Governor Gavin Newsom and Democratic legislative leaders will announce an agreement on Monday to give school districts $ 2 billion to open schools for students from kindergarten through second grade through April 1, with a focus on older children. California, after nearly a year of distance learning.
Negotiations were closed over the weekend, according to sources close to the governor and the legislature who confirmed its basic components.
The plan, the sources said, offers financial incentives for school districts that offer face-to-face education in counties with fewer than 25 new coronavirus cases confirmed daily by 100,000 residents, a threshold that almost all California counties currently reach due to the rapid spread of the virus. In the winter. slowed down.
School districts seeking county funds at the red state level, with seven or fewer cases per 100,000 residents, would be required to extend classroom learning to all elementary school students and at least one elementary or high school grade .
But the proposal, which is expected to vote in both houses of the Legislature this week, does not actually force the reopening of schools across the state. Instead, it leaves the final decision to local education authorities and, in some areas, is subject to agreements between districts and unions representing school officials.
The agreement marks the conclusion of weeks of negotiations at the state capitol and merges current public health guidelines with previous proposals for reopening schools presented by the governor and lawmakers. For Newsom, the proposal envisages students returning to campus two months after what they had promised in the plan they offered in late December. Lawmakers objected to the requirement of their original effort that schools submit long requests for money and declined some of the first details about the community’s public health standards.
But the most heated debate over the reopening of more classrooms in schools centered on the promise of COVID-19 vaccines to educators. Newsom, which initially declined new guarantees, relented last month and reserved 10% of the state’s weekly doses of vaccine for teachers and school officials starting this week.
Public health officials said on Monday that the state is on track to beat Newsom’s initial estimate of providing at least 75,000 weekly doses of vaccine. And Los Angeles Unified School district officials have announced that they expect enough vaccines to reopen campuses by April 9 – a week after the new statewide plan to open classrooms.
Legislation says that vaccinating teachers and staff is not a precondition for a district to return to face-to-face learning, an order required by the California Teachers’ Association.
Union leaders have also failed to block Newsom’s pressure to reopen schools in the state’s most restrictive purple layer in the counties. State officials are expected to update levels on Tuesday. Last week, all but two California counties had case indices that would allow TK second graders to return to their classrooms.
The plan depends on financial incentives for more campuses to open in the spring. School districts in counties that reach the virus limit and don’t open until April 1 would lose 1% of their share of the $ 2 billion in reopening funds for each school day when distance learning is the only option offered. Schools that are open or have plans to reopen before the end of March would be allowed to proceed with their respective reopening and still qualify for funding.