Sonoma County education, public health officials at odds over school reopening guidelines

After months of distance learning and the latest round of shelter-in-place orders in Sonoma County, tensions are simmering among officials tasked with one of the most crucial pieces of the fallout from the coronavirus pandemic — reopening in-person instruction for the county’s approximately 70,000 school children.

Barring the 10 small elementary schools that have received waivers to reopen for in-person instruction in modified form, Sonoma County students, and by extension their families, have been in distance learning since mid-March when all campuses where shuttered as the pandemic took hold.

And as grade reports and mental health surveys indicate negative outcomes for thousands of students who haven’t seen the inside of a classroom for months, pressure is mounting on officials to offer solutions.

“I understand … and I know (Public Health Officer Dr. Sundari) Mase understands, that this is a really difficult time right now,” said Adam Radtke, a deputy county counsel who has consulted on much of the public health guidance for schools.

“(School officials) are dealing with a whole lot of political pressure from all sides and also dealing with a novel coronavirus that we are still learning about,” he said.

Radtke and Mase met with superintendents of secondary schools from across the county Thursday to go over existing guidance on how middle and high school students, who typically have six different classes and six different teachers per day, would be able to return to campus while keeping potential exposure to a minimum.

County and state guidance continues to tout the flexibility of its recommendations as an advantage for individual schools and districts. But officials at Santa Rosa City Schools, the largest school district in Sonoma County with nearly 16,000 students — more than 10,000 of whom are on secondary campuses — contend they need more concrete direction.

“That was kind of our push (Thursday). We appreciate the flexibility, we appreciate the local control, but it has created a divide between parents and teachers. Parents are on one side of the spectrum and teachers are on the other,” she said. “Flexibility does not help us in terms of working with our stakeholders.”

Kitamura pointed to language in the Sonoma County Office of Education “Roadmap to Safe Reopening” which calls for schools to “identify an isolation room or area to separate anyone who has COVID-19 symptoms” as a point of conflict with stakeholders.

“Is it a room or an area? What does ’area’ mean? That just becomes a point of contention between labor, management and parents,” she said. “Just say ’room,’ let it be a room.”

That road map, first released in June, was crafted from guidance from the Sonoma County Department of Health Services, the Centers for Disease Control, California Department of Public Health and the California Department of Public Education, as well as a number of district superintendents from across the county, including Kitamura.

A bigger unresolved issue is the number of cohorts allowed on secondary campuses. Officials have long expressed confidence that elementary-age students will be easier to return to classrooms in a hybrid format once Sonoma County advances from the purple tier, the most restrictive in the state’s coronavirus reopening plan, into the red tier. But the worry has been that middle and high school schedules with significantly more movement between peers and classrooms will be more complicated.

“Really the bottom line is the more mixing of different students and teachers, the more interactions between people, the higher the risk,“ Mase said. “I think that each school has to determine what they think is appropriate risk.”

“I really think each school needs to look at their own numbers, their own layout, their plan, and determine if they think that is a safe approach,” she said.

The county health department will work with schools and districts on their plan but is not tasked with granting approval of a school district’s cohort and scheduling plan, Radtke said.

“We are working with the existing guidance. We want as well for the state to do more to provide clarification and greater detail in exactly what they mean in certain portions of their existing guidance where there is a lot of discretion or a lot of things left open to interpretation,” he said.

But that flexibility leaves districts exposed to myriad issues, including lawsuits and labor disputes, Kitamura said.

“When they said ’Well really it’s a risk that you are going to have to manage, it’s like, wow it’s a lot of life and death weight on a school district. It’s a lot of responsibility on a school district,” she said. “I’m used to a lot of responsibility. That’s not the problem. But when we are talking potential health, and life and death — it’s a little different.”

“I’m not casting blame on Dr. Mase and Adam (Radtke). I really think it’s bigger than all of us. I think there is fear of liability, I think there is political pressure,” she said.

And those pressures come as Sonoma County is facing what Mase has called the “darkest days of the pandemic.” Sonoma County on Wednesday reported more than 600 new daily cases, a near doubling of the previous high of 343 daily cases two weeks ago.

Amid a surge in cases, the state in late November stopped issuing waivers allowing elementary campuses to reopen. Ten Sonoma County schools, nine of them private and one a public school with about 20 students, had already been granted waivers. Three of those have reported cases of coronavirus associated with the school.

The Presentation School in Sonoma, the first school in the county to receive a state-sanctioned waiver, reported three people associated with the school tested positive for coronavirus in November, but the school’s operations were not affected. School officials have not disclosed whether those infected were students, parents or staff members.

Two other schools, which county officials declined to identify this week, also reported cases within approximately the past 30 days which required contact investigations but neither closed.

You can reach Staff Writer Kerry Benefield at 707-526-8671 or kerry.benefield@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @benefield.