California education news: What’s the latest?

Los Angeles Unified, California’s largest school district, reopened its campuses Monday after the holiday break with upgraded safety measures intended to protect students and staff from the coronavirus.

The district requires students and staff to test negative for Covid before they can return to campus and requires everyone to wear masks at school. In addition to distributing in-home Covid tests, the district has also hosted vaccine and testing sites and required older students to be vaccinated, according to the New York Times.

“We know there is apprehension, and we’ve added the extra layers of protection for the return to school,” the district’s interim superintendent, Megan K. Reilly, said in a video address to families and staff. “There may be a few lines at the start of the school day and longer wait times for buses.”

After closing Friday and Monday due to staff shortages related to Covid, West Contra Costa Unified reopened Tuesday for in-person classes.

The district has taken aggressive steps to improve safety measures, including opening three new testing sites, giving out 13,000 at-home test kits to families, requiring medical-grade masks for staff, asking families and staff to quarantine during the closure, and requiring vaccines for students ages 12 and older beginning Feb. 18, according to the district.

“In our district, we had far more absences than usual, we also had more students testing more positive for the Covid-19 virus,” Superintendent Kenneth Chris Hurst said in a video address to families. “It also put a strain on our system, and the rapid spread of the virus requires an aggressive response for us all.”

The number of active Covid-19 cases among young people incarcerated at state detention facilities has risen sharply in the last week — jumping from under 50 cases to 135, according to the Division of Juvenile Justice. This means that 42% of all Covid-19 infections among youth since the pandemic started are currently active cases.

Intake of all youth to the state facilities was suspended last week. The last time intake was suspended was at the onset of the pandemic. Family visitation was also suspended.

The sharp increase in infections mirrors the increase at adult jails across the state, which report 2,405 active cases among the inmates and 3,845 active cases among staff.

A staff vaccine mandate is currently in place for a group of select medical workers at the state’s four youth detention facilities. A mandate for all corrections workers that would have gone into effect this week was pushed back to at least March after the California Correctional Peace Officers Association, the union that represents corrections workers, and Gov. Gavin Newsom requested a postponement for prison staff. An appeal hearing is scheduled for March.

Most school districts are discouraging parents from coming to school during the omicron surge to prevent schools from closing. Palo Alto Unified Superintendent Don Austin on Sunday sent out an all-points bulletin, pleading with them to volunteer in schools to keep them open.

“We need your help to volunteer as never before,” he said in a video that was emailed to parents with a form they could fill out that would be sent to their children’s principals. “If you are able, please answer.”

The email went out Sunday at 9 p.m. By 9 a.m. Monday, 360 parents responded, Austin said. Jobs include support for Covid testing, signing in students at lunch, recess duty, light custodial duties, work in the office preparing materials and classroom support.

“The jobs won’t be glamorous, Austin said. “Many of the essential jobs we perform every day for your kids aren’t glamorous.”

As in other districts, Palo Alto has been hit hard with teacher and staff shortages. Austin pledged to keep the schools open unless authorities force the district to shut down. That’s unlikely in Santa Clara County. Dr. Sara Cody, the county public health officer, and Mary Ann Dewan, Santa Clara County superintendent of schools, sent a notice to superintendents Friday urging them not to close during the surge and switch to remote learning. “We’ve learned that in-person education is what (students) need, and remote learning doesn’t support their mental health, emotional health and academic well-being nearly the way that in-person learning does,” Cody said.

Under the strict rules that the Legislature imposed in this year’s state budget, districts that close schools due to Covid must document that they consulted with county officials before seeking reimbursement from the California Department of Education.

With parents’ help, “we’re going to tell (students) they don’t have to worry about closing for staff shortages,” Austin said in the video.

Bay Area school districts saw hundreds of Covid-19 cases and teacher absences their first week back after the holiday break, and one opted to switch to virtual learning for all of this week.

Hayward Unified, which enrolls about 22,000 students, announced Friday it would hold classes online Monday through Friday due to the surging omicron variant. Students will work independently on assignments they had already received, and the district distributed Chromebooks to students Monday. From Tuesday through Friday, they will have schedules similar to the previous week, with both live and asynchronous instruction.

The district will host some “learning hubs” at schools where limited numbers of students can get access the internet. The district will also provide “grab-and-go” meals each day.

Ahead of Governor Gavin Newsom’s budget proposal Monday, members of his administration announced that it will include a $2.7 billion emergency response package, as well “continued investments” in addressing the state’s ongoing teacher shortage.

The emergency response package — around $1.4 billion of which is requested for the current fiscal year — includes $1.2 billion to bolster testing at schools, county offices of education, community health clinics and local health departments. It also includes $583 million for initiatives to boost vaccinations and combat misinformation and disinformation by anti-vaccine groups.

Newsom administration members didn’t provide details on the governor’s plans to address the teacher shortage — the effects of which have been devastating to districts trying to keep schools open after winter break amid the Omicron surge. However, they did say his proposal will build off of current initiatives. The state’s spending plan for the current fiscal year includes $2.8 billion for programs to attract, retain and train educators. Specifically,  $1.5 billion is budgeted for the Educator Effectiveness Block Grant over five years for staff professional development. And $1.3 billion is budgeted for other programs including expanding teacher residencies, awarding Golden State Teacher grants for teacher credential candidates who commit to teaching at a low-income school for four years, and funding for classified employees to become credentialed teachers.

