Stanislaus County schools want teachers back on campus. What are the offers, exceptions?
Though the school year will start with children working from home or places other than classrooms, the same can’t be said for all Stanislaus County teachers, which worries some.
Most, if not all public school districts are expecting the bulk of their teachers to work from their campuses as the coronavirus pandemic continues and Stanislaus County remains on the state’s COVID-19 watch list. Districts including Modesto City Schools, Oakdale Joint Unified and Turlock Unified are offering exceptions to teachers who have children 12 or younger at home, or who are in, as MCS puts it, “a high-risk group (as verified in writing by a health care provider).”
Some other districts are offering teachers of younger children a variety of day care options, county Superintendent of Schools Scott Kuykendall said, while still others continue to work on the matter.
For instance, Ceres Unified School District spokeswoman Beth Jimenez said in an email Monday, “Things are constantly evolving. Our goal is that all employees will support learning; however, the details of how that looks are still being developed.”
And Superintendent Eric Fredrickson of Modesto’s Sylvan Union School District said Monday that it’s still in conversations with bargaining units and hopes to have a signed memorandum of understanding “very soon.”
Kuykendall provided a bigger-picture perspective for across the county. Where teachers are expected to return to classrooms to provide online instruction, three child care options are being offered, depending upon district:
On-site child care for small groups of school-age children. Because they are for the children of employees, there is a license exemption, Kuykendall said, though there still is an application process and site inspections. The care would be offered only during regular school hours.
Allowing teachers to bring their school-age children into their own classrooms, where the kids would work on their own distance learning.
Shifting the hours of an already operational after-school program to provide care during the school day.
“Districts are looking at using paraprofessionals in a variety of ways, and one of those would be to provide child care for school employees during the regular workday, which would be option one,” Kuykendall said. “Option three would use current employees in the after-school programs to provide the child care. So I think the difference is really who is providing the child care supervision.”
Turlock Unified is considering yet another option: providing child care through the city parks and recreation department’s After School Education and Safety program. TUSD spokeswoman Marie Russell said the district is in discussions with the city of Turlock on using ASES, but no plans have been finalized.
“My child less important?”
A county Office of Education special-education paraeducator who asked that her name not be used said it is unreasonable that teachers are expected to send their own children to day cares so they can offer online classes and instruction from their classrooms. “Why is my child less important than others and why am I supposed to expose my family while other children are safe receiving instruction from their home?” she asked in a message to The Bee.
“Teachers are offering crucial service and should be allowed to work from home. I should not have to worry about having to choose between staying home to care for my child and going to work or quitting. ... It just doesn’t seem fair that we have to expose our children while we are working to educate other children via an online model, with the sole purpose of limiting their exposure to this illness that lingers in the air.”
In a statement to The Bee, the County Office of Education said, “When school begins, SCOE intends to provide free on-site child care to employees during work hours. SCOE’s para educators will provide educational support to children of SCOE employees. We have worked cooperatively with both bargaining units (certificated and classified) during this time and all employees understand the expectations for returning to work.”
Since March, many SCOE employees have had the ability to work from home, the office’s statement said. SCOE’s practices are to consider extenuating circumstances when they arise.
New statewide requirements on distance learning are best met in classrooms, where teachers have access to equipment and facilities with a robust internet connection, the statement said. Those requirements include daily live interaction with teachers and other students, challenging assignments equivalent to in-person classes and adapted lessons for English language learners and special education students.
Even in the districts where teachers with young children are being allowed to work from home, not all are embracing the return to no-student classrooms. Turlock Unified science instructional coach Ryan Hollister and his wife, Laura, are parents, and both teach, so only one would be permitted to work from home at a time, he said.
“Schools with shared ventilation systems and, in particular, shared restrooms pose a particular problem,” he said in an email. “I personally share one room with three colleagues as a science coach. Just being around 100-plus colleagues at a high school greatly increases possible vectors for transmission, and that’s assuming everyone followed safety distancing and mask wearing 100% of the time.
“We believe, based on evidence, that no one should be at school, period, if our community is serious about reducing community transmission.”
‘I like the rhythm of being on campus’
In the county’s largest school district, Modesto City Schools, which serves about 30,000 students, it’s yet undetermined how many teachers will choose to teach from home because of child care or health issues. But Modesto Teachers Association President Doug Burton said the union’s membership really pushed for that option.
The letter of agreement reached by the union and the district, he said, was “the result of 20-plus hours of collaborative meetings to come to what we believe is a very reasonable solution to provide the best education opportunities we can while still providing some flexibility and safety for our members.”
