Sonoma County campus leaders tell state schools chief of rising toll from disasters, power outages
Sonoma County’s top school officials say recurring wildfires and floods in the region and related hardships such as power shut-offs have emptied classrooms, strained resources and hit campus budgets, leaving the educators scrambling for help amid disasters that have upended school schedules year after year.
Since 2017, the county’s public schools together have missed the equivalent of more than four years of instructional days, according to the county’s Office of Education.
School officials say the extended disruptions — stemming from catastrophic fires in 2017 and 2018, floods this year and last, and PG&E’s expanding scope of power outages — have dealt a severe blow to the education of local students.
The state has been caught flatfooted in the crisis, educators say.
That was the message Friday to state Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond, who met in Santa Rosa with most of the county’s 40 district superintendents to learn about their experience facing disasters in the past two years.
Santa Rosa City Schools Superintendent Diann Kitamura told Thurmond that closing schools in a county with a large working-class population goes beyond simply a loss of school hours.
“I have a real concern that when I close schools, 54% of my students probably have nowhere to go,” she said. “They don’t get to go get a hotel. They don’t get to have a vacation.”
The loss of instructional time in Sonoma County has been staggering in the past three school years.
Since 2017, because of natural disasters and power shut-offs, local schools have collectively missed about 786 days in the classroom, according to Sonoma County Superintendent of Schools Steven Herrington. The typical school year is 180 days.
The loss has forced educators to restructure lessons to ease re-entry for returning students, said Brandon Krueger, superintendent of Windsor Unified School District.
“We don’t want this to be a ‘catch up on everything we lost in two weeks,’” he said in an interview, referring to changes made in the wake of the Kincade fire that menaced Windsor and shut schools countywide last week. “We want this to be, ‘How do we reset and logically and comfortably get back into the rigor of the curriculum?’”
California needs to do better to respond to the new era of challenges faced by schools, Thurmond said. “I’ll be blunt. A lot of policy decisions are made by non-educators that aren’t hearing the perspective of what’s needed in classrooms,” Thurmond said in the meeting at the county Office of Education. “The impact on students has to always be at the center of everything we do. I just think there are other systems that aren’t thinking about that, especially when they don’t (come and) ask what you need.”
Identifying a way to make up for lost classroom time was the most pressing issue for area educators.
In a letter to state congressional leaders Monday, Herrington requested their support for a bill that would fund a disaster relief summer school program that districts could voluntarily participate in if they missed five or more days in one year.
On Friday, Herrington also mentioned a possible switch to a year-round school calendar, with a nine-week instruction period followed by three weeks of break. October, which typically marks the peak of wildfire season in the North Bay, would fall in a break.