School District announces starting dates for hybrid learning

Vallejo City Unified School District Superintendent William Spalding made dates for hybrid learning official on Friday.

The dates were previously tentative, but Spalding said in a video that transitional kindergarten through sixth grade will begin on Monday, April 12. Meanwhile, seventh through 12th grade has been moved up a week to April 19.

The district has been in distance learning since March of 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

At a VCUSD meeting earlier this month, Spalding said that Gov. Gavin Newsom would like all of the state to begin returning to in-person instruction by April 1, but if the district had a spring break during the next

month, no penalty would be accessed as long as there was a plan in place for schools to return on the first possible day after the break.

April 12 is the first day after spring break ends in the district.

“This is a very exciting development for us,” Spalding said in the video. “We’re very, very happy and very excited about coming back to school (for in-person instruction) and having some sense of normal after a long year spent on Chromebooks and doing all of this through distance learning.”

Spalding went on to say that students and staff will still have to wear masks and maintain social distancing. He also said that distance learning is still an available option if that is what the family chooses when going forward with education.

“In-person hybrid learning does not mean that every student will be on campus every day,” Spalding said. “We will be operating and switching days. Some students will be on campus and in classrooms, some students will be at home in distance learning. Then we will switch students so we never have more than half the students in the classroom.”

Earlier this month VCUSD set up a plan to return students back to inperson instruction, which would come in four phases — beginning with a survey for parents and guardians of students from transitional kindergarten through 12th grade. This survey helped the district determine which students will remain in distance learning for the remainder of the 2020-21 school year and which will return to campuses.

The next phase concerned learning hubs and small group cohort classes. Learning Hubs opened on targeted campuses across the district to provide workspaces for small groups of students lacking access to the resources necessary to participate in distance learning.

A stable cohort is a group of students and staff that stay together for the duration of the intervention. This group avoids contact with people outside the group.

While Vallejo and Jesse Bethel high schools will eventually come back to in-person instruction on April 19, it will be months after some nearby schools have returned. St. PatrickSt. Vincent High and all of the Napa Unified School District schools (including American Canyon High) have had some classroom instruction since October.

Spalding also said that students and families will be getting instructions from school sites on when students will be coming back and how that will occur and what the schedule will be.

Just recently, VCUSD allowed some outdoor sports to return to campus at Vallejo and Bethel.