LA Parents Keeping Kids Home Because Teachers Aren’t In School

As Los Angeles Unified, the second-largest school district in the country, begins introducing students back into classrooms more than a year after going remote, superintendent Austin Beutner is claiming his gradual reopening plan guarantees “the safest school environment — period, end of story.”

Yet surveys have shown that less than half of Los Angeles elementary, middle, and high-school parents intend to send their child back to school. Teachers and administrators intent on delaying a full reopening are citing those numbers to suggest that many parents are still reluctant to expose their children to COVID-19 in schools.

“The trauma, anxiety and very real concern about the virus isn’t going away just because a few politicians declare it’s time to reopen,” Beutner said last month.

But some parents disagree, arguing that some of the hesitation stems from the district’s meager “return” proposal, calling it disingenuous from the start.

“Our middle school has 2000 kids, only 400 are going back. And what upsets me even more is LAUSD is using that number to show, ‘oh look, parents didn’t really want to come back,’” Ghazal Vahdat-Yashouafar, an attorney and mother of three, told National Review. “No, parents are choosing not to send their kids back, because it doesn’t make sense.”

After extended reopening negotiations with union officials, LAUSD agreed to a deal granting union members the right to wait until they’re fully vaccinated before returning to school, as well as mandatory coronavirus testing and six-foot distancing between desks — double what the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention now recommends.

So far, the staggered “reopening” has seen elementary school students return to campus, with middle and high schools next. But even once they’re back in classrooms, students are still being deprived of the education they received before the pandemic.

Vahdat-Yashouafar’s two youngest children — a second and fifth-grader — have already returned to school, but now spend half of their six-hour school day with hired monitors in “supervised care and enrichment,” rather than with a teacher in the classroom. In some schools, such programing runs all-day, multiple days per week.

“They get to sit in a tent outside. I mean, it was so strict. Parents are so upset,” she explained. “They’re not allowed to really talk to each other, even one of the ‘beyond the bell workers,’ — that’s what they call the program — said they’re not even allowed to tilt their heads towards each other. It’s like prison.”

And as for middle and high-school students, many will spend only a couple of days a week on campus, and while there they will still be learning over Zoom while teachers stay at home.

“The whole idea of ‘Zoom in the room’ makes my blood boil, because I’m like, ‘So these kids have been abandoned all year. They’ve been stuck on screens and now you’re going to shove them into a classroom with little screens?’ I mean, it’s so insulting. It’s not a plan, it’s not a reopening plan,” Nicole Sacker, a screenwriter and mom of four LAUSD students, said in a phone interview.

“If they were going to do such a plan, the more humane and nicer way to do it would be to have all the kids in one classroom, have them be in one class,” she continued. “So at least you could project the screen up on the wall. But the way they’re doing it is like one kid will be on algebra, another kid will be in biology, another kid will be in music class. It’s madness.”

Sacker said her oldest, a freshman in high school, tested as “gifted” in the fifth grade and “got good grades all his life.” But after a year of Zoom school, “he is so unmotivated” and is struggling with nearly all failing grades.

“The kids at this age, they don’t need babysitters. They need teachers,” she said. “So it’s almost like it satisfying some requirement, where the unions and the district can say, ‘See we got your kids covered, we’re babysitting your kids.’ They’re old enough that they don’t need babysitters. What they need is to be taught by people.”

To cover the thousands of auxiliary positions as many union members remain home, LAUSD is hiring monitors at a rate of $14 to $30 an hour or more, as well as partnering with existing local day-care and tutoring organizations. In an email to National Review, a district spokesperson declined to say whether the newly hired monitors have already been vaccinated.

“It’s 600,000 kids that this is impacting. We’re the second-largest school district in the United States. They’ve had 14 months to plan for this,” Vahdat-Yashouafar stated.

She went on to call out Beutner, the superintendent, for touting his district’s ability to provide “a full day of instruction” when students actually spend much of their school day without a teacher present.

“It’s only three hours of instruction and four hours of babysitting or day care. And . . . most of the schools, they don’t have enough staff to even provide it,” she said.

Sacker — who attended Catholic school but became “a big champion of public-school education” as she had her own kids — said she was fully behind the initial closures when the pandemic started last March. But as time has gone on, and especially over the last few months, she has watched friends with kids in Catholic schools go back to school — while in LAUSD, “a lot of district and union politics” have left her disillusioned.

“Just people all over, I would be talking to, and they were back in school. And I’m like, ‘Yeah, LA’s teachers’ unions have these like high demands,’” she recalled. “And then I saw one of their demands was ‘defund the police.’ And I mean, even though — like, yes, I’m in support of that — like that has nothing to do with getting our kids back in the classroom.”

“Everybody else seemed to open before us. I mean, we’re last.”

Both moms said they had been forced to hire tutors to try to keep their kids, who struggle with staying focused for hours in front of a screen, afloat during distance learning.

“We went to open house for my son, the middle schooler, and two of his teachers admitted that they’re not able to finish half of what they normally would in a school year,” Vahdat-Yashouafar said. “That was science and math . . . LAUSD is trying to make up for by adding ten days to next year’s instructional school day. They would have to add six months in order to make up for the amount of instructional time that they lost this year.”

And both moms said they were unlikely to keep their kids in school under the current model, since the quality of the instruction provided is no better than what can be accomplished from home.

“They’re doing what they were doing at home, but they’re doing it in a classroom. If they’re going to do that they might as well just be home in their pajamas,” Sacker stated.

Vahdat-Yashouafar agreed.

“Even though I really wanted my son to go back to school — and we’re going to try it out, just to see — but most likely after the first day, I mean it just doesn’t make sense,” she said. “If he’s not getting in-class instruction from his teacher, he’s not getting the socialization that he needs, so what’s the point?”