CUSD Coronavirus Update / New CDPH Directives

Press release from the Carlsbad Unified School District:

January 15, 2021

On January 14, the California Department of Public Health (CDPH) issued a new public health directive with new requirements for all public and private schools in the state. You can read the highlights in this all-county letter from Dr. Naomi Bardach, head of the CDPH’s recently formed Safe Schools for All Team. You can find the full directive and many other resources on the State of California’s Safe Schools for All Hub.

There are three items of immediate importance in the new public health directive.

First, the CDPH directive clearly states that “Schools may not reopen for grades 7-12 if the county is in the Purple Tier” unless they were already open while the county was in the Red Tier. As you may recall, San Diego County moved from the Red Tier to the Purple Tier on November 10, 2020.

The CDPH directive also creates a brand new definition for what it means for a school to be open, specifically explaining that “the school must have given all students in at least one grade the option to return for in-person instruction” while in the Red Tier.

In Carlsbad Unified, this is the case for our nine elementary schools and our continuation high school (Carlsbad Village Academy). We’ve been advised by our legal counsel that this is not the case for our three middle schools and two comprehensive high schools. While all students in each grade level had the option to return for in-person activities as part of Distance Learning 2.0+ (as we referred to Phase 2 of our phased reopening plan), this does not meet the requirement of in-person instruction in the new definition.

Second, in the new directive, CDPH makes clear that "under no circumstances should the distance between student chairs be less than 4 feet." This is new; previously, the CDPH document had indicated “six feet as practicable,” and our Board had agreed to space students at least three feet apart (with additional safety mitigations like air filtration).

Third, the new directive clearly requires all schools (including middle and high schools) to implement “stable groups” of students and staff for in person instruction. CDPH defines a stable group as “a group with fixed membership that stays together without mixing with any other groups for any activities” and is noted to be a “key mitigation layer in schools.” While this is not a problem at our elementary level, staff is discussing how this will be accomplished at the middle and high school levels, as it does not appear that we can run a traditional bell schedule with students mixing with students and teachers in multiple classes. We’re hoping for more clarification from CDPH on this issue.

Based on the new directive, we plan to continue to Phase 3 of our elementary reopening plan on January 25 (which involves a modified five-day per week schedule). In order to comply with the new directive to have students at least four feet apart, where necessary we will hire additional teachers and move some students from higher density classrooms into a new classroom with a new teacher. We are working as quickly as possible to make these roster changes and hire new staff. We anticipate that, in most of our elementary classrooms as currently rostered, we’ll be able to keep students four feet apart without additional staff. We’ll do our best to limit the disruption to as few classrooms as possible.

At the secondary level, we will not be allowed by CDPH to implement the hybrid schedule as planned on January 25. Based on the new directive, we are allowed to “provide in-person supervision, instruction, targeted support services, and facilitation of distance learning for some students, especially high-need student groups and students who may not be able to benefit fully from distance learning offerings.” As such, we are working now to implement a plan for our middle school and high school sites to offer an opportunity for our most vulnerable students to engage in distance learning from a classroom on campus while we remain in the Purple Tier. We already have cohorts of special education students and some students with chronic truancy issues meeting daily on campus; we’re evaluating our ability to expand this to include additional students on January 25, and will update you as soon as we have more information.

Our district has spent millions of dollars on upgrades to our ventilation systems, installation of air filtration units, and additional staff to reduce class sizes and increase cleaning and disinfection protocols. We negotiated an agreement with our teachers union, which was subsequently ratified by a majority of its members, so that we’d be ready to expand to Phase 3 of our reopening plan at both the elementary and secondary level on January 25. While it has been shared publicly that our teachers union withdrew support for the agreement after the new public health directive was released yesterday, we will continue to work closely with both certificated and classified staff to ensure the health and safety of our more than 1,000 employees and 11,000 students.

On January 20, our Board will hold a regular meeting and will hear an update from staff about the new public health directive and our response to it, including the items described above. We’ll send another update following that meeting.

This press release was produced by the Carlsbad Unified School District. The views expressed here are the author’s own.