The Long Beach Unified School District vowed at the start of this school year to do everything in its power to keep campuses open, and they’ve stuck to that promise as the district’s 70,000-some students returned to campus today amid a surge of COVID-19 cases across the region.
Still, with no new restrictions or testing requirements announced, there were plenty of parents feeling anxious as their kids headed off Monday morning.
“We dropped our kids off today and I had a sinking feeling that I’m throwing my kiddos into some kind of a fire,” said Priya Bahl-San, a parent of students at Lowell Elementary and Hughes Middle. “We don’t want the schools to close but I feel like they’re not doing enough right now and I’m worried we won’t be in a good situation in a couple of weeks.”
A spokesman for the district said officials feel more confident about keeping kids in class than in the early days of the pandemic because of improved knowledge about community spread as well as a high percentage of employees and a rising number of students being vaccinated.
“Given these factors and others, including the positive impact that we know in-person instruction has…we will continue to do all that we can to keep our campuses open in a safe manner, with reasonable precautions,” the spokesman, Chris Eftychiou, said.
The LBUSD sent a pair of emails to parents in the closing days of the recent two-week winter break, reiterating the district’s currently existing COVID-19 safety guidelines, including indoor masking but no widespread COVID-19 testing.
When the school year began the district was testing unvaccinated students, and later revised that down to testing 10% of students on each campus as cases continued to fall. In November that testing program was suspended at least through the end of winter break.
The rationale behind suspending the program was continued sustained low positivity rates on LBUSD campuses, however, positivity rates throughout Southern California have spiked dramatically because of the more contagious omicron variant.
With other area districts requiring negative tests to return to school, Bahl-San and some other parents would like to see something similar in the LBUSD.
“With testing I think it would relieve a lot of our stresses, and if they’re planning to do that can they please tell us?” she said. “It’s echoed with a lot of our friends in the community. We’re watching the news over the break waiting for them to reach out and make us feel better about the first day back. We got the message yesterday and it was a (reiteration) of what they were already doing…I feel like nobody’s communicating with us.”
Anxiety around returning to campus amid a period of widespread COVID-19 positivity wasn’t just limited to some parents or students, either. Chris Callopy, executive director of the Teachers Association of Long Beach, acknowledged his organization’s membership was feeling it too, as the city’s largest workforce prepared to have the ground shift underneath them once again as the nearly two-year pandemic drags on.
“Yes, anxiety is way up,” said Callopy. “Fatigue and exhaustion is setting in for sure.”
One thing that teachers, parents, and the district seem to be in widespread agreement on is a desire to avoid closing campuses and returning to an at-home Zoom learning model that challenged everyone around education in parts of 2020 and 2021.
Eftychiou reiterated that point Monday afternoon, saying, “Our goal is to keep schools open for in-person instruction.”
He also said parents can expect an update on “COVID-19 testing and other precautionary measures in the coming days and weeks as the situation evolves” and as the district works with public health officials on shifting guidelines.
Eftychiou also stressed, as the district’s messages did last week, that the LBUSD is urging parents to keep students home if they have any COVID-19 symptoms, including running nose, sore throat, cough, or fever; they’re also encouraging families to make sure that children ages five and over get vaccinated at a Long Beach or Los Angeles County vaccination clinic.