Schools’ slow lurch into service
As of April 1, students in San Francisco and other cities across California still won’t be able to go to school. But they might be able to go to Disneyland. Typifying the state’s backward approach to reopening, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration has announced that amusement parks and outdoor sports and entertainment venues will be allowed to open at the beginning of next month, subject to conditions and restrictions. While legislation signed by the governor last week also aims to return children to classrooms by April 1, it does so by offering funding incentives that may not be enough to make that happen in some of the state’s largest districts.
On Friday, when Newsom signed the legislation, Assemblyman Phil Ting, DSan Francisco, said he and his fellow legislators would still have to “go home to all our districts and beg all our districts to open up . ... I know I’ve got a big hurdle with my district in San Francisco.”
San Francisco school officials announced Monday that a tentative deal to reopen schools more than a year after they closed will gradually reintroduce inperson instruction of preschool through fifthgrade students for at least two days a week starting April 12 and continuing through April 26. The plan, subject to a Board of Education vote later this week, followed a setaside of vaccine doses for thousands of teachers, a threatened recall of three school board members, and a lawsuit by City Attorney Dennis Herrera, whose office continued to express skepticism about the district’s reopening plans on Monday. Most of the city’s middle and high school students aren’t expected to return to inperson instruction before the school year ends in June.
In Oakland, meanwhile, school officials have said elementary schools should and could reopen this month, but they have yet to reach an agreement with the district’s teachers union to enable inperson learning. And, like their counterparts in San Francisco, they don’t expect public middle and high schools to reopen until next school year. Neighboring Berkeley has a plan to phase in all grades from March 29 through April 19.
Despite longstanding expert consensus, evidence and practice indicating that schools can reopen safely and should do so for the sake of students’ and families’ wellbeing, these districts are promising to lurch back into service well behind their private and public counterparts. Like parochial schools in San Francisco, most of Marin County’s school districts are offering inperson instruction, some since last fall. One recent analysis of Bay Area districts found that classrooms in wealthier districts are more likely to be open.
The halting return of this public service is in disturbing contrast to the state’s latest rush to reopen less essential venues such as baseball stadiums and amusement parks. Outdoor settings and capacity restrictions may temper the risk of reopening these places to the public, but the state’s still empty classrooms should temper the joy.