The governor’s budget proposal won’t tie a specific dollar dollar amount to providing more N95 and KN95 masks to schools, despite pleas by teachers and students for more of them. However, over the past few days the state has begun making its inventory of adult-sized N95 masks available to counties to distribute to schools and other institutions.

A group of Oakland Unified high school students are threatening to walk off campuses if the school district doesn’t provide more Covid protections or return to online learning.

More than 150 high school students signed a petition demanding that the school district provide KN95 masks for every student, twice weekly Covid tests for everyone on campus and more covered outdoor spaces where students can eat in inclement weather. The students say the only other acceptable choice would be to return to online learning.

The students say the district has until Jan. 17 to meet their demands.

“This letter is to inform you that OUSD students are not comfortable with going to school with the rising cases of COVID-19,” according to the letter. “There’s a lot of concerns regarding safety measures and how to protect us from COVID-19, especially the highly contagious Omicron variant. We must go back to distance learning until the cases go down again. In order to ensure a safe learning environment, we demand you give us N95 masks and weekly PCR testing. If these demands are not met we will be striking by not attending school. We will be striking until we get what we need to be safe.”

California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, started housing on-campus students who test positive for the coronavirus at off-campus hotels because campus isolation beds filled up the first week of classes, according to a university official.

The university has 62 on-campus isolation beds, but 332 students tested positive for the virus between Sunday, Jan. 2 and Jan. 5, according to The Mustang News, the student newspaper.

The university has 194 isolation beds, of which 132 are located in off-campus hotels.

As of Friday morning, the university reported 397 on-campus students had tested positive for Covid-19 in the last seven days. Of which, 46 were reported yesterday.

About 4,000 administrative employees at Los Angeles Unified are ready to staff classrooms, cafeterias, and other positions at school campuses when the district begins the new semester amid another surge in Covid-19 cases, according to a district spokesperson. The number of positive Covid-19 tests significantly increased in the last 24 hours as more test results have been added to the district’s data dashboard, indicating a rising number of educators and staff who might be quarantined when students return to campus on Jan. 11.

Staff and teachers are required to get a negative test result by Jan. 10 so they can be on campus. Teachers return on Monday and students on Tuesday.  Reflecting the increased testing underway, of over 250,000 tests administered to students and staff by the end of the day on Wednesday, at least 18,000  or 7.2% were positive for coronavirus. One day prior, 6,940 or 4% of 170,000 tests were positive.

On Friday, dozens of campuses across the district were handing out free at-home coronavirus tests in an attempt to ensure every student and staff member is tested before the semester begins. Free tests will also be available for pick-up at select locations on Saturday, in addition to the district’s stationary testing centers being open for extended hours on Saturday.

CalOSHA announced last night that it had updated its website to clarify that employees, including teachers and other school staff, are eligible for the shorter quarantines recommended by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and adopted by the California Department of Public Health last month.

Now people who test positive for Covid-19, but remain without symptoms, can isolate for only five days rather than 10, followed by five days of wearing a mask when around others. The change was prompted by research showing the majority of Covid transmission occurs in the one to two days prior to the onset of symptoms and the two to three days after.

The only exception is for employees who choose not to take a Covid test before returning to work. They must quarantine 10 days.

Conflicting state information has caused confusion about whether school districts should follow CalOSHA Emergency Temporary Standards, which required a 10-day quarantine, or the new recommendation to quarantine for five days.

CalOSHA officials said the department is is following Executive Order N-84-20, which states that its recommended isolation and quarantine periods are overridden by any California Department of Health recommendation that has a shorter period of isolation.

The CDC guidelines also recommend that people who are exposed to Covid-19 quarantine for five days, followed by five days of strict mask use. If that’s not feasible, the CDC said, the individual should wear a well-fitting mask at all times around others for 10 days after the exposure.

People who are fully vaccinated and have had a booster do not need to quarantine following exposure, the CDC said, but should wear a mask for 10 days after the exposure.

Local health jurisdictions and school districts may have more restrictive isolation or quarantine requirements.

Staffing shortages caused by Covid infections and quarantines are forcing Milpitas Unified School District to temporarily return to online learning Monday.

The district’s school board voted to close campuses until mid-January at a board meeting Thursday night, according to the Mercury News.

A letter to the school community from the office of Superintendent Cheryl Jordan said that there has been an “exorbitant” number of positive cases of Covid among students and staff, resulting in numerous quarantines.

The teacher absences left 167 classes without a substitute. Other teachers, principals, and district office staff filled in. In some cases classes had to be combined, according to the letter.

“While we are diligently recruiting substitutes, we are not able to fill the shortage,” said the letter. “Given the number of cases, the possibility of being in close contact with a positive case has increased.”

During the 10-day quarantine, students and their families are being asked not to travel or attend large gatherings so that students can return to school safely on Jan. 18.

Students should expect to go into virtual learning with the same schedule they had when on their campus. Parents will be required to sign a contract for independent study, according to the letter.

The University of California’s Irvine, Los Angeles and Riverside campuses announced they will extend remote learning by three more weeks amid a surge of Covid-19 cases in the state.

The three campuses previously planned to resume in-person classes on Jan. 18 but now won’t do so until Jan. 31. They were the latest campuses to extend online learning until that date after the San Diego, Santa Cruz and Davis campuses did the same Thursday.

