USA/ 12 November 2020/ Source/ www.sandiegouniontribune.com/

Less than a third of San Diego County students are attending school in-person to some degree, while 84 percent of private school students are

By Kristen Taketa

Private school students in San Diego County are more than twice as likely to be attending school in-person as public school students, according to new data published by the San Diego County Office of Education.

Out of 462,752 public and private school students reported, about two-thirds remain in distance learning at home while less than a third are attending school in-person at least part-time. Just 6 percent of students are attending school in-person full-time; more students are in hybrid learning, where students learn in-person part-time and learn online part-time.

The rates of in-person versus online learning become more skewed when looking at the type of school.

About 84 percent of private school students in the data are attending school in-person to some degree, compared to just 32 percent of district public school students and 16 percent of charter students. Charter schools are public schools run independently of school districts.

In San Diego Unified, about 3,000 students — or 3 percent of the district’s total enrollment — are coming to campus for partial in-person services as part of the district’s Phase One of reopening. District officials previously said up to 12,000 elementary students would qualify for Phase One because they have high needs.

The data seem to confirm what private and public school officials have been saying throughout the school year — private schools had several advantages over large districts when reopening, and they were the first in line to reopen.

The reopening data do not represent all schools in the county. Sweetwater Union High School District and 100 of the county’s 221 private schools failed to report how many students are learning in-person, in hybrid or online, even though the county health order required the report by Monday. Sweetwater is staying closed for in-person instruction until 2021.

While some schools are missing, the data still present the first comprehensive picture of K-12 school reopenings in the county in the 11 weeks since schools here were first allowed to reopen. Until this month, no such data was being collected from public or private schools countywide.

The data shows that at least 561 schools have reopened to at least some students, while at least 282 schools reported they have not yet reopened for any students. Only three of those 282 closed schools are private.

As of Tuesday, closed schools lost their chance to reopen because the county has fallen to the most restrictive, purple tier of the state’s COVID-19 monitoring system.

In the purple tier, schools that have not reopened must remain closed for in-person instruction, but they can serve limited numbers of students in small groups in-person. Elementary schools can also apply for a county waiver to reopen during the purple tier.

Schools that have already opened for in-person instruction do not have to close during the purple tier.

It will take at least five weeks, or until mid-December, for the county to get and stay out of the purple tier long enough to reopen still-closed schools. It could be later, depending on how long it takes the county to improve its COVID-19 rates.

The county data shows that 148,435 students are attending school in-person to some degree and 30,666 school staff are working on-site. Meanwhile, since June, 344 cases have been reported of a person testing positive for COVID-19 after having visited a K-12 school.

Private advantage

While private school students had the highest rates of in-person learning among K-12 students, they are a small minority — they make up 5 percent of the students represented in Tuesday’s data.

Several private school leaders have said they were eager and determined to reopen as soon as they could, largely because reopening was what their parents wanted. Private schools were overwhelmingly the first in line to apply for waivers to reopen, and they possess several advantages over public schools.

Private school leaders have said it was easier for them to reopen because private schools are autonomous and generally smaller than public schools, and therefore were more flexible and quick to figure out reopening logistics. Meanwhile many districts have taken longer to coordinate reopening dozens of schools for tens of thousands of students and staff.

Leaders of large school districts have tended to be more cautious and said they have to worry about the potential to spread COVID-19 to a larger community if they reopen, whereas a single private or charter school would likely have less impact because of its smaller size.

What’s more, three of the four school districts that enroll the most students in San Diego County — San Diego Unified, Sweetwater and Chula Vista Elementary — include areas where COVID-19 rates are disproportionately high compared to the rest of the county.

Unlike district schools, private schools and most charter schools do not have employee unions they must negotiate with before reopening. Some teachers unions, which have older members and members with pre-existing conditions, are pushing school districts to implement more extensive safety precautions before reopening.

Other factors are playing into the data. Schools that reopened are offering students the option to continue learning online, so the distance learning totals include students who have chosen to continue learning at home.

Charter schools likely have a lower percentage of students learning in-person because several charter schools are specifically geared toward online learning, home school or independent study.

All San Diego County public and private schools are required by the county’s health order to report reopening data — the numbers of students doing in-person, online or hybrid learning and number of staff working onsite — to the county education office by the second and fourth Monday of every month.

The county education office will publish the data the following day.

You can look up your school in the county education office’s reopening data dashboard.

Source

https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/education/story/2020-11-11/new-data-show-private-public-divide-in-san-diego-county-school-reopenings