California’s two largest school districts announced Monday that classes will be online only at the beginning of the school year, citing “dizzying infection rates” of the coronavirus in their areas.
The Los Angeles and San Diego Unified School Districts, which issued a joint announcement, will begin online instruction in mid-August but “will continue to plan a return to in-person learning during the 2020-21 academic year, as soon as public health the conditions allow it. “
Los Angeles Unified, the second largest school district in the country with approximately 700,000 students, will begin instruction on August 18; San Diego Unified, which serves more than 100,000 students, will begin on August 31.
“There is a public health imperative to prevent schools from becoming a Petri dish,” Austin Beutner, the school superintendent in Los Angeles, said in a video message posted online.
In the joint announcement, school districts said research on coronavirus-era school safety remains “incomplete” and that many of the public guidelines were “vague and contradictory.”
But, districts added, “One fact is clear: Those countries that have successfully reopened schools have done so with declining infection rates and on-demand testing available. California has none. Infection rates for the past few weeks they have fired it, of course the pandemic is not under control. “
The announcements come a day after Education Secretary Betsy DeVos defended the Trump administration’s aggressive push to reopen schools in the fall amid the increasingly severe pandemic.
In an interview with CNN on Monday, DeVos said that a hybrid of virtual and in-person learning “is not a valid option for families.” He also declined to say whether the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines for schools should be followed uniformly.
“The CDC guidelines are just that, they should be flexible and should be applied as appropriate to the situation,” he said.
Los Angeles and San Diego, which closed schools and moved to an online learning model in mid-March, have dated the largest school districts to announce a change to online-only instruction.
New York City, home to the nation’s largest school district, has opted for a partial reopening, with limited classroom attendance one to three days a week. Chicago, the third largest, has yet to announce a roadmap.
In a separate development on Monday, California Governor Gavin Newsom announced that the state would expand the closure of a series of business operations across the state, including restaurants, bars, movie theaters, zoos and museums.
The number of deaths from coronavirus in California soared above 7,000 over the weekend.
