Law aims to put kids back in class
SACRAMENTO >> California’s public schools can tap into a $6.6 billion school reopening plan that Gov. Gavin Newson signed into law Friday, aimed at pressuring districts to reopen classrooms by the end of March. Educators, parents and lawmakers question whether it will work.
After nearly one year of distance learning for most of California’s K-12 students, parents across the state say they are frustrated and losing hope their children will see the inside of a classroom this year.
“Is this money going to be a motivator? I don’t know,” said Dan Lee, a father in San Francisco where the city sued its own school district to reopen classrooms. “We throw money at them, we sue them, we shame them. They still haven’t moved.”
The bill Newsom signed into law has attracted bipartisan support and scorn in equal measure, with both the governor and lawmakers saying Friday it marked an important step forward but was far from perfect.
The bill does not require school districts to resume in-person instruction. Instead, the state is dangling $2 billion before cashstrapped school boards, offering them a share of that money only if they start offering in-person instruction by the end of this month.
“This is the right time to safely reopen for in-person instruction,” said Newsom, who faces a likely recall election later this year, fueled by anger over his handling of the pandemic.
Newsom signed the bill via Zoom, unintentionally mimicking how most of the state’s 6.1 million public school students have been learning for the past year. The irony was not lost on Newsom, who said the virtual
ceremony was necessary to include officials who were
scattered across the state. He highlighted the struggles he and lawmakers had in negotiating the plan.
“When you look at 58 counties, a thousand-plus school districts, this truly is a challenge at a scale no other state in the country is faced with,” Newsom said.
Teachers from some of the state’s biggest districts have come out against the plan, saying schools can’t reopen until infection rates drop and enough educators have been vaccinated.
Among them is the powerful United Teachers of Los Angeles, whose members were voting Friday to reject what they called an unsafe return for the second-largest district in the nation. Earlier this week, the union slammed the reopening plan as “a recipe for propagating structural racism” by benefiting wealthier areas with lower infection rates.
“If you condition funding on the reopening of schools, that money will only go to white and wealthier and healthier school communities,” union leader Cecily Myart-Cruz said in a statement.
While California businesses have opened and closed through the ups and downs of the pandemic, many school boards have not been willing to return students to classrooms as they have struggled with the costs to implement public health standards and negotiations with teachers’ unions.