West Contra Costa Unified to negotiate reopening schools with labor unions

West Contra Costa Unified intends to return to the bargaining table with its teacher and employee unions to reopen schools, Superintendent Matthew Duffy said in a brief announcement at a school board meeting Thursday.

The statement followed three hours of closed-session discussion among school board members. In accordance with state public meeting laws, Duffy announced the action taken during closed session, saying school board members unanimously gave “direction to staff regarding negotiations to reopen schools.”

Though West Contra Costa Unified officials would not elaborate, United Teachers of Richmond president Marissa Glidden clarified that the board’s decision was to negotiate a return to in-person instruction in the spring. Glidden said teachers are “eager for a safe return to school buildings” and that the union seeks to create a plan in which teachers may volunteer to work in person, and high needs students are prioritized.

“We know that educators are working tirelessly to serve their students and any plan must not significantly reduce the quality or amount of instruction that students who remain in distance learning will receive,” Glidden said.

A group of parents that had been for months pressuring the district to reopen celebrated the announcement. They had criticized the district’s distance learning contract with its unions — which was agreed upon in the fall of 2020 — for being too stringent to allow for in-person instruction this school year. The contract called for a return to in-person instruction only when three conditions were met: all zip codes within the district were in the orange or “moderate” tier on the state’s reopening tier system for 21 consecutive days; the case rates in surrounding counties of Alameda and Solano counties dropped below 10 per 100,000 population; and the positivity rate dropped below 3%. Contra Costa County remained in the purple or “widespread” tier as of March 5.

School board members Demetrio Gonzalez-Hoy and Mister Phillips said they were in favor of moving toward reopening before the end of the school year. Gonzalez-Hoy said he would want the district to start by only bringing students back in small cohorts, with teachers returning to the classroom on a voluntary basis. Phillips said he would like the district to offer in-person instruction by April 1 to preschool through sixth grade, and for the district to bring back as many middle school and high school students as conditions allow.