Being right about COVID was tough. Just ask the superintendent for Elk Grove schools
The global pandemic, you could argue, became real in California when the Elk Grove Unified School District announced it would become the first in the state to shut down amid fears that multiple students had been exposed to the coronavirus by their grandparents.
That fateful decision was reached in the dead of night and announced on an overcast Saturday a year ago. Like a COVID bookend, the district, the largest in Northern California with 63,000 students, is poised to reopen, Tuesday, March 16, saying in its announcement, “it was a long and tiring year.”
What we might not remember was how long and tiring that weekend was, marking the beginning of the cascade of coronavirus news that reshaped our lives. EGUSD was ahead of the class, triggering a furious reaction that saw its leaders take a pummeling from an array of of critics.
The figurative firing squad included, but was not limited to, local elected officials, members of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration, parents and, well, me. The headline for my March 7, 2020 column, written on the same Saturday that the EGUSD bombshell went public, was this: “Closing Elk Grove schools gives a shocking lesson in how not to handle the coronavirus.”
That column was one of my most read of the year and many of its points still hold up today. The problem is what I left out and what was still unknowable on March 7.
The roll-out of what was momentous news of California’s first public school district shutdown included a huge communication breakdown. That was not the fault of EGUSD.
Major problems within the Sacramento County hierarchy complicated EGUSD’s scramble to protect its students. These internal county issues foreshadowed the eventual departure of former county CEO Nav Gill, who months later would be caught violating the county’s COVID-19 guidelines by refusing to wear a mask.
Dr. Olivia Kasirye, the county health officer working closely with EGUSD, would also later join other county women in leadership positions to accuse Gill of creating a “toxic culture of sexism.”
‘Leadership is hard’
These and other issues contributed to EGUSD being held up as a punching bag for trying to do the right thing.
Figuratively speaking, EGUSD were like U.S. Marines hitting the beach first for a battle in which they were badly outnumbered. They didn’t have reinforcements coming to save them. They didn’t have information or equipment they badly needed. They had no little or guidance from above. And yet they knew they had no choice but to do their jobs.
“The best case scenario was that people would say we were overreacting idiots,” Christopher Hoffman, the EGUSD superintendent, said this week.
The district’s actions played out amid a culture of denial about the coming threat posed by the coronavirus. I plead guilty to this.
We know now, but didn’t know then, that what seemed true on one day of the pandemic could be proved false the next.
The truth is that EGUSD, led by Hoffman, handled the threat of a COVID-19 exposure in the way we would want any institution to respond. It was deliberate and collaborative. It worked closely with county health officials and put the safety of the district community above all else. Included in its concerns was a highly anticipated high school basketball playoff game that was initially canceled on March 7 because of coronavirus fears.
Elk Grove Mayor Bobbie Singh-Allen a year ago was a member of the EGUSD Board of Trustees.
“At a certain point we knew full well we were going to be the first,” she said . “One of (Hoffman’s) favorite quotes is, ‘Leadership is hard.’ You do the best you can do but there was no playbook for this.”
For Hoffman, the key moments of that week are still vivid. “That Friday afternoon (March 6) was when things changed,” he said. “There were four children who lived with their grandparents and were confirmed positive cases. Some of the kids were symptomatic.”
Hoffman convened an emergency meeting that included county health officers and dragged into the evening. “I learned a new phrase,” Hoffman said. “’Assumed positive.’”
He said he was told by Kasirye to assume that the four kids exposed to the virus by their grandparents were positive as well. Hoffman said they had been in school the previous two weeks. They attended multiple campuses.
“At this point, we didn’t know how quickly this thing spread,” he said.
Decisions saved lives
Hoffman wanted to know: Could the kids be tested for the coronavirus? The answer was “no.”
“We were told the county didn’t have the resources,” Hoffman said. Again, this issue would flare up in the summer of 2020 when Gill was accused of bungling the dispersal of federal dollars meant for COVID-19 relief.
“That’s where we were at that time,” Hoffman said. “No testing capacity in the county. We left the meeting Friday evening not knowing exactly what we were going to do.”
But the district had another huge problem: 800 people were expected Saturday for a career fair. That was canceled and in hindsight, Hoffman might have saved lives by making that decision. Singh-Allen is sure of it.
“His leadership saved lives,” she said. But nobody was patting Hoffman on the back in the pre-dawn hours of March 7.
“At 2 or 3 a.m. I texted my attorney and asked: ‘What authority do I have to address this issue? Can I make a calendar change and move spring break?’”
EGUSD was going to have its spring break in April but Hoffman wanted to move it up to the week beginning Monday March 9. That was meant to buy EGUSD time so somehow it could test kids and to learn if they were positive for COVID-19.
