SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Three weeks after Gov. Gavin Newsom unveiled his ambitious plan to get California elementary school students back in their classrooms when COVID-19 conditions improve, educators are unwilling
The transition from Trump to Biden is already being felt in San Diego [The San Diego Union-Tribune]
It’s only been a few days, and already the official transition of power in Washington, D.C., has touched San Diego in concrete ways.
A flurry of executive orders from President Joe Biden’s first 24 hours in office has halted construction on border wall projects, pledged further protection for the county’s 27,000 DACA recipients, and frozen deportation orders for an unknown number of local migrants.
The immediate changes, if only temporary, mark the sharp ideological contrast between the Trump and Biden administrations, and are just the beginning of more drastic changes expected in the coming days and weeks.
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Educators remain in limbo. For some, Newsom’s proposal threatens to upend months of work they’ve done to craft local plans based on the state’s summer guidance. Those rules link reopening to a county’s ability to stay out of California’s most restrictive virus conditions tier for at least 14 days, with case-by-case exceptions, while setting rules on protective equipment, COVID-19 testing and contact tracing.
Those rules were put in place five months ago. No one expected that Newsom would wait to change them until five days after Christmas.
“I was very excited that we had our plan,” said Campbell Union School District Supt. Shelly Viramontez during Thursday’s state Senate committee hearing. “And it feels like yet again, the goalposts moved. And things have changed. And there are new requirements that were never known before.”
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Addressing the San Diego Unified School District’s decision this month to hold off on setting a date to reopen campuses, a district official spoke during the La Jolla Cluster Association’s Jan. 21 meeting about the need for coronavirus testing, vaccinations and a lower rate of infections before such a date can be identified.
San Diego Unified schools have been closed to in-person instruction since March because of the pandemic, except for limited support for eligible students who are struggling.
Andrew Sharp, chief public information officer for SDUSD, told the cluster, which is made up of the five La Jolla schools in the district, that “we could not reopen at this point based on the spread of the virus. The [county’s] positivity rate … would have to get below 28 [per 100,000 residents] … for schools to be able to take the next step as far as reopening.”