It’s that time of year again: back to school time. And this year, kids actually get to start the year in classrooms! But due to COVID-19 lingering around like an unwanted guest, the state of California is requiring students to mask up while indoors on campus. For this year’s Education Today issue, New Times Assistant Editor Peter Johnson writes about how local school districts are dealing with parents who want more freedom for their kids, while Sun Staff Writer Malea Martin talks about the state’s new preschool requirements and what it means for early education in public schools.
Central Coast K-12 students will start a new school year with a mask mandate, amid a surge in the COVID-19 Delta variant
BY PETER JOHNSON
Patsy Mitchell, a third grade teacher at Calvin Oakley Elementary School in Santa Maria, got a pretty good test run at teaching during the pandemic when her school partially reopened for in-person instruction in the spring and summer.
Even with a less-than-full classroom, the experience wasn’t easy. Indoor masking was mandatory, and that adjustment proved challenging.
“Some students had a hard time breathing,” Mitchell remembered of those spring and summer classes. “A lot of it was anxiety ridden. Those little people—they don’t even know it’s anxiety.”
Whenever her students were having a hard time breathing in their masks, Mitchell would gently invite them to step outside, take it off, and catch their breath. Mitchell herself needed that respite at times.
“For some of us, it’s difficult. I would walk out when it was too much for me,” she said. “When they were ready, they were able to come back in. Nobody made fun of anybody.”
Despite the rough start, Mitchell said her students showed resilience and adaptability. Before too long, they had mostly adjusted to the new circumstances, she said.
“At the end of the three weeks, children were giggling through their masks and making the best of it,” she said.
Looking ahead to the full reopening of schools this month, K-12 teachers like Mitchell—as well as students, parents, and staff—are gearing up for an even more daunting challenge amid the ongoing pandemic.
As communities try to achieve some normalcy by bringing back full-time, in-person school for the first time since March 2020, cases of the COVID-19 Delta variant are surging. And children under age 12 are not yet eligible to receive the COVID-19 vaccine.
Meanwhile, Central Coast vaccination rates lag among adults and teenagers. In a July 29 update on COVID-19, San Luis Obispo County Public Health Officer Penny Borenstein said that 42 percent of residents over age 12 are not yet fully vaccinated (about 10 percentage points higher than the statewide rate). In Santa Barbara County, about 46 percent of the county’s population, of any age, is not fully vaccinated.
Despite those circumstances, health and education officials say that K-12 schools can still safely open this fall—but with precautions. One of those precautions is that teachers, students, and staff must continue to wear masks while indoors, regardless of their vaccination status.
That is a health mandate being passed down to all school districts from the state of California.
“It’s going to be a different kind of difficult,” said Eric Prater, superintendent of San Luis Coastal Unified School District, of the reopening process. “But anything’s going to be better than what I saw last year. We need to reopen our schools.”
The mask mandate is generating mixed reactions from schools and parents. At San Luis Coastal, which serves SLO, Avila Beach, and Morro Bay, Prater said district leaders fully agree with the state’s rules and plan to take them extremely seriously.
“This is not something we’re choosing to mess around with,” Prater said.
At San Luis Coastal, any student who shows up to school without a mask will be provided one by the school. If the student refuses to wear it, he or she will be asked to go home, and the district will follow up privately with that family. All families have the option of enrolling their children in independent study instead of in-person school.
Prater added that a district nurse is going to review all mask exemption requests based on medical conditions and will follow a “strict protocol” in determining what constitutes a legitimate excuse to grant an exemption.
“There are some parents that are upset about this. And I just don’t agree with them,” Prater said. “As superintendent, my job is to keep students safe and staff safe, and my priority is to keep our schools open.”
The mask mandate is getting a more lukewarm reception at some other local districts, like Atascadero Unified School District. At a July 22 school board meeting, Atascadero Unified Superintendent Tom Butler fielded several questions and complaints from board members and parents about the requirement.
Parents voiced concerns ranging from the safety and sanitation of their kids wearing masks, to the lower fatality rate of COVID-19 in children, to their constitutional right to not wear a mask. Parent Christa Abma pointed out that children and adults have been allowed to go places indoors without masks for most of the summer.