The problem was, doing this would mean the cancellation of the playoff basketball game between Sheldon High School, EGUSD’s star-studded team, and Dublin High School. The game was scheduled for Saturday evening at Cosumnes River College in south Sacramento.
Sacramento is nothing if not a region that is passionate about its prep sports. Hoffman’s call drew a white-hot response.
“It’s just heartbreaking,” Sheldon senior guard and captain Josh Williams told my Bee colleague, Joe Davidson. “This being our senior year, that’s the hardest part. It’s over. We really felt like we had a chance to win it all this year. This is the biggest part of our season, but we can’t control anything that’s happened.”
Other local schools were going to play basketball that night. Bradshaw Christian was hosting its NorCal contest against San Domenico. Bradshaw Christian is a half mile away from Sheldon, but not in its district.
Bradshaw Christian is a private school, Sheldon and EGUSD are public. That dichotomy between private schools and public schools have played out for the last year, as private school kids have largely stayed in classrooms while local public school kids haven’t.
Hoffman had a good reason for pulling Sheldon out of its game. One of the kids feared to be infected with the coronavirus had been on the Sheldon campus in the weeks leading up to the game. EGUSD had no way of knowing if that student had come in contact with Sheldon players. But if those had been exposed to each other, then Hoffman could expose Dublin High School kids if they played the game.
They would hop on a bus and return to the East Bay where more people could be exposed.
Because Sacramento County could not test his kids, Hoffman made the call to shut down the district. Again, the news spawned a furious reaction.
Coronavirus had the final word
But what was lost in the furor was the extraordinary cooperation to make that decision. Hoffman needed the cooperation of his labor partners. He got it in a matter of hours.
As a parent of the Sacramento City Unified School District, all I can say is, I am jealous. EGUSD is a model of district-union cooperation where all parties work for the kids. In SCUSD, the local teachers seem to look for any and all opportunities to embarrass Superintendent Jorge Aguilar.
But again, no one was patting Hoffman on the back. Hoffman said Kasirye and County Supervisor Don Nottoli were aware he was going to shut down the district and supported him. But that message was obviously not conveyed by Kasirye and Nottoli to all the other elected officials in the county
As I wrote: “Sacramento County Supervisor Phil Serna, the chair of the board this year, learned about the Elk Grove announcement when word of the district closure caused his phone to “blow up....Serna was at a campaign event for a colleague in the Arden Arcade area Saturday afternoon when he learned. With him was Sacramento Democratic state Sen. Richard Pan, a doctor, who has spent weeks trying to calm public fears about the coronavirus. With them was Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg and Assemblyman Kevin McCarty, D-Sacramento.”
“I am very concerned about the big picture that we don’t cause a panic,” Steinberg said that day. And then in the early evening, after EGUSD announced it was shutting down, state officials from the Newsom administration released a new set of COVID-19 guidelines. They called for school districts to shut down only after multiple positive tests on multiple campuses.
At that point, EGUSD didn’t have a positive test because it had no tests.
“When does the state release school information on a Saturday?” Hoffman said. “Never.”
I asked him what he thought when the new state guidelines made him seem like he jumped the gun.
“I said,’Thanks for your support.’”
But Hoffman said he slept well that night because, despite being pilloried and undercut by the state, he felt the district had done the right thing. By Sunday, Kasirye arranged for the four kids to be tested, Hoffman said.
That same day parents screamed angrily at officials about the cancellation of the Sheldon game. But EGUSD finally was able to determine that it had one positive test, and the youth at the Sheldon campus tested negative.
The basketball game went on.
“We always wanted the kids to play,” Hoffman said.
But within days, the coronavirus would have the final word on everything.
By March 11, a Kings game with fans in attendance was canceled before it started as the NBA shut down. By March 13, I drove my kids to their school and we haven’t been back since. After the EGUSD bombshell, Dave Gordon, the county superintendent of schools, coordinated with all the school superintendents in the county and eventually all the districts shut down at the same time.
As it turned out, the impulse to close EGUSD was prescient and brave. It revealed the disconnect between confusing state guidelines and people on the ground trying to do the right thing.
“Nobody knew how big this was going to be,” Kasirye said. “It was very difficult for Hoffman mainly because parents were unhappy.”
Hoffman was right. Leadership is hard and leaders like him have been battered by a frightened and frustrated population worn down by a year of COVID restrictions.
“I saw the governor recently and I told him that he looks as tired as I feel,” Hoffman said.
If I’ve learned anything about that time a year ago is to remember to save some grace for people who have to make the hard decisions. In some cases, as in this one, we needed to be thanking them instead of excoriating them.
“My people are worn out but they show up every single Monday and do their jobs,” Hoffman said. “Every single day there has been something we’ve had to work through and the reality is people are making the best decisions they can in an impossible situation.”
This story was originally published March 15, 2021 at 5:00 AM.
