August 31, 2020 — The latest shelter-in-place order, effective as of 8:00 on August 31, reflects a new statewide system of monitoring the covid-19 pandemic, just one week before the expected Labor Day surge. Instead of being on the much-dreaded watchlist, which is now a thing of the past, Mendocino County is in the top tier, or purple zone, of a four-tier color-coded system. As such, hair salons and barbershops may now operate indoors, retail stores can only operate at 25% capacity, and grocery stores at 50% capacity.
But one of the most closely-watched sectors is schools. Schools are limited to distance learning, though they can submit waivers for limited in-person instruction for kindergarten through sixth grade. On Friday, ten waivers in Mendocino County were approved, including those for the two largest school districts: Ukiah Unified, with about 6,000 students, and Willits Unified, with a student body of around fifteen hundred, the majority of them in K-6.
School starts in Willits today, and Superintendent Mark Westerburg is hoping to get ahead of the internet problems by parking a number of school vehicles around the district to serve as mobile hotspots.
Meanwhile, in Ukiah, which was the first district to open on August 17th, Superintendent Deb Kubin said the district has made a significant investment in about 600 individual internet hotspots.
We’ll hear from both superintendents about the waivers, and the tech solutions they hope will improve distance learning a lot more manageable than it was in the spring.