Frustration Mounts Over School Closures

Following  331 days of school campus closures, frustrations boiled over during Monday’s City Council meeting for at least two Councilmembers questioned if the City should “push back” against State and County orders that keep schools closed until a safe case metric is reached. 

Councilmembers Felicia Williams and Tyron Hampton’s comments came after Pasadena Public Health Director Dr. Ying-Ying Goh delivered an update on current COVID-19 cases in Pasadena.

Goh said that the city is currently experiencing a seven-day average of 32 new cases per 100,000 population per day. 

“This is higher than the case rate at the peak of the summer surge,” Goh told the Council,  “which is a stark reminder that while stay-at-home restrictions have been lifted by the state, we are still faced with a situation where we are seeing COVID-19 cases and outbreaks in every setting where people gather whether for work socially or for any other purpose. That means that it is imperative, that we all continue to wear masks and avoid gathering.” 

Goh said that the past few weeks have been “devastating to our country and our community with a massive loss of life due to COVID-19.

“We continue to see a hundred people every day in LA County and three in Pasadena pass away from COVID-19,” she continued.

Currently, said Goh, all public health jurisdictions in LA County are in the “Purple Tier,” defined as a daily case rate higher than seven cases per 100,000, with a positivity rate of at least 8% or higher.

The new threshold rate for opening schools is now defined by the State to be a daily new case rate of 25 per hundred thousand.

Once the LA County metric has been stable for five days at that case rate or below, Goh explained, schools may reopen grades K through six with a new Cal-OSHA prevention plan and California COVID-19 safety plans submitted to the state local health department, and posted on the school website in Pasadena.

“I’ll just make this conversation even more awkward,” she began.  “The issue to me is that either we follow the State … or we don’t follow the State like other counties and health departments have, and we sort of guide our own path. As a city with a health department, we could do that. We could just go against what the state says, and kind of do what we want, and come up with a different set of rules.” 

Williams acknowledged that by doing so, the City would not receive certain state and federal reimbursements, but said, “I think that the people should know that. Maybe that’s a decision that the Council can make at some point, that we may want to change the rules from the State because we don’t think that the state’s rules are reasonable.”

Councilmember Andy Wilson, following Williams’ comments, asked Dr. Goh what she would do, hypothetically, without having to follow state and county orders. 

Goh said that she thought raising the number of allowable cases from ten to 25, was “already a very aggressive and proactive step to reopening schools, where we are using all the information that we can possibly get, through observational information from around the world, that maybe, even at that high of a case rate, that the younger grades are not going to contribute significantly to another surge in cases.”

Added Goh, “I have a middle schooler, and I would like to see her in school, but I have seen kids even with short term acute cases, have long term alterations to their sense of taste and smell, and so each family has to make that decision when that time comes.”

Goh also said, however, that she encourages all schools to be ready to reopen, “because we shouldn’t wait any longer once we reach that threshold, to open K-6.”

Councilmember Hampton, agreeing with Williams, said, “I think at some point we have to push back on the State. A lot of this stuff just doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. I understand that we are trying to protect lives. I  get that, I am all for that, but at the same time, the mental stress and instability that we are putting on our children, when Europe is on full lockdown, but schools are open.” 

According to The Wall Street Journal, while schools have been open through much of the pandemic,  closures have been announced recently in the U.K., Germany, Ireland, Austria, Denmark and the Netherlands on concerns about a more infectious variant of the virus first detected in the U.K. which is causing rising case counts despite lockdowns.

After a City Hall fire alarm interruption, the meeting reconvened, and Hampton added, “If parents want to put their kids back in school, we should allow them to do so.”

Currently, schools with previously approved waivers from county restrictions have already been permitted to reopen their K through second grades with limited in-person services on campus for all grades, Goh told the Council.

Goh also reminded the Council that State orders do not allow grades seven through 12 to open for in-person instruction until the County metrics reach a lower tier,  “because current scientific evidence shows us that middle and high school-aged students pose a higher risk of transmission than elementary age school-age children.”

Schools should plan to operate when allowed by state orders with newly available resources, said Goh, including grants from the state for public school districts. Testing is currently recommended to be done weekly for all students and staff with our current case rates and offered to local educational agencies for free, she added. 

But at least two dozen parents, community members and schools wrote comments to the Council asking the schools to be reopened, citing the low risk of the virus transmittal to students. 

“The CDC says that a return to school is safe and schools across the country are reopening successfully,” wrote Madison Heights resident Erika Foy, “so why are our kids still at home with no end in sight? When will our state legislature and local officials accept that our children are bearing the brunt of these flawed public health policies? 

A letter signed by leaders of eight local private schools acknowledged the Pasadena Public Health Department’s (PPHD) struggle with school closures, but said, “We remain hopeful that LA County will transition to Tier 2 (Red Tier) in the not too distant future. In preparation for a broader reopening of our campuses, our schools have engaged in extensive administrative, logistical, and curriculum planning, including dedicating significant financial resources to hiring and training additional personnel and adopting health and safety measures and guidelines aligned with PPHD’s School Reopening Protocol. 

“Once LA County enters Tier 2 (Red Tier),” the letter continued, “we are confident in our ability to safely and successfully reopen our campuses for in-person instruction once we receive the appropriate authorization from PPHD.”

Meanwhile, the Center for Disease Control (CDC) said in a recent report, “Opening schools for in-person learning as safely and quickly as possible, and keeping them open, is important given the many known and established benefits of in-person learning.”

The report also said that while fewer children than adults have had COVID-19 in the United States, the number of school-aged children with COVID-19 has been increasing. Children and adolescents can be infected with the virus that causes COVID-19, can get sick with COVID-19, and can spread the virus to others.

L.A. Unified School District Superintendent Austin Beutner said Monday that campuses could reopen for 250,000 elementary school students if 25,000 principals, teachers, and other staff are vaccinated, said in his weekly address on Monday. The District would also have to enact and follow safety protocols and infection rates would have to fall within approved levels.

“Vaccinate 25,000 people and reopen elementary schools in the nation’s second-largest school district. Sounds simple to me,” Beutner said.