginning. I have cared for COVID-19 patients in San Francisco and in the Navajo Nation, where I assisted the Indian Health Service with the first surge. I designed policies to prevent COVID-19 transmission between patients and staff while there was inadequate personal protective equipment and limited testing.
In short, I am not naive to the threats COVID-19 poses. And I fully supported Newsom’s early shelter-inplace order a year ago. I’m sure it saved tens of thousands of lives in California, and in neighboring Oregon and Washington when those governors followed suit.
California’s early success should have meant that our children would be among the first to return to inperson learning last year. That didn’t happen.
The first sign of how badly Newsom would bungle policy on schools came late last summer, when he let restaurants and bars reopen ahead of schools, sabotaging students’ chances of returning to in-person classes in September as case rates inevitably rose. Next, Newsom allowed individual counties to layer on additional and often arbitrary barriers to schools reopening, making children’s education captive to the whims of county health officers, who often delayed reopening under pressure from superintendents and union leaders.
So here we are, one year later. The landscape has changed. Infections are dropping. The vaccine rollout has begun. Policy decisions no longer need to be based on anxious speculation and imprecise data.
In January, researchers from Duke University published the largest and highest-quality data set to date: roughly 90,000 students and 10,000 staff members were monitored for nine weeks. COVID-19 rates were spiraling out of control in the local communities, yet in these
K-12 public schools, there were only 32 in-school transmissions (and none from student to teacher). Community prevalence would have predicted more than 800 cases. Why the difference? In the classrooms, everyone wore masks, plain and simple. Masks block COVID-19 transmission, and when kids and teachers are masked, they do not spread disease.
A similar smaller data set was recently released from Wisconsin: More than 5,000 students and staff over three months; seven inschool transmissions. Zero student to teacher transmissions. Masking again was the primary intervention.
In the past 12 months, countless children have suffered mentally and emotionally from the continuing isolation resulting from trying to do school from home. The Benioff Children’s Hospital of Oakland,
Mandate the reopening of all California schools. It can be done safely.
part of the UCSF medical system, has seen a 66 percent increase in suicidal children in its emergency room, and a doubling of adolescents requiring hospitalizations for eating disorders in 2020 compared with 2019. There has been a 75 percent increase in children brought in for mental health services who require immediate hospitalization. And these statistics reflect only the most severe cases.
Parents and guardians are fed up with this rising harm to their children, and our governor is failing them. Newsom won’t risk alienating the teachers unions, which helps explain why the ballyhooed plan announced this week is so underwhelming. Because of California’s rigid policies linking community case rates to school reopening, most of the state’s schools do not even qualify for reopening. But when they do, there is no minimum requirement for in-person instruction to collect on Newsom’s cash incentives. In fact, many districts have already announced plans to offer just 90 minutes of instruction twice a week, beginning in April, and extending that paltry schedule into the fall, well beyond when all teachers are vaccinated.
One year ago, Newsom ordered school closures. If he believes that children have a right to public education, as mandated in California’s Constitution, then he needs to act like it, and take one single, courageous step: Mandate the reopening of all California schools. It can be done safely. It can be done rapidly. And it is long overdue.
I keep this silver pin with my mom’s name — Misako — on my nightstand. She got it while incarcerated at the Poston War Relocation Center in Arizona when she was a girl.
Mom referred to this place as “camp,” and I always thought she had a lot of fun there. They had clubs, sports teams, picnics.
I learned later this camp was in the desert and had barbed wire. Mom and her family were forced to leave their home in Delano without her father, who had been rounded up by the FBI. Her obachan — grandmother — died in this desolate place.
That’s why my family remembers Feb. 19. That’s the day in 1942 when President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which authorized the imprisonment of 120,000 people of Japanese descent living on the West Coast because they were deemed a threat to national security after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor during World War II.
That included my mom, Misako Katano, who was 14 then and a U.S. citizen. She was the youngest of five siblings born to Japanese immigrants.
Mom never talked about the abuse of her civil rights or racism or the war. It never dawned on me that she looked different to some people. She was just Mom. The only time I really heard her speak Japanese was on the phone with her mother. I didn’t even know about camp until my dad told me in junior high that “your mom is part of history.”
