Gavin Newsom signs school reopening deal pressuring districts to get kids back into class

Nearly a year after California classrooms shuttered in the early weeks of the COVID-19 crisis, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a law Friday to send $2 billion to help schools reopen by April 1.

The legislation was backed by a bipartisan coalition of lawmakers facing intense pressure from families and local leaders to reinstate in-person instruction before a school year of mostly remote learning concludes.

The deal will allocate $2 billion in grants for schools that decide to reopen by the end of this month. To receive the funding, schools in the counties under the state’s most restrictive purple tier will have to open kindergarten through second grade classrooms.

For those in the less stringent red tier, schools will have to reopen all elementary classrooms and at least a middle or high school grade.

The color-coded tier system considers community transmission and test positivity rates to dictate which businesses can reopen, and at what capacity.

In either category, schools must open classrooms for students with disabilities and other high-risk groups like foster kids, homeless youth and English Language Learners.

The blueprint also sets aside $4.6 billion to fund supplemental instruction like summer school, tutoring, one-on-one support and extended learning time.

Flanked by top Democratic legislative leaders Senate President Pro Tem Toni Atkins of San Diego and Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon of Lakewood during a Friday press conference, Newsom called the plan a result of bipartisan “commitment and resolve.”

“This is the right time to sign this bill,” Newsom said. “This is the right time to safely reopen for in-person instruction our schools.”

Amid the celebration, members on the press call said the signing was only the first step of many to solving the state’s yearlong, patchwork approach to reopening schools.

“One of the biggest knots the Legislature and governor have had to unravel is how to get our California kids safely back into schools following the science and in the wake of COVID-19,” Atkins said. “Today we have an answer. It’s not a perfect answer. It’s also not the final answer. But it’s an answer that’s going let our kids learn, our teachers teach and our parents, to let them breathe.”

Despite weeks of negotiations to reach this point, the deal has failed to completely appease critics.

Parents groups say the deal doesn’t go far enough to reopen classrooms for kids who’ve suffered a year of Zoom calls and valuable in-person interaction with school staff and classmates.

Unions have also said that the plan doesn’t include strong enough testing requirements, and scrutinized recent changes to the state’s tier system as jeopardizing employee safety.

On Thursday, Newsom formally announced the decision to include a vaccine equity metric in the state’s campaign to inoculate as many Californians as possible. The plan requires reserving 40% of vaccine doses for poorer communities that have been hard hit by the virus. The governor also promised to designate 10% of the vaccine for school workers and teachers.

But once at least 2 million of those community members are vaccinated, counties can more easily move from tier to tier and reopen certain businesses and schools.

In a Thursday statement, California Teachers Association President E. Toby Boyd lambasted these “eleventh-hour changes,” which Newsom announced after school reopening negotiations were already in print.

“Changing guidance directly tied to this legislation will impact districts already working on their plans and will likely trigger confusion, fear and anxiety when our communities are already worried about the safety of their families,” Boyd said.

San Diego Democratic Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez also criticized the revisions during a Thursday floor speech before lawmakers voted to send the legislation to Newsom’s desk.

“If we are going to change the tiers and suddenly everyone is in red tier, that changes the classes that have to be open, the number of classes and the testing cadences,” Gonzalez said “So, if you get calls from your teachers union a little upset, they have the right to be upset. You don’t negotiate a deal and change the parameters of that deal on the day we are voting on it.”

Other Democrats also raised concern that the framework would advantage wealthier schools in areas with lower transmission rates and punish low-income districts that can’t yet reopen due to high transmission and low vaccination rates.

Assemblywoman Cristina Garcia, D-Bell Gardens, also said that some family members in her district, many of them essential workers of color who can’t afford to get sick, were hesitant to send their kids back to school out of fear of contracting COVID-19, despite lacking access to internet or other essential learning resources.

“We are afraid,” said Garcia, a former math teacher. “Because you are asking to put our own lives at risk and our families’ lives at risk.”

Republicans also had their share of objections to the plan. Though most GOP lawmakers voted in favor of the legislation, several scolded their colleagues and hammered Newsom for taking an entire year to hash out a strategy to get kids back into the classroom. Even then, they argued, it was too late to make up a year of learning loss and social-emotional damage.

“We have to say California gets an F. It gets an F in how it dealt with education,” said Assemblyman James Gallagher, R-Yuba City. “It deemed education not essential...and it’s a travesty that that happened on our watch.”

This story was originally published March 5, 2021 at 10:09 AM with the headline "Gavin Newsom signs school reopening deal pressuring districts to get kids back into class."