We’re beginning to approach a full year of online learning, with March 13 being only one month away. This process has caused an incredible amount of controversy, discussion and planning in our own school district, and we still await the call for in-person learning. Meanwhile, on February 3, the city of San Francisco filed suit against its own school district, and demanded the return of in-person learning for over 52,000 students.
This kind of overlapping legal battle between government agencies is the first of its kind in California, and perhaps the country. City Attorney Dennis Herrera led the charge with support from Mayor London Breed. Herrera describes how the board has “earned an F” in regards to planning out the school year and adds that “having a plan to make a plan doesn’t cut it.”
“This is not the path we would have chosen, but nothing matters more right now than getting our kids back in school,” said Mayor London Breed in a press conference. “The city has offered resources and staff to get our school facilities ready and to support testing for our educators.”
The legal action has been met with surprise and defense from the school board, claiming that there is a plan in place. San Francisco Unified School District Superintendent Vincent Matthews called the city’s action a “frivolous lawsuit” and a “waste of time that we don’t have. SFUSD has a very comprehensive plan with specific steps around health and safety and what in-person learning will look like for our focal student populations to return as soon as we can complete all the clearly laid out steps,” said Matthews in a news conference.
But what exactly is that plan? Unions made up of San Francisco Unified School District employees and district officials released an agreement on Sunday, February 7 to safely reopen the city’s public schools. The proposal outlines that when the city is in the red tier of California’s coronavirus case rate system and vaccinations against COVID-19 are made available to on-site school staff, schools can return in-person. They can also start integrating students into classrooms if the city progresses to the orange tier, in which case teachers and other staff would return without demanding vaccination.
It’s unclear if these guidelines will be followed by our own school district, but we can expect a similar situation. Unfortunately, the timeline of the pandemic continues to grow and it’s very difficult to predict when exactly we will return to school. For now, we await updates from our own school board and hope to see a light at the end of the tunnel in 2021.