SCHOOLS SHUT DOWN
Santa Clara, San Mateo counties order campuses to close for 3 weeks
After continuing to hold classes while the working world around them abandoned offices for the refuge of homes, a flood of school districts across the Bay Area and the rest of the state announced Friday they’ll finally be shutting down in the midst of the coronavirus outbreak, many of them for at least three weeks and possibly longer.
Gov. Gavin Newsom followed the dramatic decisions later in the day with an executive order ensuring that all public school districts receive funding to move to online learning, continue to provide school meals and, as practicable, arrange for the supervision of students during school hours.
“Closing schools has a massive, cascading effect for our kids and their families — especially those least equipped financially to deal with them,” Newsom said in a statement. “School districts that choose to close must use state educational dollars to quickly meet the needs of children and families.” Starting Monday, tens of thousands of Bay Area students — from kindergarten to college — will stay away from their campuses. The luckier ones instead will be turning to technology to receive their lessons.
The state’s hardest-hit county, Santa Clara, enacted a mandate midday Friday for all public schools to close starting next week. The move was part of a wave of similar announcements made by school districts and county health departments across the state, from San Mateo and Santa Cruz counties to the Los Angeles Unified School District — the second-largest in the nation.
“The decision to close schools to student attendance is a serious matter,” Santa Clara County schools Superintendent Mary Ann Dewan said. “I urge families and schools to work together.”
The decisions stem from mounting concerns of parents over student safety amid the rapidly spreading COVID-19 pandemic, which has made the Bay Area a hot spot.
The total number of people around the Bay Area who have tested positive for coronavirus, or COVID-19, grew to nearly 200 Friday, including a fourth TSA agent at Mineta San Jose International Airport, four more San Jose firefighters and an Alameda firefighter who possibly exposed eight of his colleagues to the disease.
In Santa Clara County on Friday, a second person died from the disease — the fifth person in California to date. The victim was a woman in her 80s who had been hospitalized since Monday; it’s unclear at this time whether she had preexisting conditions.
The woman was among the 79 confirmed coronavirus cases so far in Santa Clara County, where on Friday public health officials unleashed a mandatory ban on public and private gatherings of more than 100 people — a
much lower number than the 1,000 set in a ban enacted earlier this week.
Also on Friday, parents picked up their children at Marshall Lane Elementary School in Saratoga after being informed a volunteer at the school had tested positive for coronavirus.
The school closures in both Santa Clara and San Mateo counties will last three weeks, with the hopes of reopening schools on April 6, according to school officials. District offices have been instructed to remain open and continue to provide essential services.
A statement from San Mateo County’s public health officer, Dr. Scott Morrow, said an order from the county requires all schools to “dismiss students from regular attendance and encourages schools and school districts to implement athome learning models if feasible.”
Naz Nilchi, a parent of two public school students in San Jose, said she was happy to hear the county finally canceled school but “wished it would have happened a week earlier.”
“This week was full of fear and concern for us as parents,” Nilchi said, adding that up until now she was told by the districts that pulling her kids out of school would have been considered “unexcused” absences. “I was the one trying to keep it cool, but truthfully, I’m really scared now.”
The Diocese of San Jose closed its school campuses and suspended Masses effective Friday after a similar
decision was made by the San Francisco Diocese.
While East Bay school districts were not under county health officials’ orders to close, a growing number of them as well as private schools announced they would stop in-person classes to help prevent the spread of the global pandemic, to the relief of some parents who had urged schools to close and the dismay of others who don’t know how they’ll manage to care for their children without school in session.
Oakland Unified, Berkeley Unified, Antioch Unified, Pittsburg Unified, Dublin Unified and Contra Costa’s largest school district, Mt. Diablo Unified, all announced schools would be closed starting Monday.
“It’s hard, I don’t know what I’m going to do,” said Betty Gabaldon, who lives in Walnut Creek and has a fifth grader at Ayers Elementary in Concord.
Her mother, who lives with Gabaldon, can help watch her daughter in the mornings while she’s at work. But Gabaldon worries there may be gaps in the afternoon between the time she gets home from work and her mother leaves for her job.
Still, Gabaldon said she’s mostly concerned that she won’t be able to help her daughter with the challenging math work she has to complete on Google Classroom each day until she gets home from work.
“Three weeks is a long time,” Gabaldon said, noting
that online learning isn’t the same as classroom work. “I’m afraid she’s not going to learn the things she has to move up to sixth grade.”
Others are turning to family members for help. Bisa Grant was told on Friday that their youngest daughter’s preschool, in Lafayette, would close starting Monday. Because she and her husband both work, figuring out what to do with their 5-year-old was a scramble. Luckily, they can take her to her grandmother’s house.
“It’s really frustrating that we’re in this predicament and so dependent on our schools and our structures,” Grant said. “It sends everything upside-down.”
Teachers, too, were scrambling as districts tried
to assess what type of distance learning they would have students do, if any.
Veronica Ayala, a teacher at Antioch’s Park Middle School, said teachers had no time to prepare for the sudden break in classes, so they did not provide any take-home work packets for students.
If the schools closed longer than two weeks, it will be hard to switch to online because many students do not have computers at home, she said. “In Antioch, we have an issue about equity — kids who don’t have access to computers. We encourage them to go to a library, but whether they take advantage of that or not is another thing.”
It will also be a challenge for families of working parents
and those who rely on schools to provide breakfast and lunch for their students.
For those families, school districts are working on providing options for students to pick up food. Oakland Unified, for instance, will open 12 schools throughout the city where “grab and go” breakfast and lunch meals will be available for students to pick up.
In the Antioch Unified School District, students who receive free and reduced lunch can get meals at seven school sites during its closure from Monday through March 27.
The closures have some students on edge, both from fears of the catching the virus to the impact class cancellations will have on their graduation.
“It seems like we are surrounded by the coronavirus,” said Omari Kingsbury, 18, a senior and an Oakland resident. “It’s a little scary.”
Many parents, along with district officials, said they are determined to try to keep a sense of normalcy for their children.
“The virus and the closures are very impactful. We’ll all be off our routines in the midst of an uncertain situation,” said Gina Dawson, of Lafayette, who has two teenagers at Campolindo High School in neighboring Moraga. “Being all in this together — not just as a family, but seeing this play out over the world — I hope will have some silver linings in recognizing our human commonalities.”