Almost 11 months into the pandemic, some San Diego County school districts say they aren’t sure when to reopen as they wait for case rates to fall and for vaccines to be made available to school staff.
Three CDC scientists stated in an article this week that there is little evidence that schools have contributed to community spread of COVID-19, as long as there are adequate safety measures in place, suggesting that schools should be open. Meanwhile, children’s health experts warn that learning loss and depression are taking a toll on children due to school closures.
Yet reopening for several districts in San Diego County remains a distant possibility.
Elementary schools in San Diego County are blocked by the state from reopening until the county’s daily new-case rate falls below 25 per 100,000 residents. Middle and high schools are blocked from reopening even longer, until the county rate falls below 7 per 100,000 residents.
San Diego County is still far from those thresholds, but it is getting closer. Since Jan. 12, the county’s daily case rate has been on the decline and is now at 50 per 100,000 residents. The case rate dropped by 20 in the past two weeks.
“There’s a whole lot of waiting game going on for all of us,” said Manny Rubio, spokesman for Sweetwater Union High School District. “We’re preparing along the way … but definitely it’s a lot of waiting just to see, hopefully, if rates come down.”
Schools that reopened before San Diego County fell to the most-restrictive purple tier in November, however, are allowed to remain open. Some school districts have been open for 17 weeks, highlighting disparities within San Diego County of who gets to be taught in person and who doesn’t.
Falling case rates led Los Angeles County to announce this week that schools could reopen in as soon as two to three weeks. San Diego County has not made such a prediction.
But it’s unclear whether other school districts will choose to reopen even once San Diego County reaches the case-rate thresholds.
Some school officials and teacher unions say they need to consider their own local case rates before reopening, not just the county’s overall rate. They note that communities in San Diego and South County have always had disproportionately higher case rates than the county as a whole. In some zip codes, the rate is as high as two or three times that of the county.
Chula Vista Elementary School District has set an even higher standard for reopening after bargaining with unions and does not plan to reopen until the county reaches the less-restrictive red tier, which is below a daily new case rate of 7 per 100,000.
“Our case rates are so much higher down in South County,” said Susan Skala, president of the Chula Vista teachers union. “We’ve got a lot of essential workers. We’ve got families who are mixing and we can’t control what people do outside of school, and can we afford to bring that into the school?”
San Ysidro Elementary School District is waiting for the county to fall below the 25-case rate. Then it will decide on a reopening date, while taking into account school safety measures and COVID rates within the district’s boundaries.
Some educator unions also say they want to wait until all their members have had a chance to get vaccinated before reopening. That’s the case for San Diego Unified educators, who want to wait until they get both doses of a vaccine before returning to campus, said Kisha Borden, president of the San Diego Unified teachers union.
“The majority of our educators want the vaccination and are anxious to receive it,” Borden said.
On Thursday, a frustrated Gov. Gavin Newsom said that if schools wait for all school staff to be vaccinated before opening, they will never reopen this school year, according to Politico.
The state and counties have received only a fraction of the vaccines they need to inoculate all health-care workers, long-term care residents and people 65 and older — the groups that have been given permission to receive vaccines first.
School staff are next in line for the vaccine. But amid persistent supply and distribution problems, it’s unclear when exactly the state and counties will extend vaccine eligibility to them, and how long it will take school staff to get vaccinated. The state has said eligibility would be extended to certain essential workers, including school staff, in mid-February.
In San Diego County there are 620,000 people in the first vaccine phase, as well as roughly 500,000 people 65 and older who are currently eligible to get the vaccine. But only 485,900 doses have been shipped to the county, as of Thursday. Each person needs two doses of the currently available vaccines to be fully vaccinated.
About 224,000 San Diegans have received at least one vaccine dose, but only 45,200 people have been fully vaccinated.
San Diego Unified will not decide what conditions need to be met to reopen schools until it hears the opinions of a panel of UC San Diego experts that the district consulted with last August, said Board President Richard Barrera. The district expects to hear back from UC San Diego in February.
Barrera said the district is going back to UCSD because it wants clearer guidance on how to factor several issues — such as recent research, vaccines, COVID testing, and new and more contagious strains of the virus — into its existing reopening plan, under which schools won’t open for instruction until the county is in the less-restrictive red tier.
“All of that puts us in a position where we say its time to go back to our UCSD team and get guidelines that we can actually work with,” Barrera said.
Barrera also said the governor’s plan for reopening schools has been confusing and flawed. Newsom proposed offering schools hundreds of dollars per student for schools to reopen, but Barrera said it’s not enough to pay for the frequency of testing for staff and students that Newsom wants for schools in areas of high COVID transmission. Newsom’s proposed incentives have not been approved by the state legislature.
Meanwhile, evidence is mounting that schools often do not contribute to community spread of the coronavirus, as some district officials feared.
Recent research and San Diego County data suggest that schools are not frequently sources of outbreaks — unless basic safety measures such as masking and social distancing are not followed. One study found that children have an increased risk of infection in gatherings but not in schools.
One of the first studies to measure the pandemic’s effect on students in California from the PACE research center found that children are indeed suffering significant learning loss from school closures, and it is disproportionately hurting low-income children and English language learners.
School closures also have been taking a toll on children’s physical and mental health, driving an increase in anxiety, depression and suicidal ideation, pediatricians and mental health counselors say.
“What has to happen to get kids back in school has to happen now,” said Janet Crow, clinical professor of pediatrics at UC San Diego. “I promise you, it will have much more dire effects on children to not have another year of school … We have got to figure it out.”