COVID: Newsom touts school reopening, but few hours are spent in class – By John Woolfolk (Mercury News) / Mar 16 2021
Change in distancing rules would be ‘game changer’
Gov. Gavin Newsom visited an Alameda elementary school Tuesday that just welcomed kids back to classrooms this week to tout progress toward reopening campuses closed for the past year by the coronavirus pandemic.
Of California’s nearly 11,000 public schools, the governor said about 9,000 have reopened or announced dates to reopen in coming weeks, up from fewer than 6,000 a few weeks ago.
“We are seeing real progress, real momentum,” Newsom told reporters at Ruby Bridges Elementary School in the Alameda Unified School District, adding that the $6.6 billion reopening bill he negotiated with lawmakers earlier this month has aided those efforts.
But as excited as kids and parents were to return to school this week at Ruby Bridges, as with most California public school districts, Alameda Unified’s reopening is only a partial “hybrid” plan, limited to elementary grades whose pupils will be on campus just two days a week for two and a half hours each. The rest of the time, they will continue their studies remotely on computers at home.
