It’s Been a Year: Where is the Plan to Get All Students Back to School?
Today marks one year since San Francisco’s public schools closed due to the COVID-19 health emergency. At the time, coronavirus was the big unknown: news stories had been coming out for months about a new disease, that appeared like the flu but that could have deadly consequences.
Only a handful of San Franciscans had contracted COVID, and our city would soon be shut down for months to combat the virus. Thanks to good local leadership following scientific advice, our rates have remained low throughout this pandemic. Since this time last year, we’ve learned a lot about Coronavirus and how to effectively combat it.
During this time, young people have made major sacrifices. We’ve persisted through zoom school and cancellations of our extracurriculars in order to do our part and keep our communities safe. But as San Francisco safely reopens, little progress is happening at SFUSD.
For months, grassroots organizations have been pushing the Board of Education to create comprehensive plans to safely reopen, which has been happening across the country and the world. Public pressure has achieved a plan for the return of some students (there is a plan to bring back some Pre-K through 2nd Graders in April), but this is far from enough.
Public health experts have made it clear: we can safely reopen schools with social distancing and masking. It’s being done successfully in other major cities, yet a year into this pandemic there still is no comprehensive plan to bring back all students. SFUSD leaders won’t even guarantee schools will be back for 5 days of school in the fall.
Every day our schools remain closed, our young people are hurt. Learning loss is real (I know, as a student, I can feel it) and the longer students are not in the classroom, the worse it gets. And it hurts our most vulnerable kids the most. We need a real plan to reopen our schools. A year into this pandemic, it’s shocking our leaders still don’t have one.
Ewan Barker Plummer is a Youth Activist and Organizer in San Francisco. You can learn more about him and who he supports on Twitter and Instagram.
