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Update: At a town hall on March 17, Superintendent Stephens said that he does not expect any substitutes to be teaching students who remain in distance learning.
Update: At a town hall on March 16, Superintendent Brent Stephens said that he thinks distance learning students will be taught by BUSD teachers and substitutes will be used for in-person classes. “W
e may here and there have a substitute working in distance learning, but by and large I think our substitutes will be working in-person,” he said.
This is a change from what Stephens told Berkeleyside on Monday, that he would “prefer to have a mix of substitutes for in-person and distance learning.”
Berkeley parents protested outside BUSD headquarters and marched to Longfellow Middle School Saturday to ask the district to allow all students back to in-person classes. Photo: Pete Rosos
One year after Berkeley public schools shut their doors, and just a week after the district announced it would offer in-person elementary classes five days per week starting March 29, some parents are still pushing for middle and high schools to fully reopen. A protest this weekend was the latest action by a group of parents who have been advocating for reopening since the fall.
On Saturday afternoon, about 150 parents and kids marched from the Berkeley Unified School District offices on Bonar Street to Longfellow Middle School, where School Board Director Laura Babbitt and City Councilmember Rashi Kesarwani awaited the group.
I haven’t rolled out of bed for a rally since I practically majored in activism in college. But here I was on University Avenue in Berkeley at 9 a.m. on a Monday morning, along with dozens of other masked parents, waving our “Open Schools” signs at the honking traffic streaming by the Berkeley Unified School District office. Drivers of garbage trucks, tow trucks and delivery vehicles laid on their thundering horns.
Freshly caffeinated parents in favor of something that we used to take for granted full-time, five-days-a-week public education were riled up after the gut-punch announcement the night before from Berkeley Superintendent Brent Stephens, nearly a year into uninterrupted distance learning, that the reopening dates announced a few weeks earlier would, in reality, involve the continuation of a full, or nearly full, schedule of Zoom school for the majority of students through the end of the school year.