No timeline for opening schools, despite pressure
Distressed S. F. parent: District is ‘ staring at its navel’
After more than a month of distance learning this fall, 9yearold Lucas grew increasingly angry, frustrated and despondent sitting in front of a computer for his classwork, his outbursts frequent and gutwrenching.
“Daddy, I hate you for making me go to Zoom school!” Lucas would yell, his father David Thompson said.
By the time early October rolled around, Thompson feared for his son’s wellbeing. With San Francisco district officials still silent on specific plans to get students back in classrooms, Thompson and his husband pulled Lucas from his shuttered San Francisco public school and placed him in a reopened private school near their home.
Parents like Thompson have been pushing San Francisco Unified for answers on reopening for months to little avail. There is no timeline, no specifics. In recent days, the pressure on the public schools has mounted, with politicians and public health experts deriding the district and the teachers union for failing families even as several private schools have so far safely welcomed kids back to class.
“Our educational system is off in a corner somewhere staring at its navel, completely disconnected from the community,” said ThompScott
“We want the schools reopened. ... We need to have the representatives listen to us.” Dheyanira Calahorrano, Mission District parent
son, adding that he’s a lifelong public school proponent. “This is like a crashing airplane and the pilot is not saying anything and we’re looking out the window and the wing is on fire.”
District officials have said reopening requires a heavy logistical lift, with each school meeting county and state health requirements, including social distancing, ventilation and regular testing of staff, as well as adequate supplies of soap, hand sanitizer, masks and other equipment. Some of that is ready to go in some schools, but not all, and the district is still working on a testing plan.
In addition, reopening schools means getting teachers back in classrooms, but the district and United Educators of San Francisco are still in labor talks to reach an agreement on what it would take to resume inperson learning.
Superintendent Vincent Matthews is expected to give the school board and the public an update on reopening plans Tuesday, rolling out a metric to show where the district is in terms of each requirement to reopen and negotiations with unions.
The update is not expected to give dates for when some students might get to go back to school.
“I totally get and totally understand the frustration from some, but we want to make sure it’s safe,” he said.
Still the criticism comes as the district has spent hours of recent public meetings on issues unrelated to reopening — including a new student assignment plan, a Black studies curriculum and a lottery admission for Lowell High School, as well as the fallout from a district committee recommendation to rename 44 school sites.
A petition urging the district to “place more urgency on reopening safely before the end of 2020,” had nearly 1,200 signatures as of Monday afternoon.
The Department of Public Health put out guidelines in September on how schools could safely invite students back into the classroom and reopen, but the district has yet to apply to do so.
Instead, said Mayor London Breed, the district is looking at renaming schools, which she called a huge distraction from the crisis of shuttered schools.
Breed said, “The achievement gap is widening as our public school kids are falling further behind every single day.
“Look, I believe in equity,” she added. “But the fact that our kids aren’t in school is what’s driving inequity in our city. Not the name of a school.”
Yet within the school district, it’s unclear how much political will there is to bring students and teachers back as soon as possible.
School board President Mark Sanchez, who is also a teacher in Brisbane, said the district has identified five preschool programs and six elementary schools that could reopen in December.
But he also said that, as a teacher, in order to return to his classroom, he would want to be tested far more frequently than once every two months, as generally recommended by health officials.
“I would want to be tested every week,” he said.
That’s unlikely to happen in San Francisco or virtually any district, or even private schools.
Testing San Francisco Unified’s 3,000 teachers every week, as well as other school staff, would likely be costprohibitive — and it’s not among public health recommendations. While board members are not vocally pushing for reopening, the district’s labor unions have also questioned whether it’s safe enough to go back.
Susan Solomon, president of the local teachers union, said that she believes other districts are “jumping the gun” by reopening schools now, with teachers worried about their safety.
“I hear those concerns from educators certainly in Marin County and Alameda County,” she said, adding that teachers shouldn’t be forced to return. “When we figure out how to do partial inperson instruction and interactions, from our perspective, it should be on a voluntary basis.”
So far, however, reopened schools are not seeing a surge in COVID19 cases.
Health officials in San Francisco and Marin County, where some private and public schools have been open for nearly a month, say they haven’t seen cases connected to students being back in classrooms.
New York schools, which have been open for three weeks, have not seen outbreaks either, with 28 positive test results out of more than 16,000 students and teachers tested randomly.
“That sounds like a nice low number, but it’s hard not to think about the 28,” Solomon said. “We’re not going to get to zero, but is there a number that we can all say, ‘ We can live with that’?”
Such conversations, however, are not addressing the cost of keeping students home, which includes abuse, neglect, violence and hunger as well as lost learning and the kids who are “virtual dropouts,” meaning they’ve just stopped logging into class, said Joseph Allen, professor of public health at Harvard University.
“Kids out of school is a national emergency, and it’s not being treated as such,” he said. “We already had data that schools are not places of high transmission.”
Why has society declared parts of our society essential, he said, but not schools? When someone goes to the hospital they expect doctors and nurses to be there; when they go to the store, they expect shelves to be stocked. Schools can be made to keep students and adults safe, but they still aren’t opening, Allen said.
Even in places where community spread is in control and the protocols are in place and the buildings are ready, they’re not going back, he added.
“Some districts are staring at the prospect of being closed through the winter,” Allen said. “I don’t think people are grasping just how devastating that is.”
Across the Bay Area, that reopening debate continues to rage at several school districts. In Mount Diablo Unified, families held a rally Saturday urging the district to reopen. In contrast, more than 7,300 people in Tracy signed a petition urging the district not to reopen after the board voted to start bringing students back two days a week beginning Nov. 2.
Meanwhile, across the state, education and union officials have questioned whether families want to go back.
A survey conducted by the California Teachers Association showed 69% of parents said “they are more worried about their children being infected or infecting other family members than about their children falling behind academically if schools only offer remote learning.”
In San Francisco, board President Sanchez said he’s not hearing from Black and brown families that they want to go back. He believes a significant number wouldn’t even if the schools reopened.
“The loudest voices I’m hearing about reopening are tending to be families with means,” he said.
Parent Dheyanira Calahorrano challenged that notion after spending the weekend talking to other Latino families in the city’s Mission District.
“We want the schools reopened,” said Calahorrano, whose 11yearold son attends Everett Middle School.
“It’s not true that the moms don’t want to go back. We need to have the representatives listen to us.”
The district needs a plan, she said.
Students “are not learning at all. Education is not happening,” she said. “They are already showing symptoms of distress. They are tired. They need school.”
It’s increasingly likely that few if any San Francisco students would be back on campuses before January, and Solomon and others questioned whether many students will return at all this school year.
Regardless, for Thompson and his son, Lucas, at least this year, it’s too late.
“I don’t feel like the teachers and the district have any sense how desperate these parents are,” he said. “New York is reopening. Detroit is reopening. We’re caught with our pants down compared to everyone else.”