“Since making the decision to start winter quarter with two weeks of remote instruction, we have watched COVID-19 case numbers climb rapidly in our region and state. Though the case positivity rate at UC Riverside remains well below the county and state rates, we remain committed to the health and safety of our community as our first priority,” UC Riverside Chancellor Kim Wilcox said in a statement.

Twelve of Oakland Unified’s 80 schools were “non-operational” Friday during a sickout protest by a group of teachers decrying what they said are insufficient Covid safety protocols.

The schools were not technically “closed,” district spokesman John Sasaki said, because they still opened their doors, and some staff remained on campus. There was no instruction held at those schools Friday, and families were advised the day prior to keep their children home. Oakland Unified did not offer a child care alternative.

None of the students of those schools attended class Friday, resulting in more than 8,000 absences, Sasaki said. About 503 teachers called in sick Friday.

The one-day protest was organized by rank-and-file members of the Oakland Education Association teachers union, though it wasn’t sanctioned by the union. The group is calling on the district to purchase and distribute N95 and KN95 masks for all students and staff, provide weekly PCR testing for all students and staff, install high-efficiency (HEPA) air filters in all cafeterias and other large spaces, avoid budget cuts to classrooms or student services, provide extra support for school nurses, retroactively extend Covid leave from Nov. 7, 2021, to June 30, 2022, and take other measures, according to a news release. The group is also calling on the district to pivot to remote learning for at least two weeks in order to implement those measures and to reduce the spread of Covid in the community.

While the district has ordered N95 and KN95 masks for all teachers and is working on getting enough for students as well, it is not considering closing for two weeks, Sasaki said.

Oakland Unified and the Oakland Education Association came to a tentative agreement Thursday night regarding Covid leave, Sasaki said, though he didn’t know what the details were at Friday’s news conference. The agreement must still be approved by the district’s school board and by a ratification vote by the union’s members.

The California Department of Education wants to get 10,000 more mental health counselors on school campuses.

According to the Los Angeles Times, the state aims to attract clinicians into schools by offering loan forgiveness, deferrals and scholarships and by reducing the time it takes to get licensed as a mental health professional.

State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond said he is hoping legislators will introduce a measure in the coming weeks.

San Francisco public schools were missing 900 teachers and aides on Thursday after a group of teachers staged a sickout to call for more protections from Covid-19, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

The number represents about one-fifth of all teachers and aides.

It was unclear how many of the missing staff were out because they were ill or quarantining after a Covid-19 exposure, and how many were out in protest.

Districts across the state have struggled to find enough substitutes to cover the high number of absences caused by Covid-19.

Three University of California campuses said Thursday that they will continue to hold classes online only until the end of January amid a surge in Covid-19 cases across the state.

The Davis, San Diego and Santa Cruz campuses announced that classes will be held remotely for three more weeks and now plan to resume in-person instruction on Jan. 31. Davis was previously planning to resume in-person classes on Monday after holding them online this week — the first week of the winter quarter. The San Diego and Santa Cruz campuses previously planned to return to in-person instruction on Jan. 18.

“We had hoped that our award-winning COVID response program would allow us to resume in-person instruction on Monday, but based on what we’re seeing with positivity rates related to the omicron variant, as well as staffing and operational concerns, we have decided that it is most prudent to continue remote instruction for three more weeks of winter quarter,” UC Davis Chancellor Gary May said in a message to the campus Thursday.

UC’s four other undergraduate campuses that are on the quarter calendar — Irvine, Los Angeles, Riverside and Santa Barbara — plan to hold classes remotely through the end of next week and resume face-to-face instruction on Jan. 18, though administrators have said those plans could change.

At the system’s two semester-based campuses, Berkeley and Merced, instruction for the upcoming term doesn’t begin until Jan. 18. Merced plans to hold classes remotely for the first week. Berkeley is still planning for all classes to be in person.

A group of Oakland Unified teachers and school staff from Skyline High School and at least five other schools are planning to call in sick Friday in protest of what they see as lax Covid safety protocols by the district.

Specifically, the group is calling on the district to purchase and distribute N95 and KN95 masks for all students and staff, provide weekly PCR testing for all students and staff, install HEPA filters in all cafeterias and other large spaces,  avoid budget cuts to classrooms or student services, provide extra support for school nurses, retroactively extend Covid leave from Nov. 7, 2021, to June 30, 2022, and take other measures, according to a news release. The group is also calling on the district to pivot to remote learning for at least two weeks in order to implement those measures and to reduce the spread of Covid in the community.

“Throughout the pandemic, (Oakland Unified, the State of California and the U.S. Government) have constantly served the interests of capital and profit rather than the interests of the workers they depend on,” the group said in the news release. “The only solution is for workers to withhold our labor until we win the pandemic response we deserve.”

The district’s teachers union, the Oakland Education Association, had called on the district to schedule a bargaining session on school safety before Monday, when students returned from winter break. Skyline teacher Harley Litzelman, one of the organizers of Friday’s sickout, said it still has not happened.

Litzelman said it’s unclear how many teachers will participate in Friday’s action, but he expects the majority of educators at each of the six schools will call out sick. It’s also unclear how the district will respond to the action, since a high number of staff absences this week due to Covid has strained the district’s substitute pool and prompted credentialed administrative staff to step in to teach classes.