“They’re living their lives and they’re healthy,” Abma said. “Let our bodies work how God designed them to work. We’re strong. We’ll overcome this.”
In response, Butler said that if the district decided to buck the state mask mandate, it risked losing state funding “to the tune of millions of dollars.” The district would also face legal liability, he said.
“The level where districts have local control is in enforcing it,” Butler said. “We have some local control in how we engage with families and students who obviously don’t want masks.”
Butler said those situations would be dealt with politely and respectfully, with medical exemptions considered and independent study programs offered.
“This isn’t going to be something where we’re going to be a district that’s suspending students or taking some type of punitive discipline action,” he said.
Local public health officials stand behind the state mask order, calling it “key to safely reopening schools.” Tara Kennon, a public information officer with SLO County Public Health, said masking is a proven strategy to mitigate the spread of COVID-19, especially when social distancing is not possible, such as in a full classroom, and when many unvaccinated individuals are gathered.
“A robust body of scientific evidence supports masking as a safe and effective strategy to reduce the spread of COVID-19, including among children over the age of 2,” Kennon said via email. “Virtually all grade school children are unable to be vaccinated against COVID-19, and universal masking provides a level playing field that protects all students, teachers, and school staff.”
While COVID-19 is most deadly among older people, local pediatrician Rene Bravo said children and teenagers don’t go unaffected by the virus. As the Delta variant spreads throughout the unvaccinated population, the average age of hospitalized patients has dropped from 63 to 51.
“Please get your teens vaccinated,” Bravo said during SLO County’s July 29 press briefing. “They do spread it. There are complications that occur in teenagers. I’ve seen that. You don’t know which child, who’s going to be that person. I don’t want to take that chance.”
Jose Rodriguez, an eighth grade U.S. history teacher at El Camino Junior High School in Santa Maria, said he’s seen the pandemic, masks, and vaccines unnecessarily politicized. He said he plans to talk about the history of pandemics and vaccines in his classes this fall, and expects that his classrooms will do just fine with the mask mandate.
“I want to go back and show them that you don’t have to contend with smallpox, measles, and polio because these vaccinations have worked in the past,” Rodriguez said. “This is not a game. It’s not an abstract political discussion. We’re not interested in politicizing health. For us, it’s the public health. It’s the common good.”
Mitchell, who taught third-grade classes in Santa Maria this past spring and summer, said the best thing teachers and parents can do going into this uncertain school year is to stay patient and model good behavior by following the science where it leads.
“This is very emotional and political, unfortunately,” she said. “Everybody wants the kids to go back. The entire world lost a year of education. All we can do as teachers is to reinforce the importance of understanding science. This is what we know now. We’ll do the best we can today. Those are great lessons to teach the children.”
New Times Assistant Editor Peter Johnson can be reached at pjohnson@newtimesslo.com.
Local school districts are ahead of the curve in offering pre- and transitional kindergarten, and state legislation will soon expand these efforts
BY MALEA MARTIN
Universal public preschool is a concept long-discussed, and recently politicians started making serious policy proposals in pursuit of preschool for all.
President Joe Biden’s American Family Plan released in late April proposes universal, high quality preschool for all 3- and 4-year-olds. In early July, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed legislation to make transitional kindergarten available to every 4-year-old in the state, and he hopes to expand preschool for even younger kids in the future.
On the Central Coast, public preschool for some students has already been an option for a while. And though it’s not universal yet, local school officials say Newsom’s push for expanded transitional and pre-kindergarten could change the early learning landscape in the very near future. In the meantime, local public school districts are doing what they can to provide early learning opportunities to as many kids as possible—and they’re approaching it through an equity lens. This means offering preschool to kids whose families couldn’t afford it otherwise.
Santa Maria-Bonita School District (SMBSD) has had preschools in the district since 1997. The first one was implemented at Fairlawn Elementary, and today, the district has a preschool at all but five of its 17 elementary school sites.
“It’s our goal to have a pre-kindergarten program at each of our elementary school sites,” district Director of Teaching and Learning Jennifer Loftus said. “For the last school year, we added Liberty and Libbon Elementary, and then going into this next school year we’re adding Arellanes Elementary School.”
