After two school years interrupted by the chaos of the pandemic, our students and school communities deserve safe educational environments. All of Oakland’s public schools must provide a full school year of robust learning opportunities to help restore academic, social and emotional success for every student. Consolidating teachers at schools across the district would be antithetical to our responsibilities to our students’ needs.
No consolidations! In order to maintain a restorative restart for all students, they should not suddenly have their teacher taken away. They are in the process of building a safe and trusting relationship and classroom community. Our students deserve stability.
There should be no consolidations this school year if we truly are trying to have a restorative restart. Our students deserve to keep the teacher that they had at the beginning of the school year. We have the means avoid consolidations this school year.
We and our students deserve safe schools. We need weekly testing at EVERY site that is available before and after school. We need outdoor eating spaces. Our students take off their masks in the cafeteria to eat, and are sitting INCHES from each other while they talk and eat. We need testing and quarantine protocols that make sense. Finally we need to know what you are doing with the MILLIONS of dollars in COVID funding.
We need a 12+ Covid vaccine mandate for students. Please be bold and be on the right side of history by voting for this mandate. Colleges and universities are already doing it. This will make things so much safer at secondary schools.
No teacher consolidations through this critical year! students have been through too many transitions already. This completely undermines catching up on academics and unsettles any attempt at social/emotion support during this critical time.
Safer meal times with appropriate social distancing when masks are off.
Better ventilation / air conditioning in every class. More custodians and support staff for cleaning and contact tracing.
I am a daily after-school teacher for students at a local OUSD elementary school. I am writing to voice my strong concerns about continuing to school in person at this time, as opposed to full or partial remote learning.
I deeply encourage you all to consider implementing remote learning options for all staff, students and faculty to serve OUSD families in full, or in part as we did to close out the previous school year. There are alternatives, and we owe it to our entire district to collectively consider and work to implement those as our lives are irreversibly changed, and still unfolding in a global pandemic.
I have an extensive list of how my school site has been affected by haphazard attempts to keep students and staff safe while schooling in-person during a worsening global pandemic. I am happy to forward via email to board chairs since comment is limited.
We need *weekly testing* of ALL people regularly coming onto ALL campuses (students + staff + volunteers). We need this data to be able to be sure that everyone is protected. Additionally we need strong guidance of masking in schools. As a teacher, I am frequently seeing students not wearing masks around campus, and I have no means of enforcing it aside from saying "please put on a mask." If students refuse, it feels as though I do not have the support to help this student either get masked or moved off campus.
I want to thank the teachers , school staff and District Staff for all of the hard work that has been put in to making the schools safe. As we all know from watching schools that were open all year last year, cases in school reflect the community, and we saw a good amount of cases come in from the community at the start of school. If schools were not safe those numbers would have multiplied - instead we saw a 51% drop in cases from week 2 to week 3. That is significant & a testament to what you all have put in place, the Rapid Response Testing and more. I am sure we will see cases rise after Labor Day & I encourage a robust testing plan after the Holidays this winter - as again cases will come from holiday gatherings.Please continue to implement the most logical approaches to keeping our kids safe-we know that misinformation causes some anger in the community, but know that there are a lot of us who know you are going above & beyond. Stay the course and THANK YOU!!
We demand that OUSD meets with our safety bargaining team to discuss: smoke days, ventilation in large spaces such as cafeterias where students eat close with no social distancing, and testing availability for students and families. Cases in OUSD Dashboard have decreased since the start of school, but this is a false sense of security. We have many many students out sick with unconfirmed COVID cases every day, due to their lack of access to testing and quick turnaround times. One family had to wait 5 additional school days before returning because they were waiting for their PCR results. Students are losing critical learning time because they are waiting for access to testing!
Our students, staff, families, and communities need safe schools. We need: weekly COVID testing available at EVERY site; a safe plan for mealtimes, including sufficient staffing for small groups of students, not students unmasked all together in cafeterias; a plan for what school sites do when multiple teachers are out sick and there are no substitutes; higher pay for custodians so we can fill custodial vacancies; support for our overworked office staff, who are currently working two jobs (contact tracing on top of their regular duties); more distance learning options without the threat of losing school placement; an assurance from the Board that there will be no teacher consolidations this year, because losing a teacher and combining classes is not a restorative restart; air conditioning in our classrooms, where we are wearing masks for 6 hours a day. We need the Board to address these concerns now, because they are problems that students, families, and teachers are facing today.
