Beutner: Getting Children Back To School Will Be Complicated, Costly
LOS ANGELES (CBSLA) — Los Angeles Unified School District is set to begin its fall semester in about 10 weeks, but there are still a number of questions of what it will look like in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic.
"If you're expecting a few talking points about moving desks and wearing masks, you're watching the wrong speech," Superintendent Austin Beutner said Wednesday.
He made it clear in his virtual address to families that the district believes getting all children back on campus will be a complicated and costly undertaking.
"Unless the state of California is going to dramatically increase funding for schools to hire more adults, the consequence of fewer students per groups is that all students cannot be at school the same time," Beutner said.
The superintendent acknowledged that the district did not yet know what the new school year would look like, but he said contact tracing and testing for COVID-19 have to be part of the plan.
"There are about 75,000 staff, almost 700,000 students and an estimate 2-3 million family members in the Los Angeles Unified community," he said. "Health authorities will need to make public their testing plan well before Aug. 18 so schools can plan accordingly."
Jazmine Erving's daughter London is a special needs student who will be in seventh grade in the fall, and her biggest concern is safety.
"I did feel reassured after the press conference today that the schools are looking to take the right protocols," she said.
Beutner said some students could experience lifelong impacts from being off campus for so long, and Erving, who is a single working mother, agreed.
"You have kids that have been able to keep up, and then you have other parents that are not able to give that one-on-one direction," Erving said. "So some of these kids have not really had any kind of education in the last 10 weeks."
If students return to campus in the fall, Beutner said it would likely be on a hybrid schedule with students rotating between receiving instruction on campus and online.
Mia Porter, who has two boys in a Title 1 LAUSD school, wants her sons back on campus as long as it's safe.
"School is more than just the education," she said. "They need interaction, they need to learn socialization, teamwork."
Beutner said the district would release a more detailed plan in the next month or so and said that whatever school looks like in August would likely continue for the entire school year unless an effective treatment or a vaccine is found.
