‘It’s been pretty vicious.’ SLO County parents, teachers debate holding classes in person
When it comes to distance learning, some kids have thrived.
They feel comfortable interacting with teachers via screens and enjoy the new routine brought on by the coronavirus pandemic.
Other children, however, struggled with online instruction — their parents nervously watching as progress the students and their families have worked toward for years slips away.
These two opposing responses to distance learning have sparked passionate debate among Atascadero Unified School District parents as the district prepares to apply for a waiver from the San Luis Obispo County Public Health Department that would allow elementary school students to go back to in-person classes.
“This has created a big divide in our community,” said one Atascadero Unified parent, Amoreena Anker. “It’s been pretty vicious online ... and, I mean, I don’t ascribe ill intentions to anyone, I just feel like everyone wants what’s best for their child.”
Most parents in the district want some form of in-person instruction for their kids, even while COVID-19 continues to spread in the community, while a little more than half of teachers want to stay in fully-distanced learning, according to survey results gathered by AUSD in early August.
District Superintendent Tom Butler said at a Sept. 14 board meeting that he hopes to be able to bring elementary students back to a blended, half-day model of in-person instruction, while also continuing to offer fully-distanced learning and an independent study option for students.
Teachers worry that the three-pronged approach may stretch their already-stressed schedules to a breaking point.
For teachers instructing students via distance learning, “the average work day is over 16 hours,” said Christine Williams, Atascadero District Teachers Association president and spokeswoman.
“Teachers are not taking weekends off,” Williams said. “We’re paid for seven and a half hours (a day), 180 days a (year).”
Speaking of Butler’s proposal, she added, “We don’t yet know how we’re going to make this work.”
At Monday’s board meeting, Butler said that he hopes everyone in the district can find common ground to find viable education choices for all family needs in the district.
The elementary waiver “does require stakeholder consultation and we have those meetings already being scheduled,” Butler said at the meeting. “But this is consultation and I want to make sure that everyone understands that the approval is at the discretion of the governing body and that of the board of education.”
Some parents want children back in classrooms
Rebekah Koznek said she has seen much of her daughter’s progress wash away with distanced learning.
Koznek said her 10-year-old daughter was diagnosed with severe childhood apraxia of speech, developmental delay and autism, and has an individualized education program that accommodates that diagnosis.
Koznek’s daughter, who attends fifth grade at Monterey Road Elementary School in Atascadero, is in speech therapy and an adaptive physical education class, alongside standard classes such as math, science and writing.
“She’s always been on a slow, steady grade forward. It’s not steep, but it’s progress,” Koznek said. “She went from being able to count to 100 with about 70% accuracy, and now she’s actually having a hard time recognizing letters.”
Distance learning threw a wrench in her daughter’s progress, Koznez said, because everything, including therapy, is now done virtually.
“She just needs that human interaction, you know,” Koznek said. “They can’t reinforce good behavior through the computer.”
Koznek said her daughter has become more frustrated and increasingly exhibits destructive behaviors.
Koznek is advocating for the choice of sending her kid back to in-person learning. Though many students with special needs are already approved to be back in school, not all are allowed back yet, she said.
The approval of an elementary school waiver for Atascadero Unified would allow her the opportunity to send her daughter back to in-person class, she said, while also letting parents choose to keep their kids home.
Sarah Sullivan has two children with special needs — including one who has a compromised immune system because of his feeding tube and a recent heart surgery. She said she does not want to send her kids back to school.
“We’ve seen some regression and he’s had difficulties following along with his general ed classes,” Sullivan said of her son. “But if they were to get sick it would definitely mean we’d end up in the hospital, there’s no doubt about it. So we have to stay home because of that.”
But Sullivan said she “100%” thinks that parents should have the choice of whether to send their kids to in-person school.
“The kids deserve an education and right now there’s a big chunk of them that just aren’t getting it,” she said.
The data gathered by AUSD before its Sept. 8 board meeting show that out of about 970 parents in the school district, 62% want some form of in-person instruction for their kids —while 35% advocated for fully in-person and 27% asked for a blended, half-day model of in-person instruction.
The rest of the parents surveyed, 39%, want their kids to stay in fully-distanced learning while COVID-19 continues to spread in the community.
Other parents worry about health risks of sending kids back to school
Whether there’s an option to send kids back to in-person learning or not, many parents are concerned that Atascadero Unified simply is not prepared to host kids in classrooms.
“I’m not opposed to the kids going back to school, I think it’s premature to ask for a waiver, though,” Anker, a parent in the district, said. “Things could go south pretty fast. I think it’s not worth risking the health of the children or the students at this point.”
Erin White, another parent in the school district, said she has plenty of reason to be concerned about sending kids back to school.
