There were several items on the agenda at the Jan. 19 Windsor school board meeting, but none garnered more attention, or time, than the latest information about a possible return to in-person instruction and vaccine information as it relates to schools.
Though Gov. Gavin Newsom announced new guidelines for returning students to schools, Superintendent Jeremy Decker rained on the parade a bit with the reality of the situation.
Though the governor had announced a new set of metrics for a return to school (25 or fewer cases per day per 100,000 people), and financial incentive ($450 per student to reopen elementary schools by Feb. 1, $337 per students to open elementary schools by Mar. 1), the reality is that these plans haven’t been formally adopted by the legislature, and even if they were the conditions in most of California, including Sonoma County, would not allow schools to take advantage of them.
In addition, the new guidelines are currently paired with new requirements that came with no guidelines for achieving, such as mandatory bi-weekly testing of students and staff and the creation of a COVID-19 safety plan that must pass muster with both employee unions and Cal/OSHA.
But at its most basic level, as of Jan. 19, Sonoma County’s case rate of 41.4 per 100,000 put it outside of the new guidelines, should they receive legislative approval, and should the other issues be able to be managed.
“This isn’t even an increase in funding, it just moves (around money) we’re due to receive from Prop 13,” Decker said, adding that in many districts there won’t be the financial resources to hire on the extra staff necessary to implement the guidelines, robbing them of the extra dollars and ability to open. “It will be an issue of haves and have nots. All this is is proposal for right now, and the timeline to return to in-person instruction is unrealistic. It’s not even through the legislature — and we know requirements could change. The legislature isn’t even reviewing this yet and we’re 12 days away from Feb. 1. To have a plan in place, bargained with labor and thought through is unrealistic.”
Teachers and other school staff and administrators have jumped to the front of the line of the vaccination tier, now being the first in line for vaccinations in tier 1B, however, Sonoma County is still working its way through 1A, according to Decker with no clear knowledge of when 1B will get to start being vaccinated.
Staff will receive the Moderna vaccine, which is two doses 28 days apart, with a four-day window on either end for the second dose, according to Decker. Jeff Harding, a former member of the Windsor Unified School District (WUSD), will be heading up the county’s school vaccination work, and the county will be divided up into regions for vaccination purposes. Regions will be ordered based on highest case counts, and elementary, special education and preschool staff will be prioritized over secondary staff. At the moment, the north county region containing Windsor would go first, while west county would be last, based on infection rates.
Decker said Harding has a goal of providing 1,000 vaccines a day, which would see the whole of county school staff vaccinated in about 10 weeks from start to finish. However, since the county doesn’t know week to week how many doses it will receive from the state, who in turn doesn’t know how many doses it will get from the federal government, it’s nearly impossible to predict how many doses will be available for that plan.
This significant amount of uncertainty led trustee Bill Adams to stop Decker from attempting to predict when there might be a return to school. Adams pointed out all the parts of the pandemic and reopening, such as vaccine availability and county case numbers, that are completely out of the district’s control, making opening predictions almost impossible.
“I can’t imagine how challenging it is when metrics keep changing, but I would like to put some trigger dates out there, of when and how we’ll make decisions. I think it was very irresponsible of your colleague in Santa Rosa to say, ‘we’re ready to go to school March 1,” he said. “Looking at your roster and list, if vaccines roll out Feb. 1 we might be ready after spring break, but every day or week that shifts we get to point where we need to talk to administrators and labor groups about do they want to come back for six weeks? Maybe they do, maybe they don’t … but we need to get transparent information out to families, and not some Pollyanna notion. We need to be prudent and realistic and cover our bases and update our community based on health and science updates.”
Decker then had to clarify for trustee Rich Carnation, who himself is recovering from COVID, that reopening schools is not tied to vaccinations, at least not yet.
“So, once we get everyone vaccinated, we’re good to go then,” Carnation asked.
“We hope,” Decker responded.
“I think that’s where get into difficulty,” Adams interrupted. “Even if we’re all vaccinated but the case numbers are still 40, we still can’t open. Our case count is what has to get better and I’m sorry, but that’s the kind of thing we can’t control right now, and the goal line keeps getting shifted.”
“So even if every one of our teachers gets vaccinated we still can’t go back to school in person until the other stuff is dropped down,” Carnation asked.
“Right now, yes. We need guidance from public health, but right now we haven’t been getting it,” Decker said.
“There is tremendous confusion and distrust, and so we need to be very clear about what we’re saying,” reiterated Adams.
For now, according to Decker, the district will continue to refine its reopening plan, which is based on the colored tier system, which at present is still the “law of the land” in terms of what’s allowed.
To that end, the district has hired Julian Rivera to help with the coordination of COVID preparation and vaccine readiness.
“What we want is when the numbers do finally get to a point we can have students return, we ready to go. We don’t want to say, ‘OK we need another two weeks to open,’” Decker said when introducing Rivera.
Another issue still being discussed include whether districts can make the vaccinations mandatory for staff. Decker said he had consulted two attorneys and gotten two different answers, so he wanted more time to look into it.
Decker also took pains to reiterate that the local labor unions were not obstructing the reopening plans in any way.
“There is a narrative out there that its labor organizations preventing reopening, and I’ve said before and will say it again, it’s not true,” he said. “We have good relationships with both unions, we talk everything through to try to make the best of worst in a responsible, safe manner and meet the needs of students. If you need to bash somebody, bash me, but that narrative is false.”
Local parent Misti Stewart had written two letters to the board that were read as part of public comment, one making the case for the reopening of school sports and the other for concerns about the length of time the district’s reopening plan would take and the fact it prioritized secondary school students last.
Decker pointed out that decisions related to school sports were not determined by districts but by CIF and local leagues and that the district’s reopening plan is controlled by the tiers and case numbers, could potentially be done in a concurrent fashion should the district find itself dropping into lower tiers quickly.
Trustee Eric Heitz is an athletic director in another district and reiterated that the issues with reopening sports are incredibly complex, including what tiers a give county is in, what the local league may choose to do, what CIF has announced about allowed sports depending on case counts and issues concerning transportation.
Heitz said they’ve been told they can only put two students in a van that would normally hold 10, and that they would have to rent large buses and keep the numbers in them low, which then leads to a natural idea of just having parents drive their students to games, except in the case of working parents or those without reliable vehicles, quickly becomes an issue of equity.
