Local schools aim for in-person instruction
With the end of the school year on the horizon for the Vallejo and Benicia Unified school districts, focus is now starting to switch to the fall and whether or not the new school year will involve only in-person instruction.
Vallejo is moving toward mostly in-person instruction while keeping the option of distance learning, according to Vallejo City Unified School District spokesperson Stephen Nichols.
Nearby school districts have been back to hybrid or some form of in-person instruction for months, but VCUSD returned just recently with 7th grade through high school coming back on April 19 and kindergarten through sixth grade on April 12.
Vallejo is set to begin the 202122 school year on Aug. 16. Benicia is slated to begin a day later for students on Aug. 17.
“We absolutely are aiming to restore traditional in-person learning on all VCUSD campuses beginning this fall,” Nichols said. “Of course, this has everything to do with the state of COVID-19, as we get closer to that date we will make decisions in the interest of safety as a priority. Distance learning may continue to be an option for students, and that’s something that we are evaluating right now.”
Nichols went on to say that the positive response for keeping kids in distance learning outnum
bered those to return to inperson instruction.
“We haven’t surveyed families for fall preferences yet, but we intend to maintain the communication and two-way feedback that we’ve enjoyed with them during the entire pandemic,” he said. “I can tell you that at this moment, roughly threefourths of district families have chosen to keep their students on distance learning for the remainder of this school year.”
Meanwhile Benicia Unified School District Superintendent Dr. Charles Young said the city would like to completely remove distance learning and go back to full-time, in-person instruction.
“We started our hybrid, in-person learning model for our TK-2 students on March 29, with the remaining grades returning on April 12,” Young said. “While no model is perfect, we have received many positive comments from students and parents returning to in-person learning.
“Barring any turn in the wrong direction regarding the pandemic, we are planning to return to full-time, in-person learning in the fall. Like all districts, we have received federal and state grant funds to help provide support systems to address any potential concerns related to learning loss or the need for any social and emotional support for our students when we start in the fall. We are engaged in a robust planning process to ensure we have systems in place to support all of our students.”
Last week, Vallejo High School shut down in-person instruction after two students tested positive for COVID-19. The school returned on Monday after a deep clean of the campus.
Vallejo High biology teacher Vivet Beckford-Nelson has said in the past she prefers teaching to students in person.
“One of the benefits of being in the same room as the student is being able to read the student’s body language,” Beckford-Nelson said in April during the school’s first week of in-person instruction since March, 2020. “Some students don’t get anything and you can just say by how they behave and behave. Distance learning doesn’t always do that.”
Solano County has not done as well as other counties when it comes to coronavirus cases.
On Tuesday it was announced that it will be remaining in the red tier — the only Bay Area county in that restrictive of a tier. As of Wednesday afternoon, the county has had 32,880 cases and 216 deaths, while the seven-day positivity rate was 7.
“It seems the bulk of people getting the positive cases are under 40, but those are the last group to get the vaccine,” Solano County Health Administrator Jayleen Richards said. “The hospitalization rates are very good, but we’re behind in other factors.”
On Monday the Food and Drug Administration said that children 12 to 15 years old are now eligible to receive a key COVID-19 vaccine as the agency expanded its emergency use authorization for the Pfizer/ BioNTech vaccine.
The vaccine had been previously only offered to people aged 16 and older. Whether or not VCUSD or BUSD require students and faculty to get vaccinated for next fall’s in-person instruction is also up in the air.
Richards said that anyone under the age of 18 would need a parent or guardian to accompany them to vaccination sites. If one can’t she said a possibility of having the parent or guardian appear on Zoom to say it’s OK is also a possibility.
For now, a requirement for middle and high schoolers this fall seems quite unlikely. Regulatory and legislative processes that would take months to work through stand in the way, and there’s little appetite now even among California’s most ardent vaccine boosters to push for a mandate.
“Given where we are in the legislative calendar, it would be challenging,” said Sen. Richard Pan, D-Sacramento, a pediatrician who has authored bills to limit vaccine exemptions for school children and crack down on doctors who issue them freely. “First of all, most importantly, we have to be sure the 12 and ups have access to the vaccine.”
Nichols said he couldn’t see making the vaccination mandatory at this time.
“We can’t compel anyone to be vaccinated from COVID-19 as a condition of participating in-person,” Nichols said. “However, we have strongly advocated for vaccinations and we are working with community partners (Safeway, Kaiser, Touro University) to provide them to our community.”
The University of California and California State University systems already announced plans last month to require students and staff to be immunized at the start of the fall term, if the U.S. Food and Drug Administration first grants full approval of one or more vaccines and supplies remain adequate.
For California K-12 schools, the Department of Education says the state cannot mandate vaccines that are under emergency authorization. Pan said there are provisions that would allow state health authorities to order it, but they have never been used, and aren’t likely to be.
California requires children entering transitional kindergarten through 12th grade public and private schools to be immunized against diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis (whooping cough), polio, hepatitis B, measles, mumps, rubella and chickenpox.
“There are requirements for other vaccinations in schools, but we’re not quite there with COVID-19 being mandatory yet,” Richards said. “That might be something that is a requirement a few years down the road, but not now just because it’s too early for the rules and regulations with that. But yes, I could absolutely see the COVID-19 vaccination becoming one of those vaccinations you need for school in the future.”
Bay Area News Group writer John Woolfolk contributed to this story.