The Morgan Hill Unified School District has postponed local schools’ scheduled return to in-person instruction to April 12. The MHUSD board of trustees unanimously approved the new full-time, district-wide in-person return date at the March 3 meeting.
District officials in January had decided to bring students back to campus at all sites and all grade levels on March 22. Since then, the availability of Covid-19 vaccinations—a key condition for the return to school—did not come about as quickly as hoped for, MHUSD Superintendent Steve Betando explained.
Now, with educators and school workers in Santa Clara County finally eligible for the vaccine as of Feb. 28, district officials are working with the county and other groups to make sure all 800 or so MHUSD employees have access to Covid-19 vaccinations in the coming days. But with the time it takes for patients to receive a second vaccine dose and for the inoculation to take effect, Betando said it was safer to extend the all-campus reopening to April 12.
To that end, MHUSD and Albertsons, the company that owns Safeway grocery stores and pharmacies, are teaming up to host a series of vaccination clinics March 10-13 (first dose) and March 31 to April 3 (second dose) at Sobrato High School in Morgan Hill. The clinics are expected to have enough vaccine doses to inoculate 1,170 eligible residents of Santa Clara County.
The vaccine clinics will take place at Sobrato’s Performing Arts Center, 401 Burnett Ave.
More than 200 MHUSD employees have already been vaccinated, as they were reserved a block of appointments at the county’s mass vaccination clinic at the fairgrounds in San Jose earlier this week, Betando said.
Employees are not required to be vaccinated to return to an April 12 full-time classroom schedule, Betando said. Regular screening and testing for employees will continue.
The return to in-person learning will apply to all MHUSD schools. Parents and students have the option of continuing distance learning from home or a remote location
Campuses and district offices have met all other regulatory and self-imposed conditions for bringing students back to the classroom, Betando said. This includes the state’s placement of Santa Clara County and the Bay Area in the Red Tier, indicating a lower risk of Covid-19 spread than the region’s previous Purple Tier.
Due to social distancing and other safety protocols, the return to in-person learning will entail a hybrid model in which different groups or cohorts of students spend alternating blocks learning from home and on campus.
The return to in-person learning is “Phase Six” in a long-term plan established last year by MHUSD officials to bring students back to the classrooms in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic. In fall of 2020, the district began a limited in-person instruction program at some campuses, under state and county protocols. The pilot program was expanded earlier this year, and now includes 24 classrooms.
The district has also enacted “connectivity hubs” and support groups for students to use district facilities for online instruction programs if they lack reliable internet at home.
“We have had zero kids contract Covid in our in-person programs,” Betando said.
Other conditions for the return to in-person learning, all of which Betando said the district will have met before April 12, include:
-Social distancing of students;
-All required health protocols in place;
-Individual student/home bubble health concerns addressed by school site health teams and available support for distance learning technology;
-Instructional technology fully deployed and available for all needed instructional situations;
-Food service has the ability to distribute meals with staggered schedules;
-Transportation can serve students at acceptable levels;
-Additional temporary employee positions for supervision, cleaning and health screening.