That’s when she showed me her pin. It was one of the few items she had from camp. A friend had made it and etched Mom’s name in it. That’s all I know about the pin. She kept it in a light blue jewelry box in her top dresser drawer.
When Mom started to talk about camp, she talked of her arrival in Poston. It was at night and by train. When she got off the train she was handed a burlap sack and told to stuff it with straw because that was her mattress. And, oh, to watch out for scorpions.
She never forgot the dust storms and dry winds. She wrote it down as the one aspect of camp she recalled the most when she was filling out a remembrance form for the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles. I was incredulous that the wind was the one thing that stuck in her mind and not the imprisonment.
Years later when I met other Japanese Americans of her generation — Nisei — they talked about the burlap sacks, straw and scorpions. It was like hearing the same family story being retold over and over. They all hated the wind.
Mom also liked to rattle off her camp address: 3-3-D. (Block 3; Building 3; Apartment D.) Your address was important because Poston was really big — 71,000 acres. Its peak population was about 17,000.
Her address helped me find documents about Mom and her family. She said she and her friends fibbed about their age so they could get work in the camp’s office group. If you Google her name, address and Poston, you’ll find that she did indeed have a job as a file clerk.
But while Mom got to work in the office at camp, her parents — Ryuzo and Fuku — were assigned to menial tasks. Like cleaning the latrines.
In Delano, before camp, Mom’s father, who left Japan for the U.S. when he was about 12, managed grape vineyards. Ryuzo was used to running things. He was an Issei, the first generation of Japanese Americans in my family. They lived down a dusty lane outside of town. The house is no longer there, but the barn remains. All of that life was gone when they were shipped to Poston.
Mom said her dad was never the same after camp and was often sullen and sad. But for Mom, Poston was an adventure where she got to hang out with friends. She had a job, attended school (they had a yearbook) and even ventured out into the desert on hikes. “We ran the place,” she would joke.
Mom was never bitter about camp. She admits that was probably because of her age. Decades later, she visited the ruins on the Colorado River Indian Reservation and was happy that she could point out what was left of the auditorium. She attended many camp reunions and always looked for other Japanese Americans.
When her children became more interested — and outraged about the camps — she started to collect articles and documents so we could learn more about Poston. She got a copy of her dad’s FBI file and looked up the forms the government had archived on her family.
I was incredulous that the wind was the one thing that stuck in her mind, not the imprisonment.
Try as I might, I could never write a story about Mom because I naively thought she didn’t have anything dramatic or powerful to say about Poston. The saddest thing I learned was that her obachan — Tei — died in camp. There’s a picture of her funeral in one of my mom’s Poston reunion books. The Poston Chronicle — yes, they had a newspaper — noted her death in its Dec. 5, 1944, edition: “Mrs. Tei Katano, 82 years old, 3-3-D, formerly of Delano, Calif., and Kanagawa-ken. Nov. 6.”
Mom never wanted to make a big deal out of her experience. She simply didn’t think it was extraordinary. She said it was a part of her life, which in the end had turned out nicely.
In 1990, she received a letter of apology from the U.S. and a check for $20,000.
She told me the government didn’t need to apologize because she was only doing what any good American would have done. Mom said other people had suffered far worse than anything she experienced.
But she got that letter of apology framed. And it was placed on the mantel in our family room — for all to see.
is business editor at The San Diego Union-Tribune. She is a third-generation Japanese American.
SAN DIEGO — Joyce Durra, 71, beloved wife of Richard Durra. Loving mother of Erin, David (Corina), Brian. Affectionate grandmother of Sofia, Michael and Leah. She passed away at home surrounded by her family on February 27, 2021. Joyce was a 40-year resident of Glencoe, IL and retried to Del Mar, CA in 2017. Joyce was a beacon of life and love. She had a magnetic personality and illuminating smile. She will be dearly missed by be her family and friends.
The grave side service will be private in San
Diego. In lieu of flowers, donations in Joyce’s memory can be made to The Scripps Research Institute www.scripps.edu or a charity of your choice.
In lieu of an in-person memorial the family requests that anyone wishing to do so share a note, poem, photograph sharing a memory of Joyce, to be put into a book the family is compiling. Please send your memory to erindurra@yahoo.com.