Irate parents demand campuses reopen soon
‘It’s high time for schools to open for any students who want to come back’
Angry that the Fremont Unified School District has decided to stick with distance learning through the end of this academic year, dozens of parents took to the sidewalks this week in a bid to pressure officials and teachers to offer classroom instruction again.
Monday’s rally came just days after a lawyer representing a group of parents sent a letter to the district demanding schools reopen by April 26 or face a potential lawsuit.
“It’s high time for schools to open for any students who want to come back,” Padma Gopalakrishnan, a parent of two students, said at the rally.
“Other districts have been able to do it. COVID is not any worse in Fremont than anywhere else. There is no reason to not open the schools,” she said. Many school districts have reopened schools under a hybrid model that entails a combination of distance and in-person learning.
Superintendent CJ Cammack announced on March 31 that the district’s roughly 35,000 students would continue distance learning only for the remainder of the school year after the district and the teachers union failed to reach an agreement on how best to reopen classrooms.
The district and union split
over issues such as “staffing, the scope of grade levels eligible for a full return, and additional compensation for employees,” Cammack said in a prior newsletter.
Gopalakrishnan said the rally is one of several steps parents are taking, including speaking out at board meetings and threatening a lawsuit, because they are concerned their kids are losing out on more effective in-person learning and are facing social isolation.
“We need to do everything we can,” she said. “Our students deserve to come back to school.”
Bob Bates, a parent who helped organize the demand letter and started a GoFundMe to help pay attorney fees, said parents are hoping for “some kind of intervention” that will sway the district and teachers to reopen schools.
He said the district was at “such an impasse with the union, that it didn’t seem the two parties could resolve things on their own.”
Lee Andelin, the attorney representing a group of Fremont parents, is doing similar work for parent groups agitating for reopening schools around the state.
Many parents at the rally pinned the blame for the impasse on the Fremont Unified District Teachers Association.
Some said union has made unreasonable demands, ranging from extra pay for teaching in hybrid learning models to what some parents categorized as “social justice” efforts, such as keeping police officers off secondary school campuses or training teachers in restorative practices.
Some parents held signs at Monday’s rally that read, “Learning loss for students. Teaching loss for teachers. FUDTA leadership fails the community.”
Union president Victoria Birbeck-Herrera said parents who blame the union for keeping classrooms closed are oversimplifying negotiations during which the district rigidly dictated the kind of reopening plan it would accept and made teachers feel undervalued.
“It does not benefit anyone to keep telling teachers they are expected to do whatever they are asked without compensation for their work, in a profession already paying less than comparable fields for their education,” she said.
Birbeck-Herrera has said the hybrid learning model would have required more work on the part of teachers, which is why they requested onetime pay increases during negotiations.
She said demands for keeping police away from campuses and restorative practices training were dropped by the union “as soon as it was clear the district was not going to engage” on those topics.
The union has said it is willing to continue to negotiate for a return to classrooms this spring, but the district has chosen to stop the bargaining and instead focus on expanding limited “learning hubs” for some students who want to do their remote learning on campus.
While many parents said they’re still hopeful they can salvage what’s left of the school year with inperson instruction, some, like Matthew Muller, said they’re mainly concerned about ensuring there will be full in-person learning in the upcoming school year in the fall.
“It’s time for my kids to go back to school,” Muller said at the rally.
“I want to be confident that if things are safe, that the union and the district are going to come together and come to a reasonable agreement that puts the kids back in school,” he said.
Right now, Muller said, “I’m not confident.” He said he’s looking for a “good faith” effort from both the district and the teachers union.
Jamie Black Phillips, a teacher in the district who also has two kids in its schools, said she left the union because she was frustrated with its leadership’s priorities and approach to some issues including the possible removal of Fremont police officers from high school campuses.
She hopes Gov. Gavin Newsom issues a mandate requiring all schools to reopen for in-person instruction in the fall so parents can be assured it will happen.
“There’s no mandate and there’s no guarantee right now, and that’s statewide,” she said.
“I don’t know what they’re waiting for,” Phillips said, “but while they’re waiting, my kids have been out of the classroom.”