California’s 2 Largest School Districts Will Be Online-Only In The Fall, Officials Say
California’s two largest public school districts, Los Angeles Unified and San Diego Unified, will hold classes completely online when teaching resumes in the fall, officials announced Monday as the coronavirus continues to surge around the nation.
Together the two districts enroll about 825,000 students and are the largest in the country to announce such plans. In a joint statement, officials said ongoing research around the coronavirus remained “incomplete” and federal guidelines were “vague and contradictory.”
“One fact is clear: those countries that have managed to safely reopen schools have done so with declining infection rates and on-demand testing available. California has neither,” the districts said. “The skyrocketing infection rates of the past few weeks make it clear the pandemic is not under control.”
Cases of the virus have continued to rise in most states in the U.S. More than 61,000 new infections were announced Monday, the second-highest during any point in the pandemic, and hospitals in some states were warning of rapidly filling intensive care units.
At the same time, school officials have been struggling to figure out how to resume classes later this year with some adopting a similar online approach or hybrid models that will limit how many students can be on campus at a time.
Austin Beutner, the superintendent of Los Angeles Unified, emphasized the district’s decision was made to keep students and teachers safe as the new school year begins, saying “science was our guide and will continue to be.”
“There’s a public health imperative to keep schools from becoming a petri dish,” Beutner said Monday. “While the school year will begin without students at school facilities, our goal is to welcome students back to school as soon as it is safe and appropriate for us to do so.”
The start of the school year in California is five weeks away, and Beutner told the Los Angeles Times it was important to let...
