Sonoma school district to parents: Ready your children with good COVID behavior

Anticipating the eventual reopening of schools, Sonoma Valley’s school district is asking families and caregivers to prepare students for the rules of reentry, while the district creates parent handbooks and readies campuses.

Sonoma County remains in the Purple tier, the state’s most restrictive category based on the California Blueprint for a Safer Economy, which prevents the school district from welcoming students back on campus.

“It’s not like a light switch,” said Socorro Shiels, superintendent of Sonoma Valley Unified School District, about returning to on-campus learning. The district can be as prepared as possible, but it needs students to be practiced in all the safety precautions they will need to adhere to at school.

That means temperature testing, wearing masks at all times while on campus, washing hands regularly and properly, and complying with social distancing rules. Shiels said they really need the help of families and caregivers to make sure children will be able to do these things the moment the district is allowed to reopen campuses.

Administrators are reviewing various models of reentry and are in contact with school districts in Napa and Marin counties — which are both in the Orange tier and allowed to reopen schools — to learn best practices, and learn from their mistakes.

Shiels said the district will send out parent handbooks in advance of reopening to explain how the district expects children to behave in the classroom and on the playground, and plan for students to go home for lunch.

“It’s a very thoughtful, very dense” handbook designed to be read “with a lens of a parent,” and will include videos, said Andrew Ryan, director of human resources.

Behavior guidelines are not limited to children, Ryan and Shiels said. Parents are asked to not medicate children for fevers and other symptoms and send them to school. Pre-pandemic, children arriving at school with flu-like symptoms was largely overlooked, but it is not something district officials can turn a blind eye to any more.

The first phase in of reopening starts with special education students who need individualized one-on-one support, then small cohorts of students who are struggling the most. A hybrid model starting with the youngest grades would follow next with an alternating schedule of a portion of students learning on campus, and another portion at home.

A slow introduction of adding higher grades over segments of two to three weeks allows everyone to adjust to the new patterns, Shiels said.

Site-specific plans are necessary because each school has a different layout and varying needs, but every site will have an “isolation room,” Shiels said. Each school will have signs and procedures in place for such things as drop-off and pick-up, and flow of pedestrian traffic — like one-way street traffic — in school hallways to limit the amount of physical interaction between students, said Bruce Abbott, associate superintendent for the district.

The district continues to have discussions with its “labor partners” — the teachers and classified staff unions — to assess their comfort level in returning to on-campus learning.

Ryan said one of their surveys indicated that there was still “significant” gut-level discomfort until a viable vaccine were widely available. There are quite a few employees with children who attend district schools, Shiels said, meaning that the comfort level includes both the worker and the student.

When the time comes — and given the timeframe necessary to be given permission to reopen is a minimum of four weeks out, and probably longer with the approach of holidays — parents will have a choice of sending their child back to campus or not.

“The next decision parents make is likely to be one they have to stick with until the end of the school year,” Shiels said. “There is less wiggle room because everything is so complex.”

The Presentation School on Broadway, the first Sonoma County school to do reopen and not part of the Sonoma Valley district, did so in early October. Enrollment at its one campus is fewer than 200 students compared to Sonoma Valley Unified’s more than 3,800 students on eight campuses.

“We can’t turn on a dime,” Abbott said.

The independent school’s ability to spread out its fewer students gave it an advantage when Presentation was granted a state waiver to reopen.

It is another example of equity disparity in the county, Abbott said, and one of the major contributors to Sonoma County’s feet being stuck in purple mud.

In order for the county to move to the less restrictive Red tier it must hold coronavirus positive testing rates and other indicators for two weeks, then maintain or improve those numbers for another two weeks.

The state issued a new health equity metric in early October to help counties reduce COVID-19 cases among those who have been disproportionately affected by the pandemic, which in Sonoma is the Latinx community.

The pandemic has “exaggerated” the disparity in the district’s well-to-do and low-income families, Abbott said.

There is a high level of stress among families who are unable to stay home from work and help their children with distance learning. Depression, loneliness and anxiety are on the rise with older students, Shiels said, and the district has in place on its website access to non-emergency emotional and mental health support.

There is a form that can be filled out to request support, and students who are 12 years or older can request assistance for themselves. If someone has difficulty filling out the form they can call 234-7379 and leave a message. For non-emergency medical questions and health support, district nurses and health staff are available to answer questions and connect families to medical resources in the community; families can email svusdhealthy@sonomaschools.org or call 200-8127.

If someone prefers support services from outside of the school district they can call Care Solace 888-515-0595. Anyone with a medical or psychiatric emergency should call 911 immediately.

Contact Anne at anne.ernst@sonomanews.com.