Youngest students heading back to classes Monday
Recent decline in COVID-19 cases is one of the listed reasons
Byron Union Elementary School District will welcome its youngest students back into classrooms Monday, almost a full year after closing the doors to stem the spread of the coronavirus.
“We are excited to have our students back on campus,” Superintendent
Reyes Gauana said in an email Tuesday to this news organization.
Reopening plans for the small far East Contra Costa County district, which include Byron and Discovery Bay schools, were approved in late February. Trustees had hoped to open schools after the winter break, but by then the number of COVID-19 cases still were surging from holiday gatherings and the region had slipped into the state’s purple tier for reopening.
Gauana said the district’s decision to return to in-person learning stemmed from the recent decline in new COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations.
But though new state rules allow K-6 schools to reopen in the purple tier, students in secondary schools must wait until the county reaches the red tier threshold.
“It has always been the goal of our district — board of trustees, both present and past, administrators, and certificated and classified staffs — to bring our students back to campus once we could do so safely,” Gauna’s email said.
“Our district has taken all appropriate steps to ensure that we are following all local and state requirements, always placing the safety of our students and staff as our No. 1 priority,” he added.
Parents were allowed in January to choose either continued distance learning through the end of the year for their children or a transition to a hybrid model with in-person classes four days a week and remote learning one day.
Plans call for students in transitional kindergarten, kindergarten, first grade, specialized academic instruction preschool
and academy programs to return Monday for classroom instruction and for those in grades 2-6 to return the following Monday.
Special education students returned to the classrooms in November.
Seventh and eighth graders will have to wait until the region reaches the red tier under the state’s reopening plan. They also would participate in the hybrid learning model.
Becky Hund, a seventh grade teacher at Byron Excelsior Middle School, told the board at its last meeting she was confident the district will be opening “in the safest ways we can.”
“When I think about our upcoming hybrid and distance schedule, I am definitely apprehensive about what’s to come but I am willing to jump in and do whatever we can,” she said. “In my mind I want all students back on the campus 100% of the time.”
Hund, however, cautioned district leaders not
to ignore the “elephant in the room” — that overcrowded schools can’t safely fill their classrooms “with the numbers that we have been filling them with for decades now.”
“There aren’t as many environments as densely packed as public school classrooms,” she said. “So until we address the issue of overcrowded classrooms, any safety measures we do are just a Band-Aid on the problem.”
Board Vice President Melissa Ortiz-Gray acknowledged the board can’t please everyone with its reopening plans but is “definitely moving in the right direction.”
“We’ve put together a cohesive plan that’s the best that we can put out there,” she said. “And now we’re going to test the plan.”
Nearby Knightsen’s tiny two-school district also plans to open with a hybrid plan Monday for K-3 students and tentatively has set April 12 for the reopening of grades 4-6 and 7-8 as soon as the county hits the red tier.