Which districts in California are most likely to have open schools? Here’s what the data shows
Claire Conway took over her father’s desk in their living room in March 2020, preparing for a few weeks of distance learning.
But then came her scheduled week-long trip to Sly Park, and her sixth grade promotion, and she was still home. The doors to her Phoebe Hearst Elementary classroom were still shut.
One year later, Claire is in seventh grade, experiencing middle school only through Zoom and Google Classroom.
“I kept telling myself the worst-case scenario is that this will be over at the end of the school year,” Claire said. “And that didn’t happen last year. Now I wonder if it will happen this year.”
Meanwhile, Claire often sees her teacher on Zoom wave goodbye to her own children as they grab their belongings and leave for school in a neighboring county.
“It reminds me that there are kids who don’t live that far away and are able to go to school,” Claire said.
She’s said she’s reached a point of frustration.
Most of Sacramento County’s 250,000 public school students are still learning from home. But drive north to Placer County, or east to El Dorado County, and thousands of students have returned to in-person instruction in the fall.
The reason may have a lot to do with politics. Across the Sacramento region and state, Republican-leaning areas have largely opened schools, while Democratic-leaning areas have largely not.
The Bee matched voter precinct data from the 2020 presidential election with maps showing the boundaries of the region’s 30 largest public school districts. All but one of the 18 districts where Trump received the highest levels of support already offer face-to-face or hybrid learning for elementary school students.
Just three of the remaining 12 school districts — the ones where Trump saw the least support — offer face-to-face or hybrid learning, though most plan to do so soon.
The same pattern repeats itself throughout the state: The map of schools with face-to-face learning looks a lot like the map showing areas that voted for Trump.
The divide can be explained in part by COVID-19 transmission patterns. Infection rates are highest in densely populated areas that tend to vote Democratic. For much of the pandemic, state and local rules have made it hard for schools to open for face-to-face learning in areas where infection rates are high.
However, infection rates were low enough in the fall for many districts in Democratic-leaning areas to open, but they did not.
Under current state guidelines, any district in a county with fewer than 25 new daily cases per 100,000 residents can open elementary schools for in-person instruction, so long as they submit a safety plan. All counties in the Sacramento region have sat below that rate for weeks.
California Republicans have consistently been among the loudest calling for face-to-face learning, echoing Trump, who often made similar demands, even when infection rates were high. California’s Democratic state leaders have taken a more cautious tone.
On Friday, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a law to send $2 billion to help schools reopen by April 1. The deal will allocate $2 billion in grants for schools that decide to reopen by the end of this month. To receive the funding, schools in the counties under the state’s most restrictive purple tier will have to open kindergarten through second grade classrooms.
Amid the celebration, members on the press call said the signing was only the first step of many to solving the state’s yearlong, patchwork approach to reopening schools.
Despite weeks of negotiations, the deal failed to completely appease critics.
Parents groups say the deal doesn’t go far enough to reopen classrooms for kids who’ve suffered a year of Zoom calls and valuable in-person interaction with school staff and classmates.
Unions have also said that the plan doesn’t include strong enough testing requirements, and scrutinized recent changes to the state’s tier system as jeopardizing employee safety.
Though most GOP lawmakers voted in favor of the legislation, several scolded their colleagues and hammered Newsom for taking an entire year to hash out a strategy to get kids back into the classroom. Even then, they argued, it was too late to make up a year of learning loss and social-emotional damage.
“We have to say California gets an F. It gets an F in how it dealt with education,” said Assemblyman James Gallagher, R-Yuba City. “It deemed education not essential...and it’s a travesty that that happened on our watch.”
Reopening in Trump Country
The 10 school districts in the Sacramento region where voters most heavily favored Trump are mostly in rural or exurban areas. They cover much of El Dorado and Placer counties.
Some of those schools have since returned to full, five-day in-person schedules. Rescue Union in El Dorado County returned to its traditional schedule on March 4, Rocklin Unified switch to a full-day on April 6.
Roseville high school students attend classes every day, though the teachers union pushed back on the district’s model. Roseville Joint Union High School District board members like Heidi Hall and Pete Constant ran on “reopen schools” platforms in the November 2020 election, winning the votes of many parents who wanted their children to return to campus.
Folsom Cordova Unified is the first Sacramento County school district to reopen campuses, bringing 56% of its elementary-aged students back on campus in a hybrid model in November. The district brought sixth graders back to their middle school campuses on March 4.
Republican Assemblyman Kevin Kiley, who represents El Dorado Hills, Folsom, Granite Bay, Roseville and the Rocklin area, has long been calling for the state to reopen K-12 campuses. His chief of staff, Joshua Hoover, is a Folsom Cordova school board member who voted to bring students back in a 4-1 vote in October.
Kiley said he isn’t sure if the divide is along party lines, but said the strength of teachers’ unions in urban areas like San Francisco and Los Angeles make school reopenings difficult to achieve.
“It is sheer politics that keeps schools closed, and aggravating all of these families,” Kiley said. “Negotiations at the capital — it’s all politics.”
Kiley has been critical of Gov. Newsom’s coronavirus strategy and supported the recall efforts.
“We have a governor that is captured by special interest groups, more than any governor in our history,” he said. “You can look at it as a partisan line if you want, I think that is secondary.”
