South Bay districts to teach remotely
The Santa Clara and Fremont school districts will begin the fall with remote learning, becoming the latest to bow to the worsening pandemic by keeping classrooms closed.
The Oakland Unified School District and the West Contra Costa Unified School District have also said classes will be virtual, at least initially.
It’s an issue that all districts are grappling with — urgently, with the August start of the school year rapidly approaching.
Some large districts in the Bay Area, like the San Francisco Unified School District, have yet to release detailed plans for the fall school year,
while others have announced a hybrid approach that mixes some inperson classes with distance learning.
In San Jose, where the school district has laid out a plan for “as many students as possible” to return to classrooms starting Aug. 12, safety permitting, resistance from teachers is rising as coronavirus cases surge.
“Teachers do not feel that it is safe to return to teaching in person and, in large majority, they are unwilling to do so at this time,” Patrick Bernhardt, president of the San Jose Teachers Association, said Friday in a letter to the San Jose Unified School District.
Of all the difficult decisions forced on communities by the pandemic, choices about education have been among the toughest. Research suggests that most kids learn best in physical classrooms, surrounded by other kids and adults, and the American Academy of Pediatrics has warned that the isolation of distance learning can bring its own harm. Many parents are desperate for child care, and some families do not have the equipment for remote learning.
But for teachers, the prospect of infection is frightening, even as research suggests that younger children may be less likely to contract the coronavirus.
“You know, I don’t want to die from teaching, I guess is the way to put it,” explained Jodi Disario, 49. She teaches high school freshmen in the San Jose district and says she is at high risk of serious illness if she gets infected.
“I have limits. I’ll work 60hour weeks. I’ll buy thousands of dollars of supplies,” she said. “But I think I need to draw the line at dying.”
Melissa Garcia, 40, a middle school English teacher, was at first eager to return to her classroom, but changed her mind as coronavirus case counts rose and she tried to imagine the logistics.
How was she supposed to enforce social distancing with 30 eighthgraders in a room? And what if they forgot their masks?
“We have a dress code at our middle school,” Garcia said. “I can’t get my eighthgraders to wear polo shirts every day. So how am I going to be able to enforce maskwearing?”
District officials in San Jose — Silicon Valley’s biggest and most diverse public school system, with 30,000 students — now say they are “reassessing the details of returning students to their classrooms in the fall.”
In a statement posted to its website, the district said it remains “committed to providing highquality, equitable learning for our students for the 20202021 school year, but we cannot do that without teachers.” It is now is asking parents, teachers, staffers and administrators to fill out an online survey by Tuesday on school reopening.
Other districts have decided the risks are too great.
In Santa Clara, schools will not reopen for inperson instruction next month, district officials announced Friday.
“Our community was clear in wanting options for their children’s instructional model during the pandemic,” school officials said in a statement. But because of the coronavirus surge, “all students will start the school year in distance learning.”
The school district serves approximately 21,500 students in parts of Santa Clara, Sunnyvale, San Jose and Cupertino. District officials said families eventually would be given options during the 202021 school year, including distance learning, hybrid learning, inperson learning and independent study.
On Friday afternoon, the Fremont Unified School District Board of Education also decided, by a 32 vote, to start the school year with distance learning.
Under the plan, schools will remain shuttered until there are no new cases of the coronavirus reported in Alameda County for seven days. That benchmark — which is unlikely to happen anytime soon, with new cases in the county averaging well over 100 per day — will trigger a reevaluation of whether students can return to the classrooms.
The board plans to consider proposed exemptions from the distance learning plan for certain groups of priority students.
Board President Desrie Campbell, who voted against the plan, said officials need to factor equity into the decision, given that some families have technology or language gaps that create challenges.
“I have some concerns about some of the families who are not able to do distance learning,” Campbell said during the meeting. “This is something that I will not be supporting.”
Jason Fagone, Anna Bauman and Shwanika Narayan are San Francisco Chronicle staff writers. Email: jason.fagone@sfchronicle. com, anna.bauman@sfchronicle. com, shwanika.narayan@ sfchronicle.com Twitter: @jfagone @abauman2 @shwanika