Sylvan Union superintendent upset over projections schools would re-open mid-March
The superintendent of the Sylvan Union School District updated his board of trustees Tuesday night on the return of sixth-graders to its middle school campuses, which is not dependent on Stanislaus County reaching the red tier in the state’s COVID-19 monitoring.
He also expressed frustration with, apparently, county officials making public statements last month on the projected time line for reaching the red tier.
Sixth-graders, who fell within the district’s approved TK-6 waiver plan, will return to classrooms starting Monday. They’ll use a hybrid learning model that alternates two cohorts of students between in-person instruction and concurrent at-home learning.
Based on survey responses from families, and outreach to those who didn’t return the form, it looks like about 66% of Savage Middle School’s students will return for in-person learning, Superintendent Eric Fredrickson told the board. For Somerset, the number is about 55%, and for Ustach, 52%.
The middle school reopening schedule has three block classes per day, per cohort. That reduces the number of students in a stable cohort and means less possible exposure during passing periods.
Students in Cohort A will be on campus Mondays and Tuesdays, and Cohort B on Thursdays and Fridays. Wednesdays are distance learning for all.
After sixth-graders, the district’s final level of student return is seventh- and eighth-graders. Surveys have been sent to those parents.
The goal is to return those students starting March 29, Fredrickson said, but that date is dependent on Stanislaus reaching the red tier.
“And this is kind of the danger when there are statements made in public about projecting that, ‘Hey, March 15, we’re going to be in the red.’ That sets an expectation for (the) community. And so I think since that was made over a month ago ... there’s been this high expectation that everybody will be back because we’ll be in the red. And the (infection) rates were trending down, but they dipped up a little bit.”
To bring grades seven and eight back by March 29, the county will have to meet the criteria when tier announcements again are made next Tuesday, the superintendent said.
Should Stanislaus not reach red, “it gets kicked down a week at a time,” he said. “It takes eight days to be qualified,” Fredrickson told trustees, so if the March 16 tier update has Stanislaus in red, Sylvan’s permitted date of return would fall during its March 22-26 spring break.
“That’s why I kept putting on our notices to our parents, ‘contingent upon being in the red tier.’ You can’t get around that.”
California health officials will loosen the threshold for all counties to move from the most restrictive purple tier into the red tier once 2 million doses have been administered in the bottom 25% of ZIP codes according to the state’s “Healthy Places Index,” which measures poverty rates and other indicators of availability and quality of health care.
The state is “linking vaccinations with the level of exposure and risk,” Fredrickson said. “This is just a moving scale every day. I don’t know when we will reach 2 million and what will be the new metric. We’ll probably find out by next Tuesday. So that could have an impact on on the ability to reopen.”
Video of the Sylvan board’s meeting is at youtube.com/watch?v=T1EhDzq9dTA.
This story was originally published March 10, 2021 at 1:29 PM.
