The stark racial disparity among students returning to Sacramento City Unified classrooms
Vincent Li’s children, like thousands across the Sacramento City Unified School District, struggle with their Zoom classes. But Li can’t justify sending them back to campus.
With COVID-19 still active in the community, “I still feel like they’re not prepared for reopened schools,” said Li, whose children attend Earl Warren Elementary and Hiram Johnson High School.
“I just don’t have any other choice,” Li said. “Keeping my kids safe is the most important thing, and being at home is better than being at school.”
Li is one of thousands of Asian and Asian American families at Sacramento City Unified schools choosing to keep their children at home as the district begins to reopen its classrooms.
Only about one in three Asian households in the district will send their children back to the classroom in the district — the lowest rate of any ethnic group, and a trend that’s been reflected in school districts nationwide.
Of the 32,600 students who responded to a district survey, just over half said they planned to return to in-person instruction. In comparison to Asian American students, 71% of white students, 55% of Black students and 52% of Latino students plan to return to the classroom.
The school district’s Asian students are a deeply diverse group, representing a wide range of income brackets and ethnic groups, including Laotian, Japanese, Vietnamese, Filipino and Indian communities, among others. For example, a plurality of Asian students at Sac City, nearly one third, are Hmong American. Those students live in families with one of the lowest levels of household income on average for Asian Americans. Meanwhile, about one in four students are Chinese American, who on average have a higher household income level.
The reasons why many Asian families are keeping their children home are similarly varied, advocates said — some may be working from home and can afford childcare, while others may be working low-wage essential jobs without the flexibility to pick up kids at different schools at different times. Many feel the threat of COVID-19 still looms large, and some have grown accustomed to their distance learning routine.
“Since the whole shutdown, I aligned my schedule to align with their classes and now I work the graveyard shift,” said Koy Saechao, a casino worker and single mother with three children in the district. “It didn’t make sense to send them back with two months left” in the school year.
The nationwide trend of Asian and Asian American families keeping their children at home comes as fears of anti-Asian attacks and abuse — heightened since the pandemic first emerged — intensified after shootings at three Atlanta-area spas left eight people dead, including six Asian women.
Asian discrimination on the rise
Sacramento, like other cities across the country, has seen a dramatic rise in attacks and discrimination against Asian Americans in the last year. The Stop AAPI Hate Reporting Center received nearly 1,700 reports of anti-Asian discrimination in California since the pandemic began.
Stephanie Nguyen, executive director of Asian Resources Inc., said she hasn’t heard of any family who’s concerned about anti-Asian violence specifically against their children, but she has heard repeated worries about bullying.
“When the virus first came out and kids were talking about it before we even knew it was going to be a pandemic, I know some Asian American kids were being made fun of,” Nguyen said. “Kids were saying, ‘It came from you, if you’re Asian you had it, because it came from China.’“
Nguyen said she knows of at least one family whose daughter was bullied in the early days of the pandemic, when then-President Donald Trump regularly referred to the coronavirus as the “Chinese virus.”
“The kid was crying, saying these kids were saying she had the coronavirus,” Nguyen said. “Having a kid go back to that and potentially be bullied, I don’t think any parent wants that.”
Michelle Lee Mahon chose to send both her children, a third grader and ninth grader, back to campus. The adults in her family have been vaccinated, and Mahon wants to return to normalcy. But she noticed about one-third of the students in her son’s third grade class chose not to return to in-person instruction. Half of those students were Asian American, she said.
Mahon said the thought of bullying crossed her mind as her son in ninth grade steps foot on his high school campus for the first time, but added “we can’t live in fear.” She credits the district’s strong stance against racism and the diversity on both of her sons’ campuses in helping her make her decision.
Her only brush with anything that resembled anti-Asian discrimination was in her South Land Park neighborhood when she was talking to a Filipino neighbor and a man approached them asking if they were from the area.
“That was my first wake up call,” she said. “So I talked to my kids about profiling, and being treated differently. And it made me cautious and more mindful for my older child.”
District’s commitment to fighting racism
Sacramento City Unified Superintendent Jorge Aguilar said in a recent statement that the district’s “commitment to anti-racism, anti-hate, and anti-violence remain firm.”
“The recent anti-Asian hate crimes, along with the killings of many Black Americans, serve as stark reminders of the work we still need to do; the work we must do to eradicate systemic racism. Solidarity events like the Black and Asian community rallies against hate give us hope. In Sac City, we have been clear on our long-term commitment to Anti-racism work, both individual and systemic.”
District officials recognized that the decision to return to campus may not be easy for all families.
“As we reopen schools, we know that fear, uncertainty and stress are natural reactions to change,” Aguilar said in a statement to The Sacramento Bee. “However, we must also acknowledge the pain of our AAPI community members, who have not only been disproportionately impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, but have also been increasingly targeted for hate crimes over the past year. A little over a year ago, prominent elected leaders were referring to COVID-19 as a product of China which triggered anti-Asian rhetoric and acts targeting our AAPI community. We continue to see the consequences of such statements, as many of our Asian students may not feel safe even leaving their homes.
“While we can communicate that our students will be safe at our schools, the damage over the last year will be difficult to unwind. As a district, we are already suffering the impacts of structural racism and attempting to dismantle longstanding policies and practices that have hurt our students. We continue our commitment to anti-racism and anti-hate on behalf of our students and our community.”
Tim Fong, an Ethnic Studies professor at California State University, Sacramento, said the fact that many Asian American families are choosing not to send their children back to campuses tells a broader story about the concerns in the community.
“Violence against Asian Americans might have some impact on this,” Fong said. “And there is a heightened awareness of potential harm, not always from the school, but from outside.”
Fong referenced the 1989 shooting at a Stockton elementary school where a gunman killed five schoolchildren and injured 32 others. The five children, ranging from ages six to nine, were Asian. At the time, the shooting was not labeled as a hate crime, but then-California Attorney General John Van de Kamp said his office found the murder had “festering hatred” against Southeast Asian immigrants.
“The most vulnerable people are being targeted: older women and children,” Fong said. “They are not doing this to deserve this violence, just walking or working while Asian.”
Nguyen said for many, the overarching theme from Asian families is a fear of potential COVID-19 exposure. Sacramento’s Pacific Islanders were hit particularly hard by COVID-19, and Asian Americans are over-represented in medical fields. According to The Washington Post, some families who have seen the first-hand effects of COVID-19 hospitalizations may choose to keep their children home.
She has talked to some parents who work full-time jobs at supermarkets along Stockton Boulevard and will keep their kids at home, since they don’t have the flexibility to pick up their children early on half-days.
Nguyen said some Asian parents may have learned English as a second language in school, or have children who are learning English. That experience may give families a sense of confidence that their kids will be able to overcome educational setbacks from continuing to distance learn through the end of the school year.
“For every family, you have to do what works best for you,” Nguyen said. “Even within my own circle of friends, they’ve chosen to stay home too. Most of us have left it up for our kids to decide.”
Lisa Fong chose to keep her two children home for the remainder of the school year rather than send them back to in-person classes at Sutterville Elementary School, where two-thirds of students have returned.
The high return rate there surprised Fong, who works as a part-time teacher in Elk Grove Unified School District. In her first grade classroom of nearly all Asian students, only five out of 24 student returned to in-person instruction.
“I tried to make sense of it,” she said. “I trust the teachers will put safety measures in place to mitigate the spread (of the virus), but I wasn’t willing to risk the safety aspect. For us, the benefit didn’t outweigh the risks.”
This story was originally published April 12, 2021 at 5:00 AM.