A day after the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) issued guidelines to encourage the reopening of public schools, the leader of the nation’s second-largest district said there was no calendar. by when Los Angeles classrooms would welcome students again.
The opening date for the new school year would have been August 18, but Los Angeles Unified School District Superintendent Austin Beutner was one of the first leaders of the public school district to announce that distance education would remain in its place as autumn approaches.
“It is an incredibly difficult decision,” Beutner told “NBC Nightly News” presenter Lester Holt on Friday. “Because we understand that students need to be in school. Young students, those who learn to read, students who learn English, students who may have had difficulties before … the best place for them to learn is in school.”
But health and safety come first in the coronavirus pandemic, he said.
“We know there are life-long consequences if we cannot get students who are learning to read in school now to build that foundation for the rest of their future,” Beutner said.
Keeping students out of classrooms is especially problematic in LAUSD, where more than 80 percent of the families they serve subsist on poverty-level incomes and more than half have had a family member who lost a I work because of the pandemic, he said.
Schools often function as daycares in many Los Angeles communities, where the school district has served more than 50 million take-home meals since classrooms closed on March 16, he said.
“We are trying to do something in public education that has never been done,” said Beutner. “Online learning has historically been the province of a select few.”
The head of the school said it is too early to consider reopening the fall and winter vacations.
“No, no,” he said. “It’s very important”.
While science says it is rare for children to develop serious complications from the coronavirus, they can still spread it, and some experts say it would be wise to control the virus before introducing millions of children again.
But President Donald Trump, recognizing the role schools play in freeing parents to work and reviving commerce, has demanded that public schools reopen for the new school year.
He has suggested that some districts have resisted reopening to thwart a post-virus economic recovery and therefore his reelection.
Beutner said he would like nothing more than to see the district’s more than 633,000 students back in class. Her return has been derailed by new spikes in coronavirus cases, including new daily records established in Los Angeles County in July.
“In May, we plan to go back to school,” he said. “June, July, going in the wrong direction, the decision, in a sense, was made alone.”
Trump has threatened to withdraw federal funds from districts that do not reopen.
On Thursday, the Los Angeles County Department of Health reported that its seven-day average of positive tests for COVID-19 was 7.4 percent. Beutner said it needs to be below 5 percent to consider reopening,
If the numbers “go in the right direction, we will be ready to return to schools as soon as we can,” he said.
Lester Holt and Jay Blackman contributed
