Virus outbreaks limited as California schools reopen
‘ We are rolling!’ says one superintendent as children return to the classroom
They’re masked, disinfected and distanced — with encouraging results so far
alifornia’s K-12 schoolchildren have been returning to the classroom this month, and so far state public health officials report “no significant increases in COVID-19 cases.”
That’s noteworthy, officials say, considering the number of schools resuming in-person instruction and relevant levels of community transmission. “We are rolling!” said Don Austin, superintendent of the Palo Alto Unified School District, one of the Bay Area’s first public school systems to return to the classroom after months of just distance learning.
About 700 Palo Alto pupils from transitional kindergarten through first grade made a partial return to schools last week with the start of a hybrid online and in-person instruction. Another
“Our teachers want to be in front of the students, but we have to do it in a manner where it’s safe.” — California Teachers Association President E. Toby Boyd
700 second and third graders will join them later this month. “Happy kids and teachers are settling in also,” Austin said.
School reopening has been controversial nationwide. Many parents want their kids back in classrooms because they aren’t learning as much even with the improvements in online distance learning, and need to socialize while allowing their parents to work.
Others, including many unionized public school teachers, fear the virus risk remains too high. The California Teachers Association released a statewide poll Thursday based on surveys last month that the union said found “broad and ongoing concerns for the safety of students and educators.”
The online poll of 1,296 registered voters, including 527 public school parents conducted Sept. 1825, found half of parents want to keep classrooms closed and stick with online learning for now, while 40% want some in-person instruction and 10% want schools fully reopened. In response to other questions, 40% of parents said schools should not reopen until there is a vaccine for the coronavirus.
“Our teachers want to be in front of the students, but we have to do it in a manner where it’s safe,” said
California Teachers Association President E. Toby Boyd, who is also a kindergarten teacher in Elk Grove.
In Palo Alto, safety measures include hospital-grade air purifiers and desks spaced 6 feet apart and separated by clear plastic barriers. Still parents have been divided over sending their kids back to class, and for younger grades were told to choose either a hybrid partial return to class or all distance learning for the remainder of the school year.
California classrooms shut in mid-March as the virus pandemic mushroomed, and state officials delayed an expected return to in-person instruction in the fall in most urban areas after a summer case surge.
Now, only 10 of California’s 58 counties are in the state’s purple color tier for widespread outbreaks where in-class instruction is still not permitted except by waiver for elementary schools. That means about 4 million of the state’s more than 6 million K-12 students live in counties where schools can reopen classrooms, according to the state education department.
In the Bay Area, all but Sonoma County are in either the state’s red or orange tiers for reopening, which both allow schools to reopen.
Though San Francisco Unified public schools plan to continue distance learning for most students through the fall, the city approved 50 private schools to resume in-class instruction last month.
Santa Clara and Alameda county health authorities maintained restrictions on school reopening beyond the state limits, but have allowed elementary instruction to resume in class.
In addition, nearly 1,000 mostly private elementary schools and districts statewide were granted waivers to reopen.
In the Bay Area, health officials in San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Alameda, Contra Costa and
Marin counties did not indicate any cases associated with schools when asked last week by the Bay Area News Group.
State health authorities, including Health and Human Services Agency Secretary Dr. Mark Ghaly, said earlier this month they have seen no connection between school reopening and online learning and virus transmission, but they are not publicly tracking school outbreaks like they do for prisons and nursing homes.
The California Department of Public Health recommends that “the school community be notified whenever there is a confirmed case of COVID-19 in a school.”
That means parents are largely left in the dark about the broader picture of outbreaks beyond their own children’s schools. The National Education Association, representing school teachers and staff, has maintained an online database based largely on news accounts of publicly reported outbreaks.
The NEA database indicates that since the beginning of August, about 120 cases have been reported to be associated with California K-12 schools, including 39 identified as students and 16 as staff, with the rest unspecified.
The largest reported cluster of school cases were 79 scattered across more than a dozen schools in the Redding area of Northern California that were reported earlier this month, 20 of those in the last two weeks. Shasta County health officials however say their biggest outbreaks are associated with a religious college and a skilled nursing facility.
Most cases have involved small numbers of staff or students. On Oct. 12, Modesto’s Joseph A. Gregori High School announced it would close for two weeks after “several” staff tested positive, though no students are known to be infected.
On Aug. 11, two teachers and two staff in the Manteca Unified School District tested positive less than a week after classes started on campus, where teachers had been protesting the safety of returning to classrooms. The district said the infections were not workplace transmissions.
But with outbreaks limited, the mayors of California’s largest cities, including San Jose, San Francisco and Oakland, wrote Gov. Gavin Newsom and state Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond on Oct. 14 urging them to do whatever it takes to safely return public school kids to classrooms.
“We are seeing private and parochial schools open much more quickly,” their letter said, “potentially increasing the disparities between well-resourced and under-resourced schools.”