CONCORD, CA – MARCH 13: A classroom sits empty at the end of school at Monte Gardens Elementary in Concord, Calif., on Friday, March 13, 2020. (Jose Carlos Fajardo/Bay Area News Group)
A steady decline of coronavirus cases in Contra Costa County would allow the Mount Diablo Unified School District to bring students in lower grade levels back to campus right away, but the district still has no firm reopening date as March begins.
Ongoing negotiations between the district and labor unions have been the driving force behind the holdup. The school board, as well as the superintendent, are angling to begin a hybrid learning model soon, but labor representatives maintain they want safety guaranteed before educators return to classrooms.
For the Mount Diablo Education Association, it won’t be enough that the county as a whole is recording COVID-19 case numbers well below the district’s threshold for reopening kindergarten through sixth grade. The union wants cities that have been hit harder by the pandemic to show better numbers.
“Our communities are very, very diverse,” said Anita Johnson, the union’s president, in an interview. “And the bottom line is the priority is safety for all our communities.”
On Monday, the county’s adjusted seven-day case rate per 100,000 residents was 11.1. The number is well under the district’s threshold for reopening kindergarten through sixth grade, which is 25 cases-per-100,000 for five straight days.
The county doesn’t publish seven-day case averages for individual cities within the county, but Bay Point and Concord have recorded 14-day case totals per 100,000 residents of around 287 and 132, respectively, and Johnson wants to see those figures below 100 before the union bends.
At a meeting last week, the school board reviewed and approved a hybrid reopening plan that would bring students back to campus in blocks on certain days.
Adam Clark, the superintendent of Mount Diablo Unified School District, photographed last year. (Chris Riley/Vallejo Times-Herald archives) Chris Riley/Vallejo Times-Herald archives
It would allow students who want to remain in a distance-learning format to do so for the rest of this school year, but teachers in lower grade levels, to start, would be expected to return to classrooms to educate blocks of students who do return in person.
A host of coronavirus safety measures — the usual cleaning, distancing and masking — would be firmly in place during in-person instruction, Superintendent Adam Clark told the board.
Clark also mentioned in passing the early results of a survey sent out to families in the district which gauged how they felt about sending their children back to school. At the time, families responding to the survey were split down the middle, Clark said — half for and half against.
The district was accepting completed surveys until Monday. The superintendent’s office has not responded to questions about the survey’s updated results.
“I am in strong favor of giving parents a choice of having kids back on campus,” Clark said at last week’s meeting. “I also want to respect those that have other challenges and don’t feel comfortable and don’t want to come back.”
But the early survey results “don’t really change” how labor representatives feel about reopening, Johnson said. She said it is “unsurprising” that half the families surveyed so far want to come back.
The unions have made clear at meetings that current case rates need to dip further before reopening plans can move forward. But, as safety goes, vaccinations are not currently one of the Mount Diablo Education Association’s demands.
“It’s not so much that a teacher might get sick — we don’t know who is going to get sick,” Johnson said. “A student could bring the disease into a grocery store and someone not affiliated with our school district might get sick and die.”
Other districts in Contra Costa County, including the San Ramon Valley Unified School District, have reopened for some level of in-person instruction.
They have not been joined by Mount Diablo, which has schools in Concord, Pleasant Hill, Walnut Creek, Pittsburg, Lafayette, Martinez and Bay Point.
The district’s inaction on reopening to this point has not been without consequence. At a meeting in early February, Clark warned that an exodus of more than 1,000 students from the district (which usually has 29,000 enrolled students) during the coronavirus pandemic would likely lead to layoffs.
If early survey results had skewed heavily in favor of reopening classrooms, would the union feel more pressure to buckle?
“I don’t think I could possibly feel more pressure,” Johnson said.
