Orange is the new back.
The Goleta Union School District decided Wednesday night to consider reopening schools to in-person classes when Santa Barbara County moves into the orange tier, which is considered a “moderate” transmission rate for COVID-19. The state announced the new system of allowing counties to reopen last Friday.
The county is currently in the purple zone, which is considered “widespread” transmission. As soon as Sept. 14, the county could move to the red “substantial” zone, and in the fastest-case scenario, 21 days after that it could move to the orange tier if cases and positive test rates continue to drop.
The Goleta school board members stressed that they won’t necessarily open schools when the district moves into the orange tier, but that it would be the soonest they could open.
“We can do it right. We are Goleta,” board president Sholeh Jahangir said. “We do things with thoughtful, thorough, compassionate, empathetic partnership. We are not blindly walking through this. We are carrying everyone of you, every day, in our hearts, in our minds.”
A survey of parents showed about a 50-50 split of wanting to return to in-person classes vs. distance learning.
The board members stressed that they have been down this road before, and know that data and information change rapidly. The best they can do, board members said, is tie the reopening to Gov. Gavin Newsom’s new color-coded tier system, and not set abitrary dates for reopening.
The board held a candid, three-hour virtual discussion, outlining the many logistical challenges of reopening schools at this time. Jahangir said that two of the schools that sought a waiver to reopen — Cold Spring and Montecito Union — are small schools that receive nearly twice as much funding per student from the state than Goleta Union, which allows them to test and build outdoor classrooms.
“Please, recognize the difference between a 100-student school and 3,500, and our partner programs that are higher,” Jahangir said.
Among the challenges of opening are paying for testing, ensuring proper air-conditioning and ventilation of classrooms, morning temperature checks, and physical space in the classroom that allows for social distancing. When schools reopen, every student would need a temperature check before entering the classroom, as would parents who want to access campus. Elementary school parking lots in all of the schools typically are log-jammed in the morning during drop-off, a reality that would be exacerbated if everyone needed a temperature check on campus, according to the board members.
Once schools are open to in-person learning, individual schools will be responsible for testing the staff, at a rate of 25 percent every two weeks. The district will have to hire an outside lab to pay for employee testing, at a cost of about $270,000. The county will test employees, but it does not have the capacity to test everyone. Further, Superintendent Donna Lewis said the designated time slots for teachers and staff to get tested is unrealistic.
“You may have heard that our health department has allocated two hours a day for teachers to come in and get tested at the county level,” Lewis said. “What they don’t say is that those hours are offered when teachers are teaching. One of the hours is at 9 a.m., from 9 to 10, the other hour is from 3 to 4. I don’t really know what anyone was thinking when they thought the teachers could actually leave the kids hanging while they go and get a test. We don’t have enough subs to cover for teachers to go get COVID tests during their work time. I am just sharing that’s a frustration.”
The board members also noted that school districts are not able to get COVID-19 liability insurance, another problem that needs to be worked out.
The board, however, did pledge to look at ways to open schools sooner for students with disabilities or other high-risk groups that are extremely challenged by the distance-learning environment. The county recently stated that cohorts of 14 people, age 18 or younger, with up to two staff people for a total of 16, could open for educational purposes.
“There are some children and families that are facing really terrible struggles,” board member Susan Epstein said. “It’s heartbreaking.”
She said the district should continue to try to find solutions.
“With the new small-group guidance, I feel the highest priority is to bring back first our students who receive special ed services, and students that we have a way of identifying as at-risk of abuse and neglect and students who are experiencing being houseless,” Epstein said. “I think those three groups, to me, feel like the highest priority.”
Ryan Sparre, coordinator of the @afterschool program, talked about some of the lessons learned from the district’s current on-campus instruction for students of teachers and other school district employees, who are considered essential employees.
“What I am seeing is that things are different at every site,” he said, adding that implementation of instruction varies depending on people’s idea of cleanliness, efficiency and even their views of COVID.
He said that students are resilient and adjust, but noted that they don’t like wearing masks all day.
“If you give the option to kids, they would always prefer to take it off,” Sparre said. “They are able to wear the mask, but it’s definitely not preferred. It’s a long time. I don’t know in any of our jobs if any one of us can wear a mask from 7:45 to 3:30 every day. That’s a long time.”
— 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.
