Beverly Hills Schools Game Out Reopening Plan

BEVERLY HILLS, CA — Once again, the Beverly Hills Unified School District is going back to the drawing board. After LA County changed its reopening threshold and announced Monday that students in grades K-6 could return to campus if the schools have received a waiver or submitted a safety plan, the district announced that it was reassessing the needs of its families and staff.

Superintendent Dr. Michael Bregy sent a survey to the families of TK-5 students that provided three tentative options: that students stay with their current teacher, either virtually or in-person; that students move to the approved model of in-person learning, even if that means new teachers; or remaining in virtual learning, which may also result in new teachers.

District spokesperson Rebecca Starkins told Patch that the survey results will inform a revised reopening plan currently being negotiated.

“A family might be in a situation where they were working from home, and now they’re back at work, so they really need that different option,” she said. “It was important to us that we check with our parent community to see where they were at... what we will then do is aggregate all the data, look at the data points, and then need to compare what are the teacher accommodations.”

Starkins said that the district will offer fully virtual and hybrid, in-person options, and will try its best to honor the preferences of each family, even if it can’t guarantee students will stay with their current teacher.

“Teachers may have underlying health conditions where they may need an accommodation and may be unable to return to in-person learning, so we then need to look at what are those requirements, and then we need to patch everything together,” she said. “So it’s not a guarantee for the parents, which we made very clear, however we will do our best to honor the parents’ requests, because their needs matter to us - however we’re trying to take into consideration the needs of everyone in our community, including our employees, including our parents, including our students.”

In December, the district and the teacher’s union agreed upon a hybrid learning model called LIVE@BHUSD that will be used once for families that wish to return to campus. Per the plan, elementary school students will be divided into separate morning and afternoon cohorts, and attend physical school for five days a week for instruction in English, math, science and social studies. On Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday, they will attend school for two hours and 20 minutes, and on Wednesday, they will attend school for one hour and 30 minutes. For the rest of the day, they will receive virtual instruction in physical education, art, MakerSpace, music, and science lab.

Before that can be implemented, the district and the Beverly Hills Education Association need to agree on the metrics for safely reopening. In December, the BHEA and the BHUSD reached a Memorandum of Understanding that they would follow the state’s color tier system for reopening. They agreed that grades TK-2 would be able to return once the L.A. County adjusted case rate - meaning the 7-day average of daily COVID-19 cases per 100,000 with a seven-day lag, adjusted for number of tests performed - reached 7. Once the adjusted case rate falls below 7 for 14 days, the county would move into the Red Tier, and after 14 more days, students in grades 3, 4, 5, 6, and 9 would be able to return to campus. After the case rate remains under 7 for another week, grades 7, 8, 10, 11, and 12 would return.

The BHEA has not returned Patch's calls for comment.

Now, the state and county have upped the adjusted case rate requirement to 25 for elementary schools to reopen, and LA County is currently at 20. Beverly Hills has submitted a thorough safety plan to the state, passed a Department of Public Health inspection, and received waivers to reopen its two elementary schools. Still, it cannot open without a revised agreement with staff, so the district wants to take in parent and staff feedback first, and then give staff ten days official notice once all the details are worked out.

It may be a minute.

“We are in constant communication with our labor partners to change this appendix to reflect the new Adjusted Case Rate ‘25 metric’, but we need your help to ensure that your needs and requirements, as a family, are met as much as possible,” Bregy wrote in an email to elementary school parents.