Closure debate at LAUSD
Teachers union, some parents say they want campuses shut down as virus spreads.
District officials and the teachers union are at odds over keeping campuses open.
On Facebook and group chats, the rumors are spreading.
With more cases of the novel coronavirus being confirmed daily, will the L.A. Unified School District close its 860-some campuses this week, or next week, or not at all? Should it follow in the footsteps of the universities that are rapidly moving to online learning, or the K-12 districts in Northern California and across the country that have shut down as they have confirmed their first cases of the virus?
The answer, as of Thursday afternoon, was no. Despite mounting pleas for them to close schools, officials declined to do so.
Still, the district has been preparing for that step. Schools are engaging in contingency planning that includes granting the superintendent broad emergency powers, canceling large events and planning for lessons delivered on TV. The district also has two online platforms: a system through which teachers and students can communicate and a separate system of selfcontained online courses.
To date, no coronavirus case has been linked to an L.A. public school, although there are confirmed cases elsewhere in the county that have spread through the community without a clear origin. Public health and school officials said say they plan to keep schools open unless a confirmed case reaches a campus.
Nonetheless, the head of United Teachers Los Angeles, the union that represents about 30,000 L.A. Unified employees, demanded the district shut down campuses during a news conference Thursday evening.
“We are calling for the rapid, accelerated and humane closure of all schools in L.A.,” UTLA President Alex Caputo-Pearl said. Experience in other countries, he said, has shown that limiting the reach of the virus by closing schools “actually slows the spread, flattens out the spread and makes sure that healthcare providers are not crushed with an overwhelming demand.”
He acknowledged that additional planning might be required. Many students rely on L.A. Unified for meals during the school day. Those
considerations, though serious, have to take a back seat to public health priorities, UTLA leaders said.
The union also called for an expansion of the social safety net through such measures as stipends so parents could stay at home with their children, extended sick leave to cover the incubation period of the coronavirus illness, and funding to cover the cost of testing and treatment. More broadly, the union is calling for “debt forgiveness” to protect families from financial hardship caused by the loss of jobs or work hours related to the crisis.
“We are only as protected collectively as the most vulnerable person is protected,” Caputo-Pearl said.
Many parents agreed on the call to close schools. More than 19,000 people had signed a Change.org petition to close all campuses in the district because of the coronavirus. “Let us not wait for an individual to test positive but make sure we close schools before that happens,” the petition urged Thursday.
Also on Thursday, Washington Gov. Jay Inslee announced that 43 school districts across three counties in that state would be closed for the next six weeks. This followed similar announcements from Ohio and Maryland.
In the Los Angeles area, some private schools have announced campus closures and a transition to online learning, including Campbell Hall in Studio City, Harvard-Westlake’s two L.A. campuses and Mayfield Senior School in Pasadena. Also, the school district that serves Santa Monica and Malibu announced that it would close Friday and Monday for a deep cleaning and staff meetings after “a community member with children in our schools” was exposed to coronavirus, according to a release from Supt. Ben Drati.
The Los Angeles Unified school board is scheduled to meet in closed session Friday for a status report from Supt. Austin Beutner.
Board President Richard Vladovic said Thursday that it was important to rely on health officials in making the call on whether to close schools.
“The prudent decision is to take direction from the doctors and the healthcare providers that happen to know,” he said. “I can’t second-guess a pandemic and how it’s spread. If there’s ever a doubt, the safety of children will come first.”
Officials from the governor on down have avoided calling for closing schools, citing the hardships for families, and the difficulty in providing academic services and the school meals that many children depend on. But Vladovic acknowledged there was widespread debate among parents and employees about what was best.
“I’m very sensitive to that, and I’m in that group that is very susceptible, and I know that many of our employees are as well,” said Vladovic, who is 75 and has battled health issues in recent years.
So far, L.A. County has been taking cues from Singapore, which did not close schools en masse but screened people for illness and had strict protocols for who could enter schools, Dr. Barbara Ferrer, director of the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health, said at a news conference Thursday.
The district, she said, serves many parents with “very limited income, who don’t get sick leaves,” who often are working multiple jobs and can’t necessarily put kids in day care. Schools should be kept open if they can function safely, Ferrer said, but sick people need to stay away.
As the nation’s secondlargest school district, L.A. Unified serves about half a million students, 8 in 10 of whom rely on free or reduced-price lunches and 18,000 of whom are homeless. School board member Nick Melvoin said the decision on whether to close was therefore a hard one. Plus, he said, the district’s actions can create a domino effect, putting pressure on other large urban school districts to shut down too.
The federal government has given California a waiver to allow meal distribution to students even if school is canceled, but that could still present logistical challenges.
“They’re relying on us for meals, for child care, and I also think from a public health concern,” Melvoin said. If schools close, parents who have to go to work may be forced to take their children with them. Also, children in middle school and high school would probably congregate in public areas anyway, as teenagers tend to do.
“The school environment is one we can control right now,” Melvoin said Thursday afternoon.
School nurse Stephanie Yellin-Mednick said she’s been inundated with questions and dealt with many sick children at the Sherman Oaks Center for Enriched Studies. But it’s the seasonal flu, not the coronavirus, and so far, absences have not risen beyond typical levels.
Ferrer said a clear tipping point for closing a school would be if an infected person was identified at that campus.
A complication, said Vladovic, is the interconnection among schools. Siblings attend different campuses; children are bused from one neighborhood to another; employees come from all parts of the city.
“There are so many connections in the district. I’m trying to figure out how you isolate something to one, two, three, four or five schools. You don’t,” Vladovic said. “I think at some point, the closing of schools is inevitable.”
Some parents have already started keeping their kids at home. On a Facebook group started during last year’s strike, Parents Supporting Teachers, families are sharing resources for athome learning.
“For those parents who have said to me, ‘I don’t feel comfortable sending my kids to school,’ I have said I’m ... going to do everything I can to make sure absences during this period are excused,” Melvoin said.
L.A. Unified isn’t the only district to close large events; Long Beach Unified announced a similar policy Thursday.
Elsewhere in L.A. County, schools are closing temporarily so they can prepare for online instruction. Las Virgenes Unified will close for two days next week for “staff in-service time to prepare for the likelihood of a district-wide closure,” district Supt. Dan Stepenosky said in a letter to families Thursday.
State funding, which accounts for most of the money that goes to California public schools, is allocated based on how many students attend school each day. In the case of a pandemic like this, schools can seek to recover funding if they close, as long as they do so under the direction of public health agencies.