Berkeley school district discusses updates to phased reopening of schools BUSD Board of Education/Courtesy BUSD Superintendent Brent Stephens presented updates on a projected timeline of reopening schools and designing a hybrid learning model with the Berkeley Federation of Teachers, or BFT. In a discussion of hybrid learning models for elementary schools, the school district and BFT agree on a model that implements distance learning in the morning and optional in-person learning in the afternoon, but they disagree on requiring COVID-19 testing for students.