Her cousin, 17-year-old Adam Black of Bakersfield, contracted COVID-19 and then developed multisymptom inflammatory syndrome in children, or, MIS-C.
MIS-C is a rare but serious inflammatory condition that has been shown to develop in children who’ve had COVID-19, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Symptoms include fever, abdominal pain, vomiting, diarrhea, rash and feeling extra tired, according to the CDC.
Children are far less likely to develop severe symptoms of COVID-19, the CDC said. And fewer children have been sick with COVID-19 compared to adults, according to the CDC.
In San Luis Obispo County, just three children up to 17 years old have been hospitalized since March as of Friday, and a total of 310 county residents in that age range had tested positive for COVID-19, according to the county Public Health Department.
That’s compared to 63 hospitalizations and 265 total coronavirus cases involving adults ages 65 to 84.
Research on whether children transmit COVID-19 as much as adults do is currently unclear, with some researchers suggesting that kids are not major transmitters of the virus. Other studies show kids carry at least the same amount of coronavirus in their noses and throats as infected adults.
Regardless, White says she wouldn’t be able to send her two elementary-age kids — Nolan Keiper, 8, and Layla Keiper, 6 — to in-person classes due to the impacts a possible exposure to the virus would have on her family.
“If my husband is exposed, he can’t go back to his job site for two weeks, he’d have to quarantine,” said White, whose husband works in construction. “He wouldn’t be able to get sick pay; it would put him out of the job.”
Teachers wary of Atascadero district’s plan
Most teachers, or about 56% of the 393 teachers who responded to the Atascadero district’s survey, want to stay in fully-distanced learning, while the rest want in-person instruction. About 18% want fully in-person and about 27% want a blended, half-day model of in-person school, survey results show.
As of Thursday, the district was still in the planning stages of applying for a waiver for in-person classes at elementary schools, so how the district is going to implement in-person learning is not buttoned down quite yet, Butler said.
“We need to be able to match our staff to our community’s desires, and that’s going to be tricky,” he told the Tribune on Thursday. “I believe we can accomplish it, but it will be a challenge and it’s going to require some flexibility.”
Williams, the ADTA president, said there is not a single teacher that doesn’t want to see kids back in classrooms soon. But there are many instructors who worry about teacher health and how they’re going to manage young children with COVID-19 concerns, she said.
“We do not want to be mask police and a six-foot-distance police,” Williams said. “That’s not what we trained to be teachers for.”
Concerns about ventilation, surveillance testing capabilities and protocols around how to handle children who come in with fevers are not clear to the teachers yet, Williams said.
The California Department of Public Health have continuously released guidelines regarding the reopening of schools. These include rules around student and teacher cohorts — meaning no more than 14 kids and two supervising adults can be in a group, and that group must stay together for all activities — and procedures on what to do if a kid or adult tests positive for the virus.
Atascadero Unified will have to follow state guidelines, as well as county guidelines outlined in the waiver application. The waiver specifies that the schools must have a plan that includes how to manage COVID-19 cases, ventilation, use of outdoor spaces and cleaning protocols, as well as figuring out how the school will encourage seasonal flu vaccination in the fall, and triggers for switching to fully-distanced learning.
Teachers in Atascadero Unified are also concerned about how the three-pronged approach will work with limited staffing.
“I cannot teach in person a group of kids and at the same time teach a group of kids online,” Williams said. “Because I can either give the kids online my attention or I can give the kids in person my attention.”
Butler said he’s working to address this issue. He said he hopes to have certain teachers dedicated to in-person instruction and others dedicated to distance learning so they do not have to split time between the two.
“We’re all human and everyone is pushing the limits right now to meet the needs of our students,” Butler said, “and we certainly want to be thoughtful and caring about how we can make sure this is practical and manageable, and then allow teachers to be effective when we can manage the workload effectively.”
What are the North County district’s next steps?
Butler said the Atascadero district is working around the clock to draft a comprehensive and complete reopening plan. He hopes to have a proposal ready in time to present it at its next school board meeting on Oct. 6.
If the proposal is ready at that time, Butler will present it and the board will hold a vote on whether to approve or deny it. If the board approves it, the plan gets sent to the county public health department, which then conducts its own review.
After county public health officials review the plan, they can either approve it or deny it, typically within one or two weeks. If it’s approved, it gets sent to the state for consultation and then the schools can begin in-person classes immediately.
If the waiver application is denied by the public health department, it’s not necessarily dead in the water. The district may go back to the drawing board and make modification that would satisfy the health department’s requirements.
Additionally, if the county reaches the red tier on the state’s COVID-19 monitoring system, schools may open up for in-person instruction. But without a waiver schools would have to close back down again if the county’s cases spike and it returns to the purple, or most restrictive, tier.
