REOPENING OVERDUE BUT OH-SO-WELCOME

Starting Monday, the San Diego Unified School District will reopen its campuses to its 97,000 students for the first time in 13 months, offering parents a choice of having their children receive hybrid instruction that is part in-person and part online or staying at home for distance learning. Given how many schools have reopened — many fully — around the nation and the world despite the pandemic, with relatively few problems, The San Diego Union-tribune Editorial Board believes this is long overdue locally. While the nation is now focused on hundreds of thousands of COVID-19 deaths and tens of millions of cases tied to the novel coronavirus, the emotional, physical and academic toll of learning from home for more than a year will undoubtedly become more apparent in the months and years ahead.

The district says it is reopening more quickly than other large urban districts in California and pushes back at the notion it was too cautious, noting the resurgence of the pandemic in Europe and concerns about whether school reopenings in Massachusetts and Michigan are linked to community spread of the virus. But there are national and global examples of reopenings done right months ago.

That said, we are here now, and parents, teachers, staff, taxpayers and of course students should appreciate how much thought and preparation went into Monday’s reopening, as shown by comprehensive responses San Diego Unified provided to questions posed by the editorial board last week.

The best news is that the overwhelming number of educators are participating in reopening. According to an email from district communications chief Andrew Sharp, only 102 of the district’s 5,000-plus educators sought a hardship accommodation to not come back to the classroom because they needed to care for a family member or had other complicating pandemic circumstances.

More good news: The teachers union and the district have reached a binding agreement that schools will fully reopen in the fall.

Still more good news: The district is acutely aware that students’ mental health is a concern. “Counselors have been specially trained to help students cope, and they will have plenty of tools to help students work through their feelings and learn to love school again,” Sharp wrote. “We recognize students may be facing complex emotions.” Other interesting notes:

• District officials have had talks with lawmakers about the possibility of redoing the 2020-21 school year to get students back on track. They have no plan to relax graduation standards “at this time.”

• With help from UC San Diego medical personnel, the district plans to test employees and eligible students for COVID-19 every two weeks. Tests are mandatory for employees.

• Because of the spread of new coronavirus strains, the district won’t accept last month’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommendation that K-12 students in areas with low transmission rates only need 3 feet of social distancing. Instead, 5 or 6 feet of distance will be the norm.

• To address the difficulty that teachers will have in monitoring both students who are in class and those who are using Zoom-type online tools, the district hopes to add a second staff member in classrooms, especially in lower grades.

• Full breakfast, lunch and bus services and extracurricular activities will resume, though there may be differences from past practices.

The stakes are high, so everyone should hope all this preparation pays off and that the partial return to in-class education goes smoothly. But if there is worse pandemic news in the future, everyone should also hope that kids are better insulated from its effects than they were this time. Too many students have suffered unnecessarily for too long.