Phased-in approach being designed for returning students to class
At the Dec. 15 meeting of the Windsor Unified School District Board of Trustees, Superintendent Jeremy Decker presented a fairly grim picture of COVID-19 infections both county and state-wide and when schools in Windsor might open for some form of in-person learning.
“It’s trending in the wrong direction,” he said, specifically citing people getting together at Halloween and Thanksgiving as contributing to the numbers.
According to Decker’s presentation, of 58 counties in California, 55 are now in the purple tier, and statewide there are 63.9 new cases per day per 100,000 residents, with an 11.3% positivity rate and 5.7% ICU bed availability (updated state numbers show 4.1% ICU availability).
In addition, the governor announced earlier this month a new metric of ICU bed availability as an indicator and after dividing the state into five regions, stated that a regional stay at home order would go into effect when a regions drops below 15% ICU bed availability. The new regional stay-at-home order was triggered in the Bay Area on Dec. 16, to take effect Dec. 17. The Bay Area’s ICU capacity as of Dec. 16 was 12.9%, however, Sonoma County, and five other counties, plus the city of Berkley all executed the stay-at-home orders preemptively due to local conditions.
None of this is good news for families desperate to get kids back in schools, and at present Decker doesn’t see students coming back to class any time before March, and even that he refers to as “optimistic.”
Still, the district continues to move forward with planning what that return to school will look like.
“What we are looking at is a phased in approach that beings back our most vulnerable students first, that is based on the tiers and metrics,” Decker said. “But, we’re looking at those metric to improve to bring back students.
“The amount of conflicting information about (the risk to students and staff) has been challenging,” he continued. “This is hard, really hard, it’s hard to decipher everything. Windsor District Educator’s Association (WDEA) has been a good thought partner as we’ve tried to work through this.”
The phased-in approach being discussed does not bring any students back to campuses until the county enters the red tier, and starts with students with special needs and students with disabilities, followed by English learners, foster youth, youth experiencing homelessness and “other high needs students” which will be students who have been identified by administrators as particularly struggling in the distance-learning environment.
How those groups will be brought back within the tier will be dependent on continually falling case rates, positivity numbers and health equity quartile case rates. Once the adjusted case rate falls below 5, the positivity rate falls below 6% and the health equity quartile falls below 6.3%, the district will start bringing back mainstream students, starting with TK and kindergarteners.
The last group that will be allowed to return in the red tier is grades one and two.
Once the county moves into the orange tier, grades three through six and grades seven through 12 will eventually be brought back.
“We’re waiting for orange for grades three and above, because of issues with cohorting,” Decker said. “Right now, the recommended number is two, and we need three to run a hybrid system that makes sense.”
Those same special needs students have been the source of a lot of discussion within the community, as well as multiple letters read to the board as part of public comment. In those letters, families discussed the heartbreak of seeing their kid’s progress fall away and the challenges of having to be a special ed teacher, parent, therapist and more rolled into one.
In theory, counties in the purple tier can open in-person learning for students with special needs, but again the issue of “small, stable cohorts,” raises its difficult head.
“Stable cohort is a very important term and it’s one of the main areas we’re struggling with,” Decker said. “We can keep them stable at school but when everybody goes home, we can’t guarantee anything. It makes it difficult to do our job and ensure the safety of everyone to be a part of in-person instruction.”
Kathryn Hill, WUSD’s director of special education discussed that while other districts in the county had opened cohorts for in person learning for special needs students, there has been issues and that most of them were shuttering and going back to distance learning.
“We do have a handful of districts who have opened stable cohorts but because of the increase in COVID cases across the county, state and nation, several have shut down,” she said. “One of them, because of a number of COVID cases and another has shut down with plans to reopen after reassessing the situation after the holidays. There is a lot of concern about student and staff safety. So, while we do have some cohorts that have opened, I think a lot of them are getting cold feet because of the number of cases and closing again for now.
She went on to explain that many of the districts that opened special needs cohorts are “tiny,” but the even so almost all have had to re-close at one point or another due to COVID infections within the cohort. Larger districts, like Rincon Valley in Santa Rosa, have opened recently, but are closing down their in-person cohorts again due to case spikes.
“It is also important to note that all of those cohorts are volunteer based,” Decker added. “There is no district that has opened and said, ‘You’re coming back no matter what.’ We put the option out there, there was a discussion we had with WDEA and we made the decision not to move in that direction.”
After the letters from families were read, there was brief discussion of adding a future agenda item to discuss cohorts for the vulnerable population, which was agreed upon by the board. Decker added they had already planned on bringing some things forward for community information at the Jan. 19 , 2021 meeting.
Though he was delivering objectively bad news, Decker took the time to express his sorrow at having to do so.
“When can they return? I don’t know. We are about to have a holiday where people get together more than any other and we don’t know what that will look like,” Decker said. “I know it won’t be in January and the timeline is dependent on what happens over Christmas. My best hope is we somehow figure this out and people are responsible over the holiday and we’re able to enter the red by March 1. That’s optimistic but that will be my hope.
“This is a slog and it’s hard, and speaking as a parent it’s hard for me, I’m tired of arguing with my child as well,” he continued. “This is a really hard thing to manage, and I feel terrible we can’t meet the needs of families right now, this is an unprecedented, difficult time. There’s been a lot of chatter the union is holding this up or there is a master plan. There is no master plan, ultimately it falls to me. I’m holding this up and board is supporting me because I want to keep people safe. That’s the focus. I’m sorry, I know it’s hard, I know it matters, and we are working butts off for when students can come back, but we just aren’t there yet.”
