July 14, 2020 — At a five-hour long meeting last night, the Ukiah Unified School District board voted 6-1 to reopen schools on August 17 following a hybrid model of instruction. Classes will be broken into two smaller cohorts, each meeting two days a week with Wednesday as a distance learning day.
Of the 35 public comments the board heard over the course of the night, many of them letters representing the views of groups of teachers and parents, the overwhelming majority called for keeping children out of schools altogether. As Erica Francis started off the public comment with a letter from concerned parents at Grace Hudson Language Academy, the Public Health Department was updating its coronavirus dashboard, refining the under-18 age group into three categories. The numbers would rise to 146 positive test results by the end of the night, but as Francis spoke, dashboard watchers learned that four children under the age of five have tested positive for the virus, as have nine children under the age of twelve and fourteen children between the ages of thirteen and eighteen.
Other callers cited the uncertain future of testing in the county, limited ICU capacity, and unanswered questions about paid sick leave if teachers miss work because they’re waiting for a covid test result or are out sick with the virus. The new work ethic calls for people to stay home when they don’t feel good, rather than power through what may or may not be a mild case of the sniffles. One caller suggested opening campuses only to the ten percent of the student body that suffers most from distance learning, like homeless and foster kids, special ed students, and those who are well below grade level. In her presentation to the board, superintendent Deb Kubin cited a document on reopening schools by the American Academy of Pediatrics, about the vital role that schools play in children’s social and emotional skills, nutrition, and mental health.
The school district has already laid in a supply of personal protective equipment, including 5,000 masks in a variety of sizes and styles. $50,000 worth of Plexiglass barriers is on its way, and the board approved a quarter of a million dollars worth of air purification systems, $200,000 in extra custodial work, and another quarter of a million dollars for an additional professional development day for staff, not just teachers. Several callers argued that adapting to distance learning, hybrid learning, and then adapting the approach as the conditions of the pandemic evolve would be time consuming and distract from their ability to teach effectively.
Teacher Zoe Louie told the board that if they voted on an approach that would only revert to full distance learning in the most dire circumstances, it would be forcing her to choose between her life and her livelihood. “Please vote with the understanding that lives are on the line, and I pray none of those lives end up on your consciences,” she said.
Trustee Jose Diaz offered a meditation on death, saying he had come to terms with it after concluding that people are afraid to die because corpses are buried in the ground or cremated. He told his colleagues that he had come to regard death as no more frightening than falling asleep. “When we die, we go to sleep, we just don’t wake up, we go to heaven, and everything is fine,” he remarked.
“There is no solution that does not potentially put a group of people in our community at risk of negative outcomes,” said Trustee Megan van Sant, as she led the board with her explanation of why she supported opening the school year with the hybrid learning option.
President of the board Anne Molgaard said her thinking on the subject has changed with the conditions of the pandemic. If the decision were hers alone, she said, she would start the school year with a full closure, switching to a hybrid approach when the numbers plateaued.
Some students will still be able to choose a full distance model, and Kubin said the district would work with families who have children in more than one school to make sure they are all attending in-person classes on the same days.