Primary schools in San Bernardino County can reopen on Monday, February 22, if they want and have an approved reopening plan.
The steadily improving number of coronavirus cases reached the level needed on Friday, February 19, to allow districts to reopen transitional kindergarten schools through sixth grade on the next school day.
Specifically, the county’s adjusted case rate – the number of new coronaviruses per 100,000 people, adjusted for how many people in the county have been tested – is below 25 for five consecutive days, starting on Monday, February 15.
The county had 52 new cases per 100,000 people as of February 2, after adjusting for testing.
His adjusted rates this week, county spokesman David Wert said, were:
- 19.0 on Friday, February 19
- 20.8 on Thursday, February 18
- 22.3 on Wednesday, February 17
- 23.8 on Tuesday, February 16
- 24.4 on Monday, February 15
This does not mean that all primary schools will reopen immediately.
Districts do not need to reopen if they do not want to and must have an approved reopening plan in place. In many cases, these reopening plans include a hybrid schedule, in which students do not have to go in person and classes are in person only part of the week.
Schools that previously obtained an exemption to reopen – which 109 primary schools in San Bernardino County did on November 16, when the county approved its last exemption – need only post the reopening plan on their website, Wert said. The county and state have already reviewed the plans of these schools.
The county’s Department of Health approved the COVID-19 Security Plan for 29 other schools, and several other plans are still under review, said Wert. The full list was not available on Friday night, he said.
Riverside County schools are not yet ready to reopen, but county case numbers are also improving rapidly. The county’s most recent adjusted case rate in state statistics on Tuesday, February 16, was 28.8, a week after it was 44.9.
Riverside County only discloses the case rate every Tuesday, spokesman John Welsh said on Friday. Since a county’s adjusted case should be less than 25 for five consecutive days, Monday would be the first day that schools could theoretically be allowed to open.
Welsh said it was “too early” to have a projection of when Riverside County schools could be reopened, and he did not have a list of schools with an approved reopening plan.
Although Governor Gavin Newsom pushed for schools to reopen, many districts said they are not yet ready to reopen, even though it is legally permitted.
Local district leaders said they would feel safe about the reopening as soon as teachers and support staff were vaccinated, which has been difficult with the low stock of vaccine.
Newsom said on Friday that California would begin to reserve 10% of the first doses of the COVID-19 vaccine for teachers and support staff.
The goal of the change is to boost personal learning after almost a year of online classes for the majority of California’s 6 million elementary and high school students. It comes a day after California’s legislative leaders announced a $ 6.5 billion proposal to reopen schools this spring. Newsom said it is not fast enough and suggested that he could veto it.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.