SAN FRANCISCO — In a conversation with Bay Area school leaders, the state’s top educator said Thursday that plans are underway to extend school districts’ current flexibility to stop taking attendance or to drop standardized tests during the coronavirus pandemic.
California Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond said two proposals are making their way through the Legislature “in the coming days and weeks” to “give districts the flexibility they need but also give them stable funding they need to carry out” a modified form of school that students will face in the coming year.
“The Legislature has to vote on this, and we expect to have the answers in the days and weeks to come,” Thurmond said. “But as all of our superintendents have said, right now the main focus has to be the safety and well-being of our students and how we support our staff.”
His comments come a day after Thurmond released state guidance calling on districts to prepare for the likely scenario of continued distance learning, face coverings in schools, smaller class sizes and the logistically difficult work of separating lunch schedules, keeping school buses socially distant and spreading students out while on campus.
The state superintendent made the comments during a televised special conversation on ABC7 with San Francisco Unified School District Superintendent Vincent Matthews, Oakland Unified School District Superintendent Kyla Johnson-Trammel and San Jose Unified School District Superintendent Nancy Albarran.
Facing a June 30 expiration date for guidelines set in place by Gov. Gavin Newsom in March that stipulate school districts will be fully funded despite not taking attendance, school districts across the state are eagerly awaiting a decision from state officials on a possible extension or a new funding model.
“We’re wrestling with what is education going to look like in the fall,” Matthews said. “We are going to need flexibility to plan adequately. What we don’t want to do is put a plan in place and find out we have regulations saying we can’t. Our hope is that the flexibility we have around daily attendance and number of days required to be open will continue so we can plan without hitting a brick wall.”
It’s clear that districts will have to shell out big bucks to make the sweeping changes to in-person education that Thurmond announced on Wednesday.
“We’ve learned from the experience of (the 1918 flu) pandemic,” Thurmond said Wednesday. “We know that we can flatten the curve by doing a few simple things,” like social distancing, hand washing and using face coverings.
Thurmond said his department has created a task force to draft guidelines for the state’s 1,037 public school districts to reopen for the new school year.
Behind the scenes, state officials like Thurmond are lobbying the federal government for financial support to help pay for the millions of dollars that will need to be pumped into California schools for them to be able to adhere to social distancing requirements and the continued delivery of distance learning programs.
Based on what superintendents across the Bay Area have said in the past two months, the health and safety guidelines that districts will be compelled to adhere to require more, not less, funding from the state. The cost to administer standardized tests alone is a staggering figure the largest districts in the area would rather not deal with.
“We need less assessment around standardized testing,” Johnson-Trammel said. “We need to focus on the impact of the months we haven’t been in schools for students who we know have not been as connected to distance learning and their educational experience.”
Superintendent Albarran said the educational conditions simply aren’t there to justify administering statewide standardized testing.
“The recognition that we are in a crisis and that conditions aren’t optimal is really important,” Albarran said. “Some students are feeling a real sense of loss and they’re committed to doing well in those assessments. To put them in that situation I think is a disservice to them. Getting a bad result may just contribute to the anxiety they feel.”