In a message to parents Thursday, district officials said they will be doing “everything possible to keep schools open for our students on Friday” but that the unexpected loss of additional teachers would be “devastating” to schools and efforts to keep them open.

Gov. Gavin Newsom announced Thursday that Van Ton-Quinlivan, the chief executive officer of Futuro Health, will join the state’s new Health Workforce Education and Training Council.

The council, which was created last year by the Legislature, is responsible for coordinating California’s health workforce education and training to meet the state’s needs. The council consists of 17 appointees from different medical education programs.

Ton-Quinlivan formerly served as executive vice chancellor of the California Community Colleges and in 2013 was named a White House Champion of Change under the Obama administration. For nearly two years she’s led Futuro Health, a nonprofit joint venture by Kaiser Permanente, a Bay Area-based health system, and the Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West. Futuro creates certificate programs and connects with colleges to recruit and train new medical professionals in allied health fields.

On the one-year anniversary of the U.S. Capitol insurrection, academics and scholars around the country are reflecting on the massive riot and its aftermath, but few colleges and universities are formally acknowledging it today, Inside Higher Education is reporting.

Some scholars told the website they are disappointed higher education institutions are not doing more to acknowledge the events in Washington a year ago.

Nancy MacLean, William H. Chafe Professor of History and Public Policy at Duke University, said she’s been “stunned and saddened, frankly, at how relatively little attention higher education has paid to the events of Jan. 6 between the week after the attack, when there were many grave public statements, and now,” Inside Higher Ed reported.

Among the organizations that held events Thursday is the Organization of American Historians, which had an online forum.

Hakeem Jefferson, a Stanford assistant professor of political science, told Inside Higher Ed that the insurrection “completely changed the way he teaches his Introduction to American Politics course since Jan. 6, theming it “In Defense of Democracy.” He said he’s also encouraged colleagues at other institutions to do the same.

“At this moment of democratic crisis, we have an obligation to speak plainly and tell the truth, and an obligation to clarify for our students and the broader public what is happening and what is at stake,” Jefferson said. “I tell my students at the start of the course that I do have a bias. I am pro-democracy.”

A wildcat sickout of teachers in San Francisco who believe the local school district has failed to adequately protect them during the Covid pandemic and the surge of the omicron variant is expected Thursday, news outlets are reporting.

Nearly 500 people signed an online petition supporting the action, which is not organized by the teachers union, the San Francisco Chronicle is reporting.

There has already been an “overwhelming  absentee rate” among teachers in the San Francisco Unified School district this week, the newspaper reported, with central office administrators and the superintendent of schools acting as substitutes.

The action comes on the same day that a bargaining session between the district and the United Educators of San Francisco over safety protocols is scheduled.

Pediatric Covid hospitalizations have shot up over the past few days, surpassing the number of pediatric hospitalizations at the peak of last winter’s surge, California Health and Human Services Secretary Mark Ghaly told reporters Wednesday. However, he did not specify how many beds are filled at pediatric hospitals or how much of an increase California had experienced.

Despite general hospitals nearing capacity in California, pediatric hospitals and hospitals serving children are “able to take on the current demand,” Ghaly said. Many children hospitalized with Covid are not being sent to intensive care units and are not having to be put on ventilators, Ghaly added. Children who are hospitalized with Covid typically have other underlying health issues, he said.

Pediatric hospitals throughout the country are also reporting surging Covid hospitalizations. During the week ending Jan. 2, an average of 672 children were hospitalized with Covid each day across the country, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control.

California Health and Human Services is continuing to call on families to get their children vaccinated against Covid and to provide them with well-fitting, filtrated masks.

Ghaly also announced that, as of Wednesday, 6.2 million at-home tests have been delivered to counties to distribute to schools. Gov. Gavin Newsom had initially pledged to provide all 6 million California K-12 students with an at-home test prior to their return to school, but only about half of those tests made it out to counties by Monday due to transportation and weather issues.

Individuals on the University of Southern California’s campus will be required to wear medical grade masks, the university announced Wednesday.

The policy, which goes into effect Jan. 18, is based on updated masking guidance in California and Los Angeles County, USC officials said in a statement. Medical grade masks “at minimum are surgical masks and may also include higher grade respirator masks” such as N95, KN95 and KF94 masks, officials said.

The masks will be required in indoor common spaces, classrooms, libraries, offices, laboratories and public spaces.

For individuals who don’t already have medical grade masks, USC will provide them at entry points to campus.

California State University, Los Angeles; Sacramento State and CSU Channel Islands will begin instruction in 2022 with distance learning due to the surge in Covid cases, the Los Angeles Daily News reported.

Cal State LA will be closed for in-person instruction for three weeks, from Jan. 24, when the spring semester begins, until at least Feb. 11. Cal State Channel Islands and Sacramento State will be remote for at least two weeks, until Feb. 6.

“By allowing the peak of the surge to pass before beginning in-person instruction, we hope to help reduce the spread of Covid-19 in our university community and the other hardships it causes,” Cal State LA President William Covino wrote to the campus community. “We look forward to returning to in-person instruction and activities. We will keep you informed and provide you with updates in the days and weeks ahead.”

As Covid-19 surges to record levels in the region, school officials in Chicago canceled classes Wednesday after teachers threatened to stay home as a safety measure, according to The New York Times.

Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot decided to close schools for the day in the country’s third-largest district rather than reinstate distance learning, which she said was unnecessarily disruptive for families and staff. School campuses remained open for child care.

The union said a majority of its members voted on Tuesday to not report to work in person due to the spread of Covid-19 and what they deemed unsafe working conditions, including a shortage of tests and large numbers of students who are unvaccinated.

After Oakland Unified distributed thousands of at-home Covid tests and held a special testing clinic, about 900 students and staff tested positive for Covid, according to the district.

Most of those students and staff were able to stay home on Monday, when students returned from winter break, though some may have been on campus before learning of their positive test result, the district said.

“Although we know the omicron variant is spreading across the country, we are pleased to see this testing regimen work the way we hoped it would, keeping sick people at home,” Superintendent Kyla Johnson-Trammell said in a news release.

The district had 269 teachers absent on Monday — a high number, just as the district said it expected. Substitutes and administrators have been filling in, and that will continue because the district expects more absences this week and the next.

Moving quickly, West Contra Costa Unified managed to distribute 15,000 at-home Covid tests to students before they returned to school Monday from the long holiday break.

Despite Gov. Gavin Newsom’s pledge to provide at-home rapid tests to all 6 million California students, only about half of them made it out to counties by Monday, the Los Angeles Times reported. West Contra Costa Unified only received its allotment of 28,000 tests Thursday afternoon, district spokesman Ryan Phillips said, as parents grew concerned about whether they would get the tests in time for school.

District administrators quickly teamed up with the local teachers union, the United Teachers of Richmond, to put together drive-up distribution sites Sunday at Pinole Valley High School and Kennedy High School. More than 5,000 cars at the two locations lined up to receive about 15,000 tests.

Phillips said the remainder of the tests will be distributed to schools this week.

At the start of Stanford University’s winter quarter Monday, 146 students who had tested positive for Covid-19 were isolating in student housing.

Most of the students had tested positive with rapid tests, according to Stanford, and others had remained on campus over the holiday break and tested positive prior to the weekend. The university provided rapid tests for all newly arriving students and asked all students traveling to take one upon their return.

“As we had planned and expected, rapid testing is allowing us to quickly identify Covid-positive cases as students return to campus,” Stanford health officials said in a health alert Monday evening.

Anticipating a surge in Covid cases, Stanford — along with several other California universities — opted to hold the first two weeks of the winter quarter online. In-person classes will begin Jan. 18, meaning the students currently in isolation will be able to attend those classes.

Two weeks ago, Gov. Gavin Newsom pledged that the state would provide schools with enough take-home Covid tests for all 6 million students when they returned from winter break.

However, only about half of those tests made it to schools by Monday, when many districts started their spring semester, a California Department of Health spokeswoman told the Los Angeles Times. According to the Times, an additional 1 million tests were en route to schools and expected to be delivered by the end of the day Tuesday, and 1.5 million tests were expected to arrive at the state’s warehouse Monday before going out to counties. An additional 500,000 tests are expected to arrive at the state’s warehouse later this week.

Some districts hadn’t received any take-home tests Monday, the Times reported, including Long Beach Unified. The California County Superintendents Educational Services Association told the Times that 20 counties had not received any tests by Monday evening.

The Governor’s Office on Tuesday morning posted a video on Twitter of boxes of take-home tests being shipped out from a warehouse. The caption said the tests arrived Monday night and will be immediately sent to county offices of education to distribute to schools.

Students and school employees in Los Angeles Unified School District will be required to take a Covid-19 test before they can return to campuses next week, according to the Los Angeles Times.

The school board voted to require testing at a special meeting Monday morning because of the high rate of Covid infection in the Los Angeles area. School board members hope to catch cases before students return to the classroom Jan. 11.

Tests can be taken at district test centers or at other locations, and can be PCR tests or antigen tests. Results should be sent to the district’s Daily Pass system by Jan. 9, according to the article.

A bill introduced Monday by state senator Anthony Portantino, D-La Cañada Flintridge, would base K-12 district’s funding on enrollment, removing average daily attendance from the formula starting in 2023-24.

Currently, districts’ baseline funding depends on the number of students enrolled, minus the daily average number of absent students. The formula has caused districts to struggle to budget for all of their students despite only getting funded for those who show up on a given day, supporters of the new policy have said.

The policy change is estimated to bring more than $3 billion in extra funding to K-12 districts in California, Portantino said. The state is projected to see a $31 billion revenue surplus in the 2022 budget year.

California is one of only six states that factor average daily attendance into districts’ baseline funding formula, Portantino said at a press conference Monday. The others are Idaho, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri and Texas.

In order to receive the supplemental funding, districts would have to submit their “average daily membership” — total enrollment divided by the total number of instructional days — to the State Superintendent of Public Instruction by July 1, and must demonstrate a “maintenance of effort” to address students consistently not coming to school. The bill would require at least half of the extra funding to be spent addressing chronic absenteeism and habitual truancy.

The bill also includes a hold harmless provision, Portantino said, so that no district will lose money as a result of the policy change. Portantino said lawmakers will consider tweaking the bill to also base enrollment numbers on a three-year average, which is something he said districts have been asking for after seeing significant enrollment drops since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Teachers and other school staff in Los Angeles County will be required to wear N95 or other medical-grade masks amid a surge of Covid cases in the region, the Los Angeles Times reported.