Raquel Valdez, director of preschools at SMBSD, said funding for the district’s preschools historically has been through the California State Preschool Program (CSPP) and the district’s Local Control and Accountability Plan (LCAP) funds. And in late June, the district was awarded a First 5 grant that will allow it to add the new preschool at Arellanes Elementary School. The grant gives the district $150,000 annually for the next four years.
“The CSPP funding that we receive from the state does have requirements with it,” Loftus said. “Students are eligible for pre-kindergarten if they meet certain eligibility criteria, and the primary factor is income.”
San Luis Coastal Unified School District (SLCUSD) has run a preschool program called Success for All since 2013, paid for out of the school’s general fund. Like SMBSD’s program, it aims to reach “a specific targeted audience of students who otherwise wouldn’t have an opportunity to attend preschool,” SLCUSD Director of Learning and Achievement Rick Mayfield said.
Success for All is hosted at Baywood, Hawthorne, and Pacheco elementary schools.
“There are a lot of preschool programs out there and available in the community,” Mayfield said. “But it’s very challenging for families these days to be able to afford preschool programs, and if you have multiple children, it’s really difficult.”
While California districts are not required to offer the preschool programs, they are required to offer transitional kindergarten (TK) to some students. Preschool is an umbrella term under which pre-K and TK fall, and the difference between the two isn’t that substantial in terms of curriculum. But, Mayfield said, the distinction more comes down to age differences, when a child is born, and what schools are required to provide.
Current law requires school districts across California to offer TK to kids who turn 5 between Sept. 2 and Dec. 2, because Sept. 2 is the cutoff for kindergarten enrollment, Mayfield said. Newsom expanded that criteria when he signed Assembly Bill 130 into law on July 9, which will provide “free, high-quality, inclusive pre-kindergarten for all 4-year-olds, beginning incrementally in 2022-23 and with full implementation anticipated by 2025-26,” according to the governor’s office.
“Right now, it’s only limited to those students who [turn 5] in the fall,” Mayfield said of existing law. “Let’s say you turn 5 in January. You would be in preschool, as opposed to kindergarten. But what the state is saying is any 4-year old needs to be in a TK program. It’ll mean there’s TK programs at every school, and probably equal to the number of kindergarten classes that are there.”
Loftus at Santa Maria-Bonita said she and her fellow school district leaders are “kind of in a holding pattern” as they await details on what the roll-out of expanded TK will look like.
“If we are offering transitional kindergarten to all of our students, [we’re] thinking of blending pre-kindergarten with transitional kindergarten, because our pre-kindergarten [currently] serves primarily all 4-year-olds, and our transitional kindergarten serves those students who are not 5 in time to start kindergarten,” Loftus said.
This leads to questions around what early learning would look like if TK expands to cover all 4-year olds.
“Are we then serving 3-year olds? Is that happening in the school system or is that happening more in a center-based child care, day care center type setting?” Loftus asked. “There’s really just a lot up in the air because we don’t know yet what it’s going to look like.”
But what district officials do know is that preschool—whether required by the state or not—is about increasing accessibility and equity. That’s why both SLCUSD and SMBSD have made efforts to offer preschool to some children, even before being required to by the state.
“Traditionally, students who are underserved are coming from households that have lower income, their parents might be both working full time, it might be a single parent household, and just all of the different challenges that go along with being in that low-income threshold,” Loftus said. “Before there’s an achievement gap, there’s a readiness gap. Many students of poverty are not ready to learn when they enter kindergarten.”
Not only does preschool get kids ready for kindergarten, but it also establishes a relationship between the school district and families.
“In the program, we focus a lot on the social-emotional, and having those partnerships with families to support them and to get them ready for kindergarten,” SMBSD Preschool Director Valdez said.
Mayfield said that the standards set for kindergarten are quite rigorous, so having kids in pre-K or TK helps set them up for success. Not having access to preschool can affect a child for years to come.
“By the end of kindergarten, students need to be reading at a fairly high level; they need to have math skills,” he said. “So getting them at 4 years old gives us the opportunity to help form their learning and prepare them for successful kindergarten experiences, and also to identify needs that students have and be able to plug them into programs, interventions that will serve their needs.”
Reach Staff Writer Malea Martin at mmartin@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Aug 5-12, 2021.
