Most schools staying hybrid for now
Local educators are closer than ever to receiving the COVID-19 vaccine as Humboldt County enters Phase 1b of the vaccination timeline. While some Humboldt County School districts have returned to in-person learning, many others are waiting for staff to receive both rounds of the vaccine before going back to the classroom.
Most school districts throughout the county have taken the hybrid learning approach and offered students the opportunity to utilize school facilities while learning primarily from home.
“We are largely distance learning, though we do have some on-campus stuff going on,” said North Humboldt Union High School District Superintendent Roger Macdonald. “We do have some kids in special education in both of our alternative sites, our independent study has a lab that’s open for kids that need to come in for help. In our charter school, we have kids that are coming in for internet and a warm, safe and dry place to work. The libraries
are open as needed and clubs are doing things. So, there is some stuff going on on campus, it’s just not fullblown.”
When it comes to returning to in-person learning, Macdonald said his district will follow the vaccine.
“When our faculty and staff are able to receive the vaccine that starts the clock,” he said. “Say it’s the Moderna vaccine, that would mean six weeks from when our faculty can receive the vaccine is when we would open up, as long as (Humboldt County) Public Health agreed.”
The Eureka City Schools District has chosen to wait for the vaccine as well and has taken a similar approach in providing hybrid learning.
“We have hundreds of students on our campuses every day,” said Superintendent Fred Van Vleck. “We have several classes on our campus for students with disabilities as well as in-person intervention classes. We also have students in classes that are equipment dependent, that’s a fancy way of saying ‘shop classes’ that have welders and things like that that students are not likely to have at home. Club activities can happen as long as they’re planned and approved by the district and reviewed by county public health.”
Van Vleck said the district also has sports conditioning in place and plans to begin sports capable of social distancing, such as cross country and golf to start next month.
The district previously expected to return to inperson learning as soon as Feb. 22, but a lag in vaccine distribution forced the district to wait.
“We are completely at the mercy of getting vaccines,” Van Vleck said. “The craziness of it is our neighbors to the east in Tehama County and Butte County, our neighbors to the south in Mendocino County and Marin County have given their first round of vaccines to teachers. We haven’t done that here in Humboldt County.”
Humboldt County Health Officer Dr. Ian Hoffman confirmed in a Jan. 14 press conference that different counties are receiving vaccines at different rates. As Humboldt County transitions into Phase 1b, Hoffman said the county will prioritize people 75 and over which accounts for about 10,000 community members. Educators will follow.
Addressing a repeated concern from parents in the district, Van Vleck noted that the vaccine is not mandatory for staff.
“This doesn’t mean that every single teacher has to be vaccinated prior to our returning. What it means is the vaccine has to have been made available to our staff, “Van Vleck said. “There’s potential a staff member will decline to be vaccinated, that’s not going to prevent us from returning to in-person instruction. What is impacting us is (the vaccine) being available to them.”
Ten Humboldt County school districts returned to in-person learning without waiting on the vaccine, including the Ferndale Unified School District.
With the exception of two cases of COVID-19 at Ferndale Elementary reported earlier this month, Superintendent Beth Anderson said the district’s return to in-person learning has been a success.
“I think it’s gone really well. We returned to in-person instruction on our first day of school, Aug. 31,” Anderson said. “The only variance would be that we also offer distance learning to all families.”
Anderson said her school district is much small than some others in the county, so it was more feasible to return to in-person learning at the beginning of the school year than it would have been for larger districts.
As other school districts prepare to return to in-person learning, Anderson said collaboration is paramount.
“I think the planning is really important along with communication with all of the stakeholders in the planning process or the reopening so that everyone’s concerns are taken into consideration,” she said. “For us it was really important that we still offered distance learning as an option to the families that wanted that option because they have high-risk individuals in their household or just because that’s their choice. I just think it needs to be a collaborative process where everyone’s feelings are respected because everyone’s feelings are valid in a pandemic.”
Fortuna Union High School District Superintendent Glen Senestraro agreed.
“I would say we’ve created kind of the best of all worlds,” Senestraro said of his district. “If they’re not comfortable they can obviously opt-out with distance learning but if they are comfortable, they can send them. I feel like that we’ve pretty much given everybody what they want.”
Senestraro said approximately 65% of the district’s students are back in class, while 25% are distance learning and about 15% are independent study, but it fluctuates.
“I would say the only push back we’ve gotten is we do get out early and some parents obviously want a school regular school day because they still work regular days, but we just aren’t able to provide that yet,” Senestraro said.
Senestraro said his district has had five confirmed cases of COVID-19 since returning to in-person learning. When contacted by Public Health, he said the district put the potentially affected classes on distance learning.
“There have been zero secondary transmissions in schools,” Senestraro said. “None of them came from school, we just got notified that they were exposed or they tested positive.”
Each of the superintendents interviewed by the Times-Standard said there was not a single right answer when it comes to deciding when to send kids back to school during a global pandemic, but that they are doing what they can to appease everyone.
“There are parents that regularly let me know how frustrated they are that their kids are not on campus, face to face right now but there are also lots of families that are grateful that we’ve taken an approach in our district where we put our faculty, students and communities safety at the forefront,” Macdonald said. “On either end of the spectrum you have people that are very passionate but the overwhelming feedback I’ve gotten is our community understands the situation that we’re in.”
More information on districts across Humboldt County can be found through the Office of Education at https://hcoe.org/ schools/.