Los Angeles campuses will not reopen for classes on August 18, and the nation’s second-largest school system will continue online learning until further notice, due to the increasing growth of the coronavirus, Supt. Austin Beutner announced Monday.
The difficult decision has become inevitable in recent weeks, Beutner said, as coronavirus cases have skyrocketed in Los Angeles County, and the district can’t come close to protecting the health and safety of approximately half a million students in K-12 and approximately 75,000 employees.
“Let me be crystal clear,” Beutner said in an interview with The Times. “We all know that the best place for students to learn is in a school setting.” But, he said, “we’re going in the wrong direction. And as much as we want to go back to schools and as students go back to schools, we can’t do it until it’s safe and appropriate.”
He added that it was important to inform families and district employees so they could prepare for the start of the rapidly approaching school year, just five weeks away.
The superintendent also requested county, state, and federal officials to provide leadership and funding for regular coronavirus testing and contact tracing. He said school districts also needed clearer guidance on when and how to reopen. Beutner estimated that it would cost $ 300 a year per person to screen all students and staff members once a week.
“Dollars pale in comparison to the importance schools will have to reopen what was the fifth largest economy in the world,” he said.
The decision faced two imperatives among themselves: the need to reduce health risks versus the need to return students to classrooms, where experts say they will learn more effectively, while allowing their parents to resume more routine work hours, helping to drive a deep recession state economy.
Other school systems in disparate regions across the country face the problem in different ways, in part because the health situation varies or due to political and philosophical divisions over what should take priority. In New York City, the nation’s largest school system, campuses will partially reopen, and students will return less than five days per week. In Fairfax County, Virginia, the school system offers parents the option to choose online only or return to campus two days a week combined with online instruction.
In California, day by day, more school systems choose to keep campus closed and reopen online only when health officials sound the alarm about the growing number of coronavirus cases.
In Northern California, those districts include West Contra Costa County, East Side Union in San José, and Oakland Unified School District.
In Southern California, the San Bernardino City School System cited the “recent and significant increase in COVID cases in our community” in its July 2 announcement that campuses will not reopen next month.
“After the start of the school year and if and only when we can do it safely, we will begin offering in-person registration and assistance services for small groups of students and ultimately the transition to a hybrid or blended learning model,” he said. Provisional supt. Harold Vollkommer in a statement.
In Los Angeles County, recorded infections reached new daily highs and the infection rate of those examined increased to 10%. It had fallen to 4.6% in May.
“You get up every morning and say, well, maybe that was a one-day thing,” said Beutner. “Maybe that was a one-week thing. Well, a month has passed … We have been deliberating on this for some time, since mid-June, since health factors in the community started to go in the wrong direction, in a hurry. ”
In their fall planning, school district officials from across the region understood that some parents are not ready to send children back to campus: a distance learning program is necessary for them.
Still, the recent hope had been that Los Angeles Unified and other school systems could open up to most families using a hybrid schedule, in which students would attend part-time classes on campus in small, socially distant groups. , using a staggered schedule. They were going to combine this limited time on campus with an improved home study framework that included both online and offline academic work.
Some school districts have still planned to take that route, but San Diego Unified, which was one of them, announced Monday morning that it would also be online only for the beginning of the semester. In that school system, the teachers union had rejected reopening plans in recent days, dissatisfied with security measures.
The Los Angeles teachers union was stronger. Last week, leaders asked that the campuses remain closed. And 83% of teachers agreed to an instant one-day survey; about 56% of union members participated in that survey.
But even a limited and staggered schedule on campus would not meet the demands of President Trump and the US Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos. They have threatened to withhold federal funds from school districts that do not open campuses, although it is not clear that Trump can carry out that threat.
Trump supporters include Florida Republican Governor Rick DeSantis, who has also threatened funding for school districts that do not reopen campus, despite a huge increase in infections and infection rates in that state. About 90% of school funds come from state or local sources.
Advocates of school reopening have reported apparently successful efforts in Taiwan, Norway and Denmark. However, critics have cataloged notable differences between pandemic management and status in those countries and in the United States.
By the start of school, LA Unified will have had about five months to improve on what it can accomplish online: Students have vastly improved computers and Internet access and technical support. Teachers have received training for online education. And certain family rituals will be restored: teachers will attend and are expected to monitor student learning every school day; students will receive grades.
But uneven, often inappropriate study environments will persist at home. Some parents are less able or unable to monitor students’ school work at home. Experts have warned that students most likely to fall behind would include those in low-income families, English learners, and students with disabilities.
And child care could remain a quagmire. Beutner said calling it a crisis would be an “understatement.”
The children, he said, “are seeing life-long consequences if we cannot get them back to school as soon as possible, but it must be safe. And what we cannot do is turn our schools into a giant Petri dish and have irreparable consequences for the health and life of the entire school community. ”
Beutner said he was particularly impressed by a study in Italy that appeared to document the spread of coronavirus infection from people who had not yet had symptoms or who had never had noticeable symptoms.
The school district, he said, was prepared to lead the preparation of campuses for social distancing and mask distribution, but was unable to carry the burden necessary for regular coronavirus testing and contact tracing.
Last week, Los Angeles County Director of Public Health Barbara Ferrer warned school districts that they should be prepared to move 100% online by the start of the school year, but did not issue a directive.
“We are a passenger on the bus, just like everyone else,” said Beutner. “If the spread is getting worse, if the infection rate is getting worse, we can observe, we can monitor, but we cannot bend that. All we can do is prevent it from getting worse by contributing to it. ”
