FREMONT — Citing safety concerns, the Fremont school board has decided the district’s 35,000 students should begin the school year away from classrooms and learning online from home as they had been doing since the coronavirus pandemic forced campuses across the state to close last spring.
In a split vote Friday evening, the board said Fremont Unified School District will stick with the virtual learning until Alameda County doesn’t see a single new COVID-19 case for seven straight days — a threshold that could put classrooms off-limits for a long time since the number of cases and hospitalizations have been rising in recent weeks.
Over the coming weeks, however, the board will consider allowing special education students and other students who need different learning accommodations to return sooner.
And when the county goes seven days without a new COVID-19 case, more students will be allowed back into the classrooms in limited fashion.
The decision came on the same day the Oakland Unified School District announced it would also start the year with distance learning, as did two districts in San Jose eadlier in the week.
Fremont school board members Ann Crosbie, Michele Berke and Dianne Jones voted in favor of the distance learning start, while board president Desrie Campbell and board member Larry Sweeney dissented during Friday’s special meeting.
Campbell and Sweeney questioned the wisdom of tying the return of classroom instruction to one county’s COVID-19 case count and expressed concern about the lack of options for families who are not easily able to care for and help educate their kids at home.
“We’re talking about 2,000 teachers that are living all over the Bay Area. And how do you define that? Is it going to be just no new cases in Alameda County and that’s all we’re going to be looking at? But yet, we’ve got hundreds of employees that are living in Santa Clara County,” Campbell said.
“I’m just very uncomfortable with that marker,” she added.
“I’m talking about the families that might have a single mom with four kids and she doesn’t have the time to dedicate to each child,” Sweeney said.
“We need to offer something for those people as well,” Sweeney added.
The school board considered plans for hybrid learning and distance learning put forth by a district reopening task force established in May. The task force is made up of about 50 people representing students, staff and faculty unions, parents, and district administration.
Jones said that after reviewing the theoretical plans, she still felt each would expose students and teachers to too many people.
“Immediately the contacts that we create become hundreds of people, and I am concerned that even under our best hybrid model, that is not safe right now, that is too many contacts,” Jones said.
More than 700 people including parents and teachers submitted written comments to the board earlier this week about the divisive issue.
Some urged the board to pick distance learning, others asked for a hybrid approach of distance learning and classroom instruction so students could better engage with their teachers and material, and some said the board should leave it up to families to choose whether their kids should go to class.
Sulakshna Anand wrote that sending kids back to classrooms is “a recipe for disastrous consequences,” and places “undue burden and stress on staff, especially when there is the safe alternative of remote learning.”
“I love teaching first grade and want to be back with my students, but returning to school without a vaccine is not safe,” teacher Jennifer Lafferty wrote. “Consistently maintaining six feet of distance and ensuring mask compliance is completely unrealistic with children.”
“There is no model that fits the needs of everybody,” Jones said. “No matter how we start the year, there are going to be some families who face real hardships with what we choose.”
District staff emphasized that any decisions made now could change and flexibility will be needed as laws, health orders and the virus’ spread all shift.
The board also heard from custodial supervisors who said the district is working to acquire more “electrostatic sprayers,” which could make disinfecting most surfaces in a classroom faster. But they also cautioned it would not be possible to clean each classroom between each period at the secondary education levels.
District staff and the task force will work on developing a “robust” distance learning program that meets current state laws, which require daily interaction between teachers and students and a certain amount of instructional time.
The board also voted to allow optional summer athletic conditioning at high schools to begin, pending a legal review by the district’s counsel.
Near the end of the meeting, which lasted nearly four hours, a terse exchange between board members over how much choice families will have at the beginning of the school year underscored the frustration felt by many during the pandemic.
“I think that is the greatest trauma that this global pandemic is putting on us. There are no absolutes, there are no 100 percent great answers,” Crosbie said.
“This is going to impact an entire generation, but that’s our reality. I frequently have those moments of going, ‘I can’t believe we’re living through this right now.’ It’s just insanity,” she added.
“But it is our reality. It’s not a science fiction novel,” she said. “So we have to make decisions.”
