Students in the Goleta Union School District will be expected to return to campuses five days a week beginning Jan. 11, the board decided unanimously Wednesday night.
The main schedule will consist of COVID-19 screening at 8 a.m., class at 9 a.m., recess at 9:45 a.m., class again at 10:05 a.m., lunch at 11:50 a.m. and class again at 12:35 p.m. Dismissal would take place at 1:05 p.m.
In order to accommodate staggered bus schedules, however, start times and dismissal times would vary across schools in four different formats, with some schools starting at 8:30 a.m., 9 a.m. or 9:30 a.m. with dismissal at 1:35 p.m., 2:05 p.m. or 2:35 p.m.
The vote means an end to Zoom classes for students, unless they were already enrolled in the remote all-year remote program.
District leaders want all 3,500 students to return to the nine schools in classes of 19 students. Pop-up tents are planned to maximize outdoor space. The district also plans to fill its buses to about one-third capacity, but families or pods could ride together and sit closer because they do so already, which could allow some buses to carry additional numbers of students.
If Santa Barbara County’s number of COVID-19 cases rises high enough to push it back into the purple tier under the state’s color-coded reopening system, the district will hold a special meeting in December to decide whether to move back to a distance-learning model.
The board made its decision after a staff brainstorming session and a survey of classified employees and teachers about three different plans. Most people who responded to the survey backed the five-day-a-week plan.
The plans included the five-day-a-week model, a morning/afternoon model under which some students would have been in attendance in the morning and others in the afternoon, and a hybrid plan under which students would have gone to school two days a week and participated in Zoom classes the other three.
The board decided on the five-day-a-week plan.
“Living in this gray area has been torture on everybody, I know on you as well, on the families, on the staff. I think it has added an edge to everything,” Superintendent Donna Lewis said. “Some people might not like what we voted on tonight, but at least we have an answer and we can move forward. I have a feeling, though, that the vast majority are going to be very happy with this vote that we just took.”
The decision came after a lengthy, detailed presentation by Lynn Fitzgibbons, an infectious disease specialist at Cottage Health, who explained the seriousness of the COVID-19 situation.
“While we had a very, very good August and September, putting that huge surge under control, unfortunately at this point, this virus is simply in our community,” Fitzgibbons said. “And it is something that is continuing to spread in our community. In the past 48 hours, I am aware of multiple cases where a patient came to their health care provider with this disease, with symptoms, and didn’t know how they caught it.”
Fitzgibbons said it is unlikely that in the coming weeks the county will transition into the orange tier under the reopening system. The Goleta district originally told families that it would wait until the county reached the orange tier before it required students to return to school. The county is still in the red tier.
“I don’t think we are facing an explosion, but I know that our numbers are not going to qualify us to move on very quickly,” Fitzgibbons said.
She said the final concern she had related to what is happening in the Midwest.
“As winter comes, I think many of us are bracing for what could be a very difficult season in a lot of parts of our country, and unfortunately, we are also facing the busiest travel time of the year,” Fitzgibbons said.
She said some families will choose not to travel, but others will, “and with travel, this virus is going to spread.”
Fitzgibbons said she is proud of the health officials and community partners.
“But to some degree as we are looking ahead, we have to anticipate that this virus is going to continue to spread through the community, and I think make the decisions you are all facing with that as a backdrop,” Fitzgibbons said.
Board president Sholeh Jahangir said she wanted the board to take a stand, even after board member Susan Epstein suggested doing another parent survey of the five-day-a-week plan. The district surveyed parents on a five-day-a-week plan in May.
“We can survey and survey and survey, and I think parents are really asking us to act now,” Jahangir said. “I am going to be honest. I don’t think they want us to be doing another meeting. They need to plan. They need to know. The kind of desperation we are in right now with families feeling so overwhelmed, I think they need to know we hear them.”
Only Epstein, who is retiring from the board this year after serving for 16 years, showed support for a hybrid plan, out of health concerns.
“I do have a concern with going with something like the full model knowing that it could get worse,” Epstein said. “I think we should choose a model that can handle different amounts of community spread so that it’s not as disruptive and we don’t kind of change models back and forth. To me, that, for children who really, I think, often thrive on routine, to have it changing around as conditions change, would be harder.”
— 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.
