Parent: Sac City Unified puts educational well-being of our students on the sideline, again
The impacts of COVID-19 are still being determined for students around the world, including here in Sacramento. But as most locals are aware, the city of Sacramento’s public school woes were visible well before the pandemic.
A district and teachers union seemingly always at war. Strikes. Financial insolvency and the threat of a state takeover. When COVID hit, it was like bad piled on top of bad for Sacramento’s public school students.
Yes, Sacramento City Unified School District’s elementary school students went back to in-person learning — for four partial-days a week. The welcome change came following a modification to a nearly three-month-old Memorandum of Understanding between the Sacramento City Teachers Association and the district that initially allowed most kids to return to school two half-days a week if they wanted.
To refresh your memory, on March 19, the CDC issued revised COVID-19 guidelines for K-12 schools, including reducing the safe distancing guidelines in classrooms from 6-feet to 3-feet. Science showed 3-feet was enough space to safely conduct in-class learning. But SCTA and SCUSD must have missed the memo because the following day, on March 20, the two parties signed their MOU for reopening the schools and employed the archaic 6-feet distancing rule.
Because of the space constraints needed under the 6-feet rule, that meant splitting the kids into two cohorts — allowing two separate groups of students to attend in-person learning for two partial days a week. According to school administrators, had the MOU employed the 3-feet rule to begin with, all of the SCUSD elementary school students who wanted to return to school four days a week and whose schools had the space would have been able to do so three months earlier.
So, while our students returned to four partial days a week of in-person instruction for the final three weeks of the school year, had the teachers union and Sac City Unified truly been interested in the educational welfare of our students, they would have signed their MOU with the 3-feet CDC guidelines months ago and given our children a chance at normalcy for the last quarter of the academic year.
So why didn’t they? Are the union and district’s plan to make the situation as miserable as possible for parents and students so that when some modicum of improvement is made we’ll all give a big smile and say “thank you?”
On May 20, SCUSD issued a resolution to return full-time to in-person learning in Fall 2021. That sounds good, but where is the commitment for the same by the SCTA? What happens if the ongoing rancor between the district and the teachers union broils up this fall, the resolution disintegrates and there’s no agreement between SCUSD and SCTA to return to school full-time? I can’t help but be skeptical.
If SCTA and SCUSD couldn’t even agree to something as simple as adhering to national safety guidelines that would have allowed our children to return to school nearly full-time months ago, how are they going to agree to full-time learning in the upcoming school year? The acrimony was highlighted once again, on June 10, when SCTA and the classified staff union passed a no-confidence vote against SCUSD Superintendent Aguilar, illustrating a further deterioration in the relationship between the parties that hold the keys to our kids’ education.
Sadly, it seems that even as we try to get on with educating our children, the reality of Sacramento’s troubled public schools continues to stare us right in the face.