State plan to reopen schools draws questions, resistance
Testing, safety worries have districts wary of in-person learning
The new year brings a ray of hope for California parents such as Kate Gude, who has watched
with mounting worry as her four children suffer social isolation and reduced instruction time from online learning in Los Gatos schools, where classrooms have been closed because of the pandemic since last March.
The first COVID-19 vaccine shots were given to health care workers a month ago. Teachers whose safety fears have blunted reopening efforts are next in line. And the governor has a new $2 billion plan aimed at getting kids back into classrooms over the next three months.
“I’m an eternal optimist,” Gude, 52, said as she joined a demonstration outside her district’s shuttered high school. “In lots of other districts, kids are going back already. Other schools have proven it’s possible to do this.”
But is it realistic to expect widescale reopening this spring in California, whose pace on schools so far has been one of the slowest in the country? At present, it seems, signs point to no.
Gov. Gavin Newsom’s “Safe Schools For All Plan” announced Dec. 30 is getting a chilly reception from school districts and union leaders who say it leaves too many unanswered ques
tions. Wednesday, seven of the state’s largest districts, including Oakland, San Francisco and Los Angeles, cited a host of concerns in a joint letter to the governor. Perhaps most important, there’s no clear plan for when teachers and other school personnel will get their vaccinations, which many consider a prerequisite for returning to campus.
“It definitely feels rushed at this point, especially given our local area is experiencing a spike right now,” said Maimona Afzal Berta, an Alum Rock Union School District middle school teacher and union leader in San Jose.
The California Department of Public Health said in response to questions that “additional components of the plan will be launched in the coming weeks.”
Newsom’s plan, a package of incentives for California school districts to reopen classrooms as early as mid-february, will be submitted to the Legislature as an adjustment to the state budget. It aims first to bring back the youngest students — from transitional kindergarten to second grade — as well as those with special needs, such as English learners and children who are homeless, in foster care or low-income. Other elementary school students would follow shortly thereafter, with a goal to be “back on track across the spectrum by spring 2021.”
The plan addresses many of the concerns teachers union leaders have voiced throughout the summer and fall. It boosts funding for schools that reopen, averaging about $450 per student, to cover the costs of safety measures, from testing of staff and students to decontamination, masks and ventilation. It envisions regular testing of students and staff — in schools where outbreaks are widespread, as frequently as once a week regardless of symptoms — with state assistance on tracing any outbreaks.
But even for some of the few public schools that partially returned to in-person elementary level teaching last fall, reopening of additional grades may be off the table. In particular, superintendents are questioning the feasibility of the plan’s aggressive testing requirements.
Since Palo Alto Unified School District welcomed its 2,100 elementary students back to classrooms in a hybrid, partly in-person model in mid- October, Superintendent Don Austin said “we have experienced zero spread” of the virus “from student to adult, adult to student, or student to student.” But Austin said his district no longer plans to expand that to middle and high schools this school year if it must carry out the governor’s school testing regimen.
“Adding the burden of turning schools into testing and health care centers is unrealistic,” said Austin, whose district has had 250 employees tested weekly for the virus through a partnership with Stanford University, but has not been regularly testing students. “Adding thousands of students is a massive logistical issue and will immediately exceed testing capacity from providers.”
In Orange County, Los Alamitos Unified Superintendent Andrew Pulver said that while he supports the plan’s efforts to open schools safely, he sees “more questions than answers,” especially when it comes to funding for testing. School administrators have said the $ 450 per student allocation would only cover testing for 11 to 16 weeks if it is required weekly for students and staff, Pulver said.
The state plan also lowers the bar for letting schools reopen. The state
established a color- coded plan last summer to help guide the pace of reopening businesses and other services. The purple tier is the most restrictive, red allows some limited activities, orange adds more leniency and yellow is the least restrictive. Only schools in counties that are within the red, orange or yellow levels could reopen without an elementary school waiver. Schools located within a purple county — indicating widespread case counts — had to remain closed.
But with cases widespread throughout the state, the new plan lets schools reopen if their county’s average new daily case rate is 28 per 100,000 people or less — four times higher than the level that triggers entry to the purple tier. That puts counties such as Marin, 20.1, and San Francisco, 23.4, in the allowable school reopening zone.
Still, that bar remains challenging for most other urban counties. The county case rates per 100,000 people are 107.9 in Los Angeles, 74.8 in Orange, 47.9 in Santa Clara, 37.1 in Contra Costa and 35.5 in Alameda. Outbreaks in Los Angeles, among the worst in the na
tion, have quieted many parents who had been urging schools to reopen.
L.A. Unified Superintendent Austin Beutner said last month that the school doors are locked because the virus levels are too dangerous, and, “If it’s too dangerous to come in the front door at this time, we can’t have students and we don’t want our staff on campuses.”
In Orange County, which has been among the most aggressive in pursuing reopening, even going so far as suing the state over the governor’s order to start fall classes online instead of in person, county Board of Education member Ken Williams said case rates are the wrong metric for opening schools and hospitalizations should be used instead. He argues the state should back off and leave decisions to districts.
“We don’t need a onesize-fits-all approach,” Williams said.
In Contra Costa County, the new metric may lead to renewed division over plans to reopen San Ramon Valley Unified schools. The district shelved a broader reopening plan for this month after case rates soared and
shot the county into the purple tier, but had planned to open classrooms when the county moves back to the less-restrictive red tier. The new state proposal would allow that to occur sooner.
Ann Katzburg, president of the San Ramon Valley district’s teachers union, is uneasy about returning to classrooms with outbreaks still widespread. The district had an outbreak of eight infections last fall when it reopened a high school for adult students with disabilities.
“We need to be guaranteed safety,” Katzburg said.
Asked Friday whether his plans give unions a veto and if the state should order schools to reopen, Newsom said, “We share the same goal for safe reopening — our approach is not to do it top-down and mandate (it).”
But that has added unease to parents such as Rob Gabel, who carried a “Put Kids First” sign to the Los Gatos demonstration and felt there’s been too much deference to educators’ concerns.
As for the vaccine, it remains to be seen how fast teachers can be immunized. Of 2 million doses received so far, the state has administered 586,379 shots, about 29%, to the first-priority recipients, health care workers and elderly longterm care residents. That first group includes about 3 million people, and they must receive a second dose. The next priority group, including the state’s 319,000 teachers, is about 8 million people.
Alum Rock teacher Berta said “vaccinations are obviously a step in the right direction, but a lot is unknown about the timeline,” and there are concerns not just for teachers, but custodians, food service staff and students, who though not as susceptible to illness, can transmit the virus. That can be a particular worry in districts like hers with many multigenerational households. A teacher already succumbed to the disease and children are low on the vaccine priority list.
In their letter to the governor, the large district superintendents noted that school- based COV ID-19 tests administered in December to children in Los Angeles showed almost one in three in the lowestincome communities had the virus compared with about 1 in 25 in more affluent areas. None of the children tested had symptoms or reported exposure to the virus.
There are signs California’s current case surge is peaking, which could allow counties with no new outbreaks to begin reopening businesses and other services in the next month or so, said Dr. George Rutherford, an epidemiologist at UC San Francisco.
And parents like Gude in Los Gatos hope schools give Newsom’s plan a chance.
“There’s a way to do it,” Gude said. “It’s time.”