A parade of teachers called on the Santa Barbara Unified School District Board of Education to start the academic school year with remote learning.
The district, just five weeks before the start of the Aug. 18 semester, has not yet cemented a plan for how to teach students.
About three weeks ago, the board approved a hybrid model, but with the recent large increase in COVID-19 cases and hospitalization rates, and school districts across the nation, including Los Angeles Unified School District moving to online-only in the fall, district officials are scrambling to figure out what to do.
“The safest way for us to go back in the fall is in full remote learning,” said Olivia Happel-Block, a teacher at Dos Pueblos High School. “Teachers are not the solution to get the economy going. We are not babysitters. We are professionals, experts in our field. Of course we want to be in a classroom. Our jobs would actually be much easier if we could go back to normal; however, I do not want to risk my life, or the lives of my family.
“It is not right to ask teachers who only a few months ago were lauded as the heroes and innovators of quarantine to sacrifice their own health and safety in this manner. Instead, let us focus on training and preparing for full remote plan as soon as possible. If we can plan and strategize right now we can present a robust and engaging online curriculum,” Happel-Block said.
The board took no action or offered any substantive comment at a three-hour virtual work session Tuesday night. About 70 members of the public spoke, many of them teachers and parents, most of whom urged the district to start the school year in a remote environment.
Board member Kate Ford told Noozhawk after the meeting that the study session and panelist presentations only reiterated and intensified the complexity of the issues surrounding re-opening the schools.
“Especially the exact steps to follow, and who will actually do this extra work, regarding sending sick people home, inviting recovered people back, providing child care, contact tracing, and improving remote learning,” Ford said. “I was also struck by the emotion and fear expressed by dozens of teachers who called in to remind us how much they love teaching, their schools, their colleagues, and their students — but how scared they are to return to their classrooms at this time.”
School board member Rose Munoz said there are communities that are very vulnerable and she wants to ensure that all voices are heard.
“Parents want their children to learn, but they are more concerned about the risk they can face with hybrid instruction,” Munoz told Noozhawk. “The input of the parents and the school staff is critical as we formulate solutions for this fall. I look forward to continuing the discussion at the next board meeting.”
As it stands now, under a hybrid scenario, students would return to school twice a week, learn remotely two other days, and use the fifth day as a flex day.
If a student, were to test positive for COVID-19, the student would have to be quarantined, along with the rest of the class, for 14 days. Many of the teachers who spoke raised questions about testing, contract tracing, the cleanliness of the rooms, enforcement, and how exactly the district would accomplish social distancing.
Alexa Levesque, a teacher in the district, said re-opening schools would negatively impact students of color and be a risk for educators. She said Centers for Disease Control data show that not only are Latinos more likely to contract COVID-19, but “we are also more likely to die from it.
“Re-opening physical schools does not guarantee quality education,” Levesque said. “Lessons will still be remote, even in the classroom. Group work and many of the other social aspects that make school so rich will not happen. There is no educational benefit to going to school in person, just risk.”
Melinda Cabrera, director of Strategic Partnerships for the United Way of Santa Barbara County, talked about the organization’s efforts to provide child care to help parents when schools closed in the spring.
United Way raised $600,000 to help pay for child care for frontline workers. Most child care centers were closed when the pandemic erupted in mid-March, and the United Way effort created more than 200 spaces in the county for children.
Now, in the event that the district moves to a hybrid scenario, either next month or later in the year, United Way wants to provide more expansive child care services when children are not in school.
About 24 percent of Santa Barbara Unified School District employees said in a survey that child care would be a major challenge if they had to to return to work. Cabrera said as many as 14,000 students throughout the county would need child care under a hybrid model, with 3,000 of those in Santa Barbara Unified.
“For school-aged youth there is no existing program to take care of children during the school day and provide that academic support because schools have always done a beautiful job for us,” Cabrera said. “In order to meet this overwhelming need, the system needs to be funded, and it needs to be built very quickly.”
She said United Way is working with the Santa Barbara Foundation and other community organizations to create off-site programs that serve children in a manner that is safe, supportive, meets their educational needs, but also gets them outside exercising.
“There is a lot of work to be done to meet this large-scale solution, in a very short period of time,” she said.
In the absence of another government order from Gov. Newsom, it appears that school districts will decide what to do on a case-by-case basis.
On Tuesday, school districts in Long Beach and Sacramento decided to go online-only for the upcoming year.
The K-6 Goleta Union School District is presenting a plan Wednesday night for students to return to school five days a week, with limited hours. If Goleta approves a five-day-a-week return, and Santa Barbara Unified goes to all remote, it could be complicated for families with children in different elementary and high school districts.
Dr. Dan Brennan, a pediatrician, said he has seen a lot of cold and flu seasons and he has concerns about what is going to happen in the fall and winter, a concern he said is shared with his colleagues across all disciplines in medicine. He said that once other germs are circulating at the same time in the fall and winter, it gets harder to separate out who might have COVID-19 and who has something else.
He said the CDC in March was suggesting that children could have a co-infection rate of 40 percent. He urged the school board to put health and safety first.
“Nobody is ever going to fault you for being extra careful with our kids and taking the abundance of caution approach,” Brennan said. “I think that’s the key thing that is going to help everybody feel better about what we do going forward.”
— Noozhawk staff writer Joshua Molina can be reached at jmolina@noozhawk.com. Follow Noozhawk on Twitter: @noozhawk, @NoozhawkNews and @NoozhawkBiz. Connect with Noozhawk on Facebook.