The Los Angeles County Department of Public Health announced the new Covid safety guidelines on Friday. The new rules also require students and staff to wear masks outdoors in crowded areas.

Schools have two weeks after reopening from the holiday break to implement the new requirements, which apply to all public and private schools. Los Angeles Unified reopens Jan. 10. Most other districts in Los Angeles County return today.

An appeals court cleared the way for Oakland to collect more than $30 million to fund early childhood education and college readiness, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.

The ruling, issued last week, allows Measure AA to pass with a simple majority, instead of a two-thirds majority. The measure, a charter amendment that establishes an education parcel tax, received 62% of the vote in 2018. But a group of property owners sued to stop the measure, saying it needed a two-thirds majority to pass. The city lost the case initially but won on appeal.

Among other things, Measure AA will fund preschools and programs for high school students to prepare them for college.

The Food and Drug Administration approved Pfizer vaccine Covid booster shots for 12- to 15-year-olds, as well as boosters for younger children with compromised immune systems, the Washington Post reported Monday.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is expected to recommend the extra shots later this week.

“A booster dose of the currently authorized vaccines may help provide better protection against both the delta and omicron variants,” Peter Marks, director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, said. “In particular, the omicron variant appears to be slightly more resistant to the antibody levels produced in response” to the initial shot.

The move comes as millions of children across the country are returning to in-person school following the holiday break, and omicron continues to surge in the U.S.

Covid cases in California children are surging in pockets of the state, including San Francisco, Santa Clara County and San Diego, the San Francisco Chronicle is reporting.

“It’s absolutely blown up,” Dr. Laurel Schultz, a San Francisco pediatrician told the newspaper in a story published Thursday. About 20 children in her practice tested positive over the three-day Christmas weekend alone, she said.

Most of the children are mildly ill, she said.

Only 15% of Californian children between ages 5 to 11 are vaccinated at all, state data shows, the Chronicle reported.

“That’s way too low,” Michaela George, an assistant professor of global public health at Dominican University in San Rafael. “It needs to be higher than that — or kids will get sick.”

The newspaper reported that “Coronavirus infections in people ages 17 and younger are a growing proportion of California’s total cases: 15.2% as of Dec. 23, up from 13.2% in August, and 11.9% a year ago.”

The UCLA football team withdrew from the Holiday Bowl in San Diego due to concerns over Covid, leading the bowl organizers to cancel the game after they couldn’t find a replacement team.

The Bruins, who finished the season with an 8-4 record, announced a few hours before kickoff that they would not be able to play the game based on the team’s Covid protocols. Their opponent, North Carolina State, expressed frustration at the late cancellation, according to ESPN.

“We are deeply disappointed for our young men in the football program that worked extremely hard for this opportunity,” UCLA Athletic Director Martin Jarmond said. “My heart goes out to them. The health and safety of our students will always be our North Star.”

The bowl game, officially dubbed the San Diego County Credit Union Holiday Bowl, has been played annually in San Diego since 1978.

–Carolyn Jones

The Cate School, a prestigious boarding school near Santa Barbara, released a report last month describing allegations of sexual abuse and other teacher misconduct dating back to the 1960s, according to the Los Angeles Times.

The report is the result of a year-long internal investigation of abuse allegations at the school. It identifies 17 former faculty members who allegedly engaged in inappropriate behavior with students, including kissing, touching and sexual relationships with students after they graduated, according to the newspaper.

“In a close community such as ours, the bonds created between people on the Mesa are meant to provide comfort and nurture growth, not to inflict trauma. This was where we failed,” board of trustees President Lisa Browne Stanson and Chair Wyatt Gruber wrote to Cate students, alumni and parents. “We honor the survivors for the courage they have shown in coming forward to recount their painful experiences, and we thank those witnesses who joined them in helping us to understand the full nature of what occurred.”

–Carolyn Jones

A new mentoring program in California will match adult volunteers with middle and high school students to provide basic tutoring, career coaching and guidance about life in general, State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond announced Wednesday.

Organizations that provide mentoring to young people can join the initiative by emailing mentoring@cde.ca.gov.

The plan calls for mentors to pair with low-income students, students of color or any student who needs extra assistance.

“When I first started thinking about running to become State Superintendent, I always thought that in order to close opportunity and achievement gaps, there needed to be a program to make sure no student falls through the cracks—a way to put individual focus on students who need additional help,” Thurmond said. “I intended to pilot such a program when my term started, but that plan got pushed to the side when the pandemic began. I can see how a program like this is needed even more right now because of how the pandemic has impacted the learning and social-emotional needs of California students.”

–Carolyn Jones

The first week of classes at the University of Southern California in the spring semester will be taught online amid the spread of the omicron variant of Covid-19, university officials announced Friday.

Classes will still start Jan. 10 as scheduled, but in-person instruction won’t start until Jan. 18. Dorms and university housing will still open as scheduled on Jan. 6.

At least seven University of California campuses will also delay in-person instruction for the spring semester, the Sacramento Bee reported. UCLA, UC San Diego, UC Irvine, UC Santa Cruz, UC Riverside, and UC Santa Barbara are holding off two weeks until after the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday to resume in-person instruction; UC Davis will resume in-person instruction Jan. 10.

Before moving into USC housing, and before starting in-person classes, all students are required to show proof of a negative Covid test, according to the university. All students, staff and faculty will be required to receive a booster shot as soon as they are eligible; the university will set deadlines for when they must get it.