Urban-suburban-rural divides
Dr. Lisa Pruitt, a UC Davis Law professor who is an expert in the urban/rural divide and income inequality, said partisan school reopenings are no surprise when the pandemic became so polarized along party lines to begin with.
“The red and blue camps have chosen to take different risks, and interpret the scientific data consistent with political polarization,” she said.
Republican states like Texas and Florida lifted many of their COVID-19 safety protocols.
“People do decide what risks they are willing to take, based on their political leanings,” she said. “It’s a matter of which risks you choose to live with.”
But those political leanings can stem from cultural and generational attitudes, and don’t respect salient lines between urban, suburban, and rural areas.
Some people from rural communities tend to be less receptive toward government intervention, Pruitt said, leaning in on a proud history of self-sufficiency.
“Rural places are more static and more traditional,” Pruitt said, adding that people outside of cities have a better sense of their vulnerabilities, accepting hardships — informing their attitude towards the coronavirus pandemic. “When something like the pandemic comes along, some people may say: life is tough, people will die, but we are doing the best we can. In urban places, we are more convinced that we can control our destiny.”
It wasn’t too long ago that places like Folsom were considered exurbs, just further out from suburban neighborhoods. Many people who live outside of the city are just one generation removed from farm life.
“They are more likely to have a rural mindset,” she said. “And that plays out in Folsom, Elk Grove, and Placerville.”
In many school districts, voters were relatively divided between Trump and Biden. Of these 10 districts, eight are back to face-to-face learning and two are distance learning only.
Many Sacramento, Yolo parents want campuses to reopen
Some Sacramento County parents have staged protests to reopen schools. Others have called on their school boards to take action sooner.
Daniel Conway, a parent of four children in the district, said he is concerned about the social and academic regression that children may experience.
His children, ages 5, 8, 13, and 15, have varying challenges when it comes to distance learning. His youngest loses interest during classes, and his oldest says he isn’t learning enough in his Spanish 1 class to move on to Spanish 2.
“It’s getting harder and harder to set expectations,” Conway said. “You try to compensate for that, but that’s not something every family has the capacity to do. That’s where people will see long-term implications.”
Conway said he wished urban schools would take advantage of the warm winter and hold outdoor activities for students, particularly those who are most vulnerable.
Conway’s concerns are not unique to Sacramento.
A new study from Lives in the Balance, a non-profit organization that provides resources for behaviorally challenging kids, shows that 43% are less optimistic about their child’s future, 56% say their child has regressed emotionally and 42% say their child has regressed educationally.
Founder of Lives in the Balance and child psychologist Dr. Ross Greene said parents want their children back on campus for multiple reasons.
“If you’re confident your kids are going to college, and your kids are doing well academically, you’re still optimistic,” Greene said. “But you may be more concerned about health, social, emotional functioning.”
Those sentiments ran high at school board meetings in Rocklin and Roseville, where scores of parents relayed to the school board that their children were feeling isolated, stressed and depressed while learning at home.
About 13% of Davis parents voted for Trump, but parents across political parties are now calling for Davis Joint Unified to reopen, especially since Yolo County entered the red tier.
“I thought I was going to have to be wading in with Trump supporters and COVID deniers,” Davis parent Mike Creedon told The Sacramento Bee in February, after he joined local efforts to reopen schools. “And what I found is mostly progressive people. Mostly liberals. It’s people who never before would dream of private schools and school choice and now they are all for it.”
Because school reopenings have been directly tied to the state’s color-coded infection rate tier system, Sacramento County school officials have had their hands tied. In fall 2020, Placer and El Dorado counties had fewer COVID-19 cases than Sacramento, allowing districts to jump and reopen. Sacramento County had a short window in the red tier, but not long enough for many of them to take action.
Now that Sacramento County met the state’s reopening threshold of no more than 25 new daily cases per 100,000 residents to reopen elementary schools, only Natomas Unified moved forward with bringing those students immediately to campuses.
Sacramento City Unified Superintendent Jorge Aguilar, and six other urban school district superintendents, sent a letter to Gov. Newsom saying his $2 billion reopening plan doesn’t do enough for low-income students, and particularly students in urban schools that are essentially forced to stay closed under the state’s coronavirus guidelines.
To access the funding, which pencils out to at least $450 per student, districts would have to offer in-person instruction for transitional kindergarten to second-grade students and lay out plans for rigorous and consistent testing and sanitation protocol.
“The plan does not address the disproportionate impact the virus is having on low-income communities of color,” read the letter.
Sacramento’s divide is notable because elsewhere in the nation, shifts toward in-person instruction are largely concentrated in urban districts, according to the Center on Reinventing Public Education. Nearly one in three urban districts have expanded their in-person instruction since reopening their campuses, more so than suburban or rural districts.
How we did this story
The Bee obtained vote totals by precinct from Placer, El Dorado, Sacramento and Yolo counties. It matched those files with elementary and unified school district boundaries as delineated by the U.S. Census bureau. If the center point of a voting precinct fell within a particular district’s boundaries, all of its voters were counted in that district. School reopening data primarily came from the California Department of Public Health. The Bee restricted its analysis to the 30 school districts with the most voters in the 2020 presidential election, excluding districts in the Tahoe area. Some independent charter schools may use a different instruction modality than their surrounding district. Figures do not include private schools.
This story was originally published March 5, 2021 at 5:00 AM.