Gov. Newsom mandates online learning for most
Order applies to counties on the state’s watchlist for outbreaks
Gov. Gavin Newsom finally stepped into the contentious debate over reopening schools, declaring Friday that those in counties on the state’s watchlist for worrisome COVID-19 outbreaks must begin fall instruction without students in classrooms and instead teach them remotely online.
The announcement, which the governor called a “mandate,” affects the majority of the state’s 6 million K-12 students in both public and private schools in most of the Bay Area and Southern California.
Newsom has been under mounting pressure to keep classrooms closed for the fall as the pandemic surges across California and more and more districts put off plans to reopen schools, resorting to the online “distance” learning forced upon them during spring lockdowns to slow the coronavirus.
“Safety will ultimately make the determination of how we educate our kids,” Newsom said Friday afternoon, just weeks before the traditional start of the school year. “Schools must provide meaningful instruction during this pandemic whether they are physically open or not. Our students, our teachers, our staff and certainly our parents prefer in-class instruction, but only if it can be done safely.”
Friday’s announcement puts Newsom at the center of a national debate over school reopening, pitting concerns over ineffective online teaching and the needs of working parents against health risks to kids and teachers. President Donald Trump, Florida’s governor and the Orange County Board of Education urged schools to reopen classrooms, pointing to other countries that have done so without much problem.
Newsom said Friday that he’s “not looking to score cheap political points” and that “we all recognize the need not only to get kids back in school where they can be healthy and safe, but also
to get back to work.”
But Friday’s announcement upends plans for many schools that had spent the summer working with state guidelines to at least partly reopen, with students wearing masks, dividing into smaller cohorts and attending in shifts part of the week to allow for physical distancing.
Newsom noted that 32 of California’s 58 counties are on the state’s watchlist, including most of those in the greater Bay Area, where the only exceptions Friday were San Mateo and Santa Cruz.
In Santa Clara County, Palo Alto Unified School District Superintendent Don Austin had “mixed feelings” about the governor’s announcement, which will change the high-performing district’s plans to bring elementary school students back to classrooms part of the week.
“Obviously, we want to be with our students, and if we thought that distance learning was the right approach, we would have created a school system built around distance learning,” Austin
said. “But on the other hand, the health concerns are real, and I think this is one of the first times the governor’s office has been relatively definitive about a direction and hasn’t just spoken about guidelines or hypotheticals.”
San Jose’s Cambrian Academy College Preparatory, a private school with fewer than 100 students in grades 6 through 12, has been teaching summer school on campus and planned to have kids return to class in the fall. Headmaster Dave Delgado found the governor’s new rule frustrating.
“If it can be done safely, that’s what we should be allowed to do,” said Delgado, whose school can keep students apart because it has no more than 10 students per class.
The governor’s office said local health officers may grant a waiver to allow elementary schools to reopen in-person instruction if requested by the district superintendent.
Otherwise, schools in watchlist counties can reopen when they are off the state’s monitoring list for 14 consecutive days. But schools should go back to distance learning when 5% of students and staff test positive within a 14-day period, the state says, and districts should do so when 25% of their schools have been physically closed due to COVID-19 within 14 days. All school staff and students from third grade up must wear masks, and younger students are encouraged to do so.
The state’s teachers have voiced growing concerns about the safety of reopening. The California Teachers
Association last week told state leaders that districts “have not come close” to safely reopening, and Friday they cheered Newsom’s announcement as a “good step in providing some clarity and uniformity across the state.”
In the last week, waves of school districts across the state put off plans to reopen classrooms to students, including the state’s two largest districts, Los Angeles and San Diego, and in the
Bay Area, San Francisco, Oakland and San Jose.
But many back-to-class advocates say children are the least likely to suffer severe illness from COVID-19 — none in California have died from it — and tend not to spread the disease, so the harm of lost learning outweighs the health risks of kids returning to the classroom.
Even those who worry about safety acknowledge concerns about continuing the online-only learning experiment that went poorly for many students in the spring. Many districts weren’t prepared to teach kids online, as teachers struggled with the technology, and many students and their families lacked computers and home internet.
Maria Nieto, who was at Park Elementary School in Hayward on Friday morning to pick up supplies for the district’s early start to the school year, said she wasn’t impressed with the online learning in the spring for her daughter, Jorelys, with just an hour of instruction a day. But she is less worried now having seen all the planning the school has done, providing “a lot of apps to help her with reading.”
Newsom — a father of four school-age children himself — insisted he is well aware of the past problems and made clear he expects online learning to improve from last spring, with $5.3 billion in the state budget to help schools do that.
Californians are about to find out if that’s enough.
“Certainly,” Newsom said, “we have work to do to make sure we’re doing rigorous distance learning.”