San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
MANY FAMILIES OF COLOR WARY OF RETURN TO SCHOOL
Advocates say voices of those who want later openings are overlooked
Edith Carmona, a tribal social worker living in Normal Heights, knows her 8-year-old son, Geo, is struggling with being away from school.
It’s hard for him to concentrate. He isn’t learning as much as he normally would; with distance learning he finishes all his school work for the day in less than an hour, she said. He is lonely because he no longer sees his school friends or does extracurricular activities. He’s also so anxious about getting COVID that he gets about four hours of sleep a night, she said.
Even though Geo’s charter school is open for in-person instruction, Carmona is keeping him home for now.
Both Carmona and Geo contracted COVID last fall.
He had no symptoms, but she suffered a 103.5-degree fever, lost her sense of taste and smell, became dizzy and nauseous, was often out of breath, and had “the headache imaginable.”
Around the same time, Carmona’s grandmother also got COVID and spent more than a month in intensive care before dying.
After that suffering and loss, Carmona said she is determined to protect her son and the rest of her family from COVID — and that means keeping Geo home from school.
“It’s not worth it,” Carmona said. “It’s not worth risking it a little bit even, especially for our children.”
Amid the growing clamor to reopen schools, many people like Carmona are being overlooked, advocates say. There are many families, especially families of color, who don’t want to return to school just yet, maybe for several more weeks or months.
In San Diego County, a sample of school district surveys of parent preferences shows most parents want in-person school to resume.
But in higher-poverty school districts, support for in-person learning tends to be lower, a San Diego Union-tribune analysis shows.
COVID’S effects on neighborworst
hoods may play a role.
During the pandemic, many of the school districts that opened early were in ZIP codes that often had lower than average COVID rates. In communities like Encinitas, Santee, Solana Beach, Cardiff and Alpine, the schools mostly enrolled White students and students from higher-income families.
Meanwhile districts that have remained closed tend to enroll a majority of low-income students of color and include ZIP codes that at times had much higher COVID rates than the county average, such as South County and southeast San Diego.
“It is primarily about socioeconomic status,” Tyrone Howard, a UCLA education professor, said about school opening preferences. “More affluent neighborhoods don’t have some of the same challenges that lower-income neighborhoods have.”
In South County’s San Ysidro — where two ZIP codes at times had COVID rates three times the county average — three-quarters of students are low income, and only 37 percent of families in a recent survey said they would return to school when the district reopens.
“It’s a pretty tight-knit community in San Ysidro. Everybody seems to know somebody that has the virus,” said San Ysidro Assistant Superintendent David Farkas.
“When we see ZIP code rates that are three times higher than the county rate, we know it’s not safe enough to come back to school at that time,” Farkas said. COVID rates have since improved there, but they’re still above the county average.
The correlations between race, income and preferences for in-person learning also play out nationally.
White and upper- and middle-income Americans are more likely to support reopening schools than are Hispanics, Blacks, Asian Americans and lower-income Americans, according to a Pew Research Center Survey last year.
“The people that are raising their voice the loudest to return back to school … by and large, those families tend to be upper-middle class and, due to the demographics of this country, also tend to be White,” said Marco Amaral, a teacher and trustee for the South Bay Union School Board, which has not yet reopened its schools.
Disproportionate impact, more concern
People who advocate reopening schools often point to the psychological, academic and physical harm they see school closures inflicting on kids.
But for some families COVID is the greater fear. Families of color are more likely to have personally experienced COVID and are less likely to have been vaccinated against it.
In San Diego County, Latinos make up 33 percent of the population but 56 percent of COVID cases, 43 percent of COVID deaths and 17 percent of those who have been vaccinated.
Black San Diegans make up 5 percent of the population, 4 percent of COVID cases, 4 percent of COVID deaths and 2 percent of those who have been vaccinated.
By contrast, White San Diegans are 45 percent of the population, 27 percent of COVID cases, 36 percent of COVID deaths and 48 percent of those who have been vaccinated.
“This doesn’t mean that people of color … don’t want to go back to school. Of course they want to go back to school. Everybody does,” Amaral said.
“But Black people in this country — like Latino, Latina people in this country — know that they are the ones most impacted by economic depression. They’re the most impacted by severe weather events. And now they’re the most impacted by this pandemic.”
Even the availability of COVID vaccines doesn’t alleviate fears in many families.
For example, Carmona has gotten the vaccine, but she knows it doesn’t guarantee her 100 percent protection against COVID, and it might still be possible to spread COVID.
There also is no vaccine available yet for children, who make up the majority of people in school buildings.
Olympia Beltran, a member of the Yaqui tribe, said she plans to keep her fourthgrade son home when his school, San Diego Unified’s Sherman Elementary, is expected to open April 12.
COVID has devastated members of her Yaqui family in other states, she said, and she has helped hold supply drives for them because they had trouble securing COVID testing, PPE and vaccines. Beltran, a nurse, also is the main caretaker for her mother and fears what will happen if she gets sick and can’t take care of her mother anymore.
“As an indigenous family, we’re a very vulnerable community; we’re a very vulnerable family,” Beltran said. “And for me, the benefit of him returning to school for three months is just not worth the risk.”
Shakira Moses, mother of a 15-year-old and a 12-yearold who attend San Diego Unified, said she doesn’t trust the vaccines because she doesn’t believe they could be safely designed as quickly as they were.
She and all her kids contracted COVID last year, she said. She bought an oxygen tank to help her breathe.
“The pandemic is worse than when they took the kids out of school. Now they want to put kids back into school” she asked.
While inequities are a key reason some Latino and Black families argue for schools to reopen later, inequities also have become a key argument by parents on the other side of the reopening debate.
Parents and pediatricians have said schools need to reopen because children in families of essential workers who can’t stay home to help their kids learn, who lack reliable Internet, who can’t understand English or who face other barriers to learning are more likely to struggle with distance learning.
But some advocates find that equity argument ironic coming from people who may not have advocated for low-income children of color before the pandemic.
“It’s ironic that these disparities in education existed long before COVID, and I don’t think that we can use them now as a kind of way to satisfy people’s arguments,” said Nancy Maldonado, CEO of the Chicano Federation.
“These disparities existed before, and they exist after. They need to be addressed, but I also think that we need to listen to the families who are speaking and who have real concern about safety, and not use equity as an argument to fit what’s convenient.”
Percentages of families who reported in district surveys that they would return to school in person or are currently choosing to attend in person. Open for Percent of parents in-person who want in-person instruction instruction Yes
School district
Alpine Union
San Diego Unified
Del Mar Union Elementary
Santee Elementary
Rancho Santa Fe Elementary
Dehesa Elementary
La Mesa-spring Valley Elementary
San Dieguito Union High
Grossmont Union High
Solana Beach Elementary
Cajon Valley Union
Sweetwater Union High
Poway Unified
National Elementary
Chula Vista Elementary
South Bay Union Elementary
San Ysidro Elementary
No
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
No
No
Yes
Yes
Yes
No
Yes
No
No
No
No
89% 86%
78%
72%
70%
70%
68%
68%
67%
64%
62%
53%
47%
42%
37%
96%
85%
Percent of students who are low income 32%
8%
4%
57%
38%
46%
60%
60%
70%
60%
80%
52%
72%
74%
kristen.taketa@sduniontribune.com