After the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued new recommendations Monday for the general public on quarantines and isolation, California officials said the state will update its own guidelines accordingly.

The new guidelines apply to everyone, including children. It remains to be seen how schools will amend their own guidelines on quarantines and isolation in light of the new guidelines.

For people who test positive for Covid-19 but remain without symptoms, the CDC is recommending they isolate for only five days rather than 10, followed by five days of wearing a mask when around others. The change was prompted by research showing the majority of Covid transmission occurs in the one-to-two days prior to the onset of symptoms and the two-to-three days after.

The CDC also updated its quarantine guidelines for people exposed to Covid-19. For people who are unvaccinated or not fully vaccinated, the CDC recommends quarantining for five days, followed by five days of strict mask use. If that’s not feasible, the CDC said, the individual should wear a well-fitting mask at all times around others for 10 days after the exposure.

People who are fully vaccinated and have had a booster do not need to quarantine following exposure, the CDC said, but should wear a mask for 10 days after the exposure.

For everyone who becomes exposed to Covid, the CDC recommends getting a test within at least five days after the exposure. If they develop symptoms, they should quarantine until they get a negative test confirming they don’t have Covid.

California’s program that enrolls incarcerated people in community college is booming, the San Francisco Chronicle is reporting.

About 14,000 of the state’s nearly 99,000 prisoners are enrolled, and the waiting list to take classes is growing, the newspaper reported Thursday in a story about the first former inmate to enroll at UC Berkeley.

“We’re limited only by the number of classrooms,” Rebecca Silbert, who runs the community college system’s Rising Scholars Network, told the Chronicle. “We have wait lists at every single prison.”

Enrollment is expected to soar next year when a new law takes effect requiring all state prisons to offer college programs. In 2023, inmates will be eligible for federal Pell Grants, a change that is expected to increase inmate applications to four-year colleges.

Allegations of a brutal hazing against a nationally acclaimed high school football program in Orange County have been met with closed ranks and silence even as the team won its third state championship in five years, the Los Angeles Times reported Thursday.

The charges stem from a lawsuit that a parent of a former player filed against Mater Dei High School last month, claiming their son suffered a traumatic brain injury in February when forced to fight a teammate who outweighed him by nearly 50 pounds in a brutal locker room ritual called “bodies.”

The suit alleges that fabled coach Bruce Rollinson and his staff did nothing to stop the beating, which was captured on video.

In a lengthy story published Thursday, the Times reports that the allegations have been met largely with silence, with fans, players, parents and alumni defending Rollinson. One father of a former player even called him “one of the greatest men ever to walk the planet.”

Orange County District Attorney Todd Spitzer has declined to file charges in the matter, the Times reported. A candidate challenging Spritzer in an election next year said he would open a child endangerment investigation of Rollinson if elected.

California plans to provide schools with enough at-home Covid-19 tests for every K-12 student — around 6 million — when they return from winter break, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office announced Wednesday.

The California Department of Public Health has already distributed around 2 million at-home tests to schools this month and will work with districts and county health offices to expand that to provide one or two rapid tests for every student, according to a Governor’s Office news release. Several districts throughout the state provided parents with free at-home test kits as students left for winter break, though they aren’t requiring students to take them.

“As we fight omicron, there is nothing more important for our kids than keeping schools safely open — that means deploying rapid tests,” State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond said in a statement.

The state will also expand antigen test availability and expand hours for state-sponsored testing sites, the news release said.

Students, faculty and staff at California State University campuses will be required to receive Covid-19 vaccination boosters in order to access campus facilities for the upcoming spring term unless they have a medical or religious exemption.

Under the policy, boosters must be administered by Feb. 28 or six months after an individual received the final dose of the initial vaccination, whichever comes later. The system’s 23 campuses also each have the option of establishing an earlier deadline for students and nonunion employees.

“Vaccination, including a booster when eligible, remains our most effective strategy against infection and severe disease,” CSU Chancellor Joseph Castro said in a statement. “This is particularly important in light of the rapid rise of cases of Covid-19 throughout the state and nation as the omicron variant spreads. Implementing the booster requirement now will help mitigate the potential spread of the variant on campuses as they repopulate in January after the winter break.”

The state’s other public university system, the University of California, is also requiring students and staff to receive boosters for the upcoming term.

The Biden administration announced Wednesday that it is extending the pause on federal student loan payments through May 1.

For tens of millions of borrowers, payments and interest on federal student loans have been suspended since spring 2020, when Congress passed its initial Covid-19 relief package. Payments were set to resume Feb. 1 but now will be paused for an additional 90 days.

“We know that millions of student loan borrowers are still coping with the impacts of the pandemic and need some more time before resuming payments,” President Joe Biden said in a statement.

As colleges struggle with safety measures amid a surge of the omicron coronavirus variant coinciding with winter break, all eligible students and staff in the 10-campus UC system will be required to provide proof that they have received a Covid-19 booster shot, officials have announced.

“The emergence of this new and fast-moving variant, coupled with student travel to and from campus and the prevalence of gatherings over the holidays, will present our campuses with a unique set of public health challenges as we begin the New Year,” UC President Michael V. Drake said in a letter to the chancellors, as the LA Times reported, adding that the plan “may require campuses to begin the term using remote instruction in order to allow students to complete an appropriate testing protocol as they return to campus.”

