While school districts across California are choosing remote learning to start the school year, the Orange County Board of Education is going a different route. On Monday night, the conservative-leaning board voted on its own guidelines for schools: a return to the old ways, before the coronavirus pandemic.
That means on-campus instruction. No face masks. No keeping 6 feet apart.
The lone dissenting vote was Trustee Beckie Gomez, also the only board member to wear a mask during the meeting.
The board has no power to direct any of Orange County’s 27 school districts to follow its guidelines, which are in direct opposition to those issued by the Orange County Department of Education, state public health officials and others.
When and how districts will reopen is left up to individual districts, which are mostly following guidelines set by state and public health agencies, as well as new rules set out in California’s 2020-21 budget and Senate Bill 98.
UPDATE: O.C. School Board’s symbolic bid to put kids in class grabs attention
Monday night’s meeting struck a similar note to a forum called by the board last month, when most of the health and public policy guest experts represented one side: against masks and social distancing.
Children, they said, have little to no risk of getting coronavirus and restricting them to distance learning can cause serious consequences to their educational progress and emotional well-being.
“Our children are not dying of COVID,” one woman said, adding that youth under 18 have a greater chance of drowning or being killed in a car crash.
Parents, and not government officials, should decide what’s best for their kids, and “participation in any reopening of public education should be voluntary,” according to the report supported by Trustees Mari Barke, Ken Williams, Lisa Sparks and Tim Shaw. Among other things, the report states that the idea that children should wear face masks to prevent spread of the infectious disease is “fallacious and lacks science and data to support this notion.”
Al Mijares, Orange County superintendent of schools, said the guidelines coming from state and public health officials to wear face masks and follow other protocols “are not just suggestions.”
“We view them as mandates,” Mijares said late Monday night. “You can’t diss all of that and not follow it. It carries weight.”
His department, along with local education leaders, issued its own guidelines on June 19 that closely follow state recommendations. When news got out that the Board of Education planned to endorse the opposite, Mijares issued a statement Monday noting that board and the county’s Department of Education have different roles. (He was on vacation and did not attend the evening meeting.)
On Monday, officials with both Los Angeles Unified and San Diego Unified said they plan to open in the fall with distance learning.
Gov. Gavin Newsom, who on Monday ordered the renewed shutdown of churches, gyms, bars and other indoor places where people gather, may soon come out with more mandates for schools also, some educators said.
Orange County school districts, meanwhile, are looking at different options. Most are considering plans that allow for flexibility, offering online and hybrid models but with the ability to jump into a strict online model or full-time on-campus model, depending on whether the number of coronavirus cases go up and down.
Monday night’s discussion and vote were premised on the June 24 board forum and a report that stemmed from input offered by 11 guest speakers, including Clayton Chau, director of the OC Health Care Agency.
Most of the speakers at that meeting expressed conservative viewpoints in what has become a partisan rather than medical issue. Five of the experts, for example, were among a group who sent President Donald Trump a letter on May 19 calling the shutdown “a mass casualty incident.” Two of them, along with a third speaker, referred to the pandemic in their bios as the “Wuhan Virus” or the “Wuhan Corona virus” – terms that are offensive to Asian Americans as their population sees a spike in discrimination and xenophobic attacks linked to the virus that originated in China.
That meeting was welcomed by those who want schools to return to normal and criticized by others who called it a one-sided forum with cherry-picked experts.
Monday’s meeting was also both praised and criticized. More than 2,000 comments came into the Orange County board but it was not known late Monday in what camp those commenters fall into.
Cyndie Borcoman, a former counselor with the Orange County Department of Education, criticized the board after the meeting for playing “partisan politics.”
“It was a sham of a meeting with charter school parents and anti maskers getting…(to) speak at the meeting and no questions taken from Zoom or by social media, like other city and school board meetings elsewhere,” wrote Borcoman, an advisory board member of the non-profit Stand Up for Kids, in an email to the Register.
Meanwhile, thousands of people followed the meeting online. And by early Tuesday, a petition urging the board to follow California guidelines for reopening schools had more than 40,000 signatures. The board, petitioners said, has “a moral imperative and a social duty to prioritize the safety of our schools,” including the use of mandatory masks and social distancing.
During the meeting in Costa Mesa Monday night, most of the 22 speakers allowed to address the board said they want schools to return to normal. One of those speakers was Jeff Barke, the husband of Board President Mari Barke.
A former school board member at Los Alamitos Unified, Jeff Barke is also a doctor who has shared his views against face masks on social media and while demonstrating in Huntington Beach. He helped found a charter school in Orange with a curriculum focused on “classical education.” On Monday night, he thanked the board for another stance they took during their meeting: a resolution urging the California Legislature and Gov. Newsom to support funding for growing school districts and charter schools.
In approving the 2020-21 budget, Newsom ensured that school districts will receive the same amount of money they were getting as of February, before the coronavirus school shutdown. But that has left growing schools facing a new year with more students and not enough money to support them.
Some observers say the move was pushed by powerful teacher unions that don’t want to see charter schools grow during the pandemic, as some families shop around for what school environment best suits their children.
“I am dismayed at the level of discrimination our legislators have shown against California students in regard to the school funding that is meant to follow them from public school to public school by diverting it to districts who have been experiencing steadily declining enrollment…,” Placentia parent Windi Eklund told the board.
Mijares, the Orange County superintendent, agrees that state leaders need to take another look at the funding cap.
“It’s problematic,” he said.
Some of the local schools that could be hurt by it, Mijares said, include the Samueli Academy in Santa Ana, (Orange County’s first campus designed to serve foster children,) and the TLC Public Charter School in Orange, (which serves elementary-age students with a range of needs.) Both are growing but their funding would be limited under the recently approved state budget.
In signing SB-98, the rider to the 2020-21 budget which spells out new rules for reopening schools, Newsom acknowledged that some students may lose their preferred school spots. He urged legislators to find a fix.
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OC Board of Education votes to support return to school without social distancing, masks - OCRegister
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