Superintendent Sara Noguchi added that 700 district employees participated in a forum she hosted and the flexibility to teach from home was a common concern and “something we needed to consider and address.”
Between teachers with child care concerns vs. personal health issues, Associate Superintendent Mike Henderson said he believes the former will be the larger group. But “a number of employees who are in the high-risk group are inquiring with our office in terms of what’s required to have that reviewed and what accommodations can be made.”
While the union had a large number of members seeking the stay-home option for child care, Burton said, “we also have a significant number of our folks who said, ‘Please don’t make us work from home. Give us access to our classrooms and our curriculum.’ That’s why we think the flexibility piece is huge for how we’re going to approach the beginning of this year.”
Chris Peterson, MTA’s chief negotiator, said he’s looking forward to getting back in his classroom. “For myself, it is a desire to try to get a piece of normal back. I like the rhythm of being on campus, being in my classroom, having my own curriculum and materials at my fingertips. My dining room table became my classroom. I felt like a refugee, really.”
He feels isolated working from home, he said. Education today includes a lot of important collaboration, and though many meetings still will be virtual, being on campus may facilitate some in-person, small-group meetings — perhaps by department or grade-level — in large spaces, Peterson said.
Advantages of having staff on site, Noguchi added, also include principals, instructional coaches and colleagues being better able to support teachers in a timely matter. And when teachers identify students who are struggling socially or emotionally, it’s more efficient in directing the right personnel to those kids.
Plans ignore science, couple say
Some positive things came out of a Turlock Teachers Association meeting Tuesday night that included some Turlock Unified school board members, Laura and Ryan Hollister said, but the discussion also showed there’s not a uniform district plan on allowances for teaching from home.
“The word from our union last night is teachers would have to work out flexibility and schedules of working from home with their site administration,” Ryan said. Laura, a Pitman High science teacher, spoke with school administrators Tuesday and was told that couples who both teach could split the time they work from campus, such as one parent doing two days at school, the other three days.
For a family such as theirs, which is careful about who goes out of the home and where and how, that makes little sense, the Hollisters said. It means both parents increase their risk of bringing the coronavirus into the home. “If folks can work from home some days, why can’t we all work from home all days?” Ryan said.
Their opinion is that the district wants staff at school sites primarily for accountability reasons, the Hollisters said. But labor agreements include accountability provisions, “disciplinary steps that can be taken if teachers aren’t doing their work” at home, Ryan said.
The couple argue that plans to return teachers and other staff to schools ignore the current science of aerosolized airborne transfer of the virus. Many sites share central air and have no HEPA (high-efficiency particulate air) filtration, they said.
Teachers will need to be mask free to talk to cameras for distance learning, Laura said. An infected school worker puts the virus into the air when speaking, coughing, sneezing or simply exhaling, she said. “Studies have confirmed that the virus is functionally aerosolized, meaning that the droplets are small enough and in moving air will circulate and stay in the air column — they’re not going to fall to the ground. And they can travel through the air system.”
School or home, teaching comes first
In talks with the Oakdale Teachers Association, both district and union representatives agreed that having teachers work from classrooms is the best way to serve students, Oakdale Joint Unified School District Deputy Superintendent Dave Kline said Monday. But they also recognized that exceptions must be allowed under certain circumstances.
Teachers with children newborn through sixth-grade age can work from home “provided, among other things, they have the appropriate technology, they have the bandwidth, they have the ability and all the materials to work from home,” Kline said.
There also must be the understanding that during instructional time, teaching must be their focus. “They need to adhere to the schedule, and we’re mirroring that very closely to a minimum-day schedule, with the afternoon being used to provide additional support for students when needed.”
There also are teachers who prefer to work from their classrooms, or need to because they don’t have the technology, the bandwidth and/or the knowledge to work from home, Kline said. “We have support staff on our campuses to move in when there’s somebody who’s struggling with Google Meet or another platform,” he said.
The district also is working on providing day care for students from transitional kindergarten through eighth grade. And discussions with the OTA and its communications with teachers have identified some specific circumstances in which teachers may be able to bring their own seventh- through 12th-grade children into their own classrooms to study, Kline said. “We’re allowing those on a case-by-case basis.”
Returning to Turlock Unified’s Hollisters, they said all teachers want to be back face-to-face with kids as soon as safely possible. “We miss our students, and we miss the interactions, the one-on-one,” Ryan Hollister said. “We’re going to be working hard to make distance learning as great as it can possibly be. ... Now that we have a little more guidance and it’s not an emergency, we think we can deliver and make things pretty good for our community, even though it’s virtual.”
This story was originally published August 1, 2020 at 5:00 AM.