Even as the Build Back Better bill has run aground in the Senate, leaving the fate of the child tax credit up in the air, California’s poverty rate, already the highest in the nation before Covid-19, is likely to have worsened in 2021, as Cal Matters reports.  

In the latest data, more than a third of Californians continued to live in or near poverty. Nearly half of California children participate in the state’s two biggest assistance programs, CalFresh and CalWORKs. 

The expanded child tax credit has already lifted many children out of poverty, experts say. In California, for example, continuing the benefit would cut child poverty from 20% to 13.7% and bring more than 600,000 kids above the poverty line, according to a recent study by the Urban Institute.

Prospective mental health clinicians could get up to $25,000 in scholarship money under legislation proposed Tuesday by State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond intended to bolster mental health services for California students.

The plan is meant to entice at least 10,000 new mental health clinicians to work in the state’s K-12 public schools, which have been suffering a shortage of counselors, psychologists and social workers at the same time that student mental health needs have escalated due to the pandemic.

The legislation is coupled with a push to streamline and shorten the process to become a licensed mental health clinician. It’s also meant to complement the state’s other recent investments in student mental health, including $3 billion for community schools, which provide health and other services to students and their families, and $4.3 billion for youth mental health services from birth to age 25.

“This proposal creates a needed career pathway to provide California students with the counselors they need to overcome the trauma of the pandemic,” said Christine Stoner-Mertz, chief executive of the California Alliance of Child and Family Services, which is co-sponsoring the legislation.

Seven University of California campuses will shift to remote instruction at the start of the upcoming term in January, they announced Tuesday.

UC has nine undergraduate campuses across the state. The Davis, Irvine, Los Angeles, Riverside, San Diego, Santa Barbara and Santa Cruz campuses will begin the winter term with remote instruction to allow for extensive testing of returning students. Davis will hold classes online for one week when students return. The other six campuses plan to hold classes online for two weeks.

Those campuses are the seven campuses that are on the quarter schedule and begin the next term Jan. 3. The other two UC campuses, Berkeley and Merced, are on semester calendars and don’t resume instruction until the middle of the month, giving them more time to finalize their plans for the term.

The campuses made the announcements after systemwide president Michael Drake said in a message to campus chancellors Tuesday that they could consider moving to online-only classes when students return in January. Given that Covid-19 cases “are continuing to rapidly rise across the nation as the Omicron variant spreads,” Drake said campus chancellors should “design and implement a plan for a January return to campus that mitigates public health impacts.” That may include a period of remote instruction, Drake added, “in order to allow students to complete an appropriate testing protocol as they return to campus.”

In his message Tuesday, Drake also emphasized that under the system’s Covid-19 vaccination policy, booster shots are mandated for eligible students and other community members.

“The evidence is clear that receiving a booster is essential to protecting yourself and those around you from Omicron and other variants,” Drake wrote.

A San Diego Superior Court judge on Monday put San Diego Unified’s vaccine mandate on pause, the San Diego Union-Tribune reported, preventing thousands of unvaccinated teens from being barred from in-person instruction in the spring semester.

San Diego Unified’s mandate called for all students 16 and older to get fully vaccinated by Monday or else enroll in independent study starting Jan. 24, according to the Union-Tribune. The court ruled that only the state Legislature can act on vaccine mandates; the state’s student vaccine mandate will follow the federal Food and Drug Administration’s full approval of the Covid vaccine for each age group and is expected to go into effect in July 2022.

“The statutory scheme leaves no room for each of the over 1,000 individual school districts to impose a patchwork of additional vaccine mandates, including those like the (San Diego Unified vaccine) Roadmap that lack a personal belief exemption and therefore are even stricter than what the (state health department) could itself impose upon learned consideration,” Judge John Meyer wrote in his ruling.

The ruling only applies to San Diego Unified, but will likely be used by anti-vaccine groups as evidence to challenge Covid vaccine mandates at other districts that adopted stricter timelines than the state’s.

After Sen. Joe Manchin, D-West Virginia, expressed opposition to President Joe Biden’s $1.75 trillion Build Back Better domestic spending agenda — some say it was a death blow — questions remain about what this will mean for universal pre-kindergarten and other education and child care proposals included in the plan.

The Build Back Better agenda included $109 billion to fund free preschool for every 3- and 4-year-old, as well as nearly $276 billion over six years for child care for parents with kids 5 and younger, according to USA Today. Child care expenses for low- and moderate-income households would be capped at 7% of a family’s income, and pay would be increased for child care workers.

The agenda also would have included a one-year extension of expanded monthly child tax credit payments, which began in July under the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan.

ABC News reported that Manchin, in private conversations on Capitol Hill, questioned whether parents would misuse child tax credit payments to buy drugs, outraging those he said it to. The last monthly child tax credit payment went out Dec. 15 and may be the last that families receive.

Manchin said he would support a separate bill to extend the payments, NBC News reported. However, the White House said it would be unlikely to get the Senate’s support for such a bill, as Manchin is aware.

CNN reported Monday that Manchin made an offer to Biden on the Build Back Better agenda days before calling off negotiations, which included funding universal pre-K for a full 10 years, but it did not extend the expanded child tax credit payments. The offer indicates that the universal pre-K proposal may be salvaged in whatever new version of the Build Back Better plan the White House follows up with.