I think it is beyond necessary to implement a real covid testing plan that proactively includes all of the school sites. It the main obstacle to rolling a program is the lack of trained medical staff to carry out the tests, and the assumption is that only trained medical staff can properly carry out the tests, then why is the district bothering to give out tests so that people themselves can test themselves? What is the district doing with the $300 million in covid relief funds?
After two school years interrupted by the chaos of the pandemic, our students and school communities deserve safe educational environments. All of Oakland’s public schools must provide a full school year of robust learning opportunities to help restore academic, social and emotional success for every student. Consolidating teachers at schools across the district would be antithetical to our responsibilities to our students’ needs.
No consolidations.
No consolidations! In order to maintain a restorative restart for all students, they should not suddenly have their teacher taken away. They are in the process of building a safe and trusting relationship and classroom community. Our students deserve stability.
There should be no consolidations this school year if we truly are trying to have a restorative restart. Our students deserve to keep the teacher that they had at the beginning of the school year. We have the means avoid consolidations this school year.
We and our students deserve safe schools. We need weekly testing at EVERY site that is available before and after school. We need outdoor eating spaces. Our students take off their masks in the cafeteria to eat, and are sitting INCHES from each other while they talk and eat. We need testing and quarantine protocols that make sense. Finally we need to know what you are doing with the MILLIONS of dollars in COVID funding.
We need a 12+ Covid vaccine mandate for students. Please be bold and be on the right side of history by voting for this mandate. Colleges and universities are already doing it. This will make things so much safer at secondary schools.
No teacher consolidations through this critical year! students have been through too many transitions already. This completely undermines catching up on academics and unsettles any attempt at social/emotion support during this critical time.
Safer meal times with appropriate social distancing when masks are off.
Better ventilation / air conditioning in every class. More custodians and support staff for cleaning and contact tracing.
I am a daily after-school teacher for students at a local OUSD elementary school. I am writing to voice my strong concerns about continuing to school in person at this time, as opposed to full or partial remote learning.
I deeply encourage you all to consider implementing remote learning options for all staff, students and faculty to serve OUSD families in full, or in part as we did to close out the previous school year. There are alternatives, and we owe it to our entire district to collectively consider and work to implement those as our lives are irreversibly changed, and still unfolding in a global pandemic.
I have an extensive list of how my school site has been affected by haphazard attempts to keep students and staff safe while schooling in-person during a worsening global pandemic. I am happy to forward via email to board chairs since comment is limited.
Thank you
We need *weekly testing* of ALL people regularly coming onto ALL campuses (students + staff + volunteers). We need this data to be able to be sure that everyone is protected. Additionally we need strong guidance of masking in schools. As a teacher, I am frequently seeing students not wearing masks around campus, and I have no means of enforcing it aside from saying "please put on a mask." If students refuse, it feels as though I do not have the support to help this student either get masked or moved off campus.
I want to thank the teachers , school staff and District Staff for all of the hard work that has been put in to making the schools safe. As we all know from watching schools that were open all year last year, cases in school reflect the community, and we saw a good amount of cases come in from the community at the start of school. If schools were not safe those numbers would have multiplied - instead we saw a 51% drop in cases from week 2 to week 3. That is significant & a testament to what you all have put in place, the Rapid Response Testing and more. I am sure we will see cases rise after Labor Day & I encourage a robust testing plan after the Holidays this winter - as again cases will come from holiday gatherings.Please continue to implement the most logical approaches to keeping our kids safe-we know that misinformation causes some anger in the community, but know that there are a lot of us who know you are going above & beyond. Stay the course and THANK YOU!!
We demand that OUSD meets with our safety bargaining team to discuss: smoke days, ventilation in large spaces such as cafeterias where students eat close with no social distancing, and testing availability for students and families. Cases in OUSD Dashboard have decreased since the start of school, but this is a false sense of security. We have many many students out sick with unconfirmed COVID cases every day, due to their lack of access to testing and quick turnaround times. One family had to wait 5 additional school days before returning because they were waiting for their PCR results. Students are losing critical learning time because they are waiting for access to testing!
Our students, staff, families, and communities need safe schools. We need: weekly COVID testing available at EVERY site; a safe plan for mealtimes, including sufficient staffing for small groups of students, not students unmasked all together in cafeterias; a plan for what school sites do when multiple teachers are out sick and there are no substitutes; higher pay for custodians so we can fill custodial vacancies; support for our overworked office staff, who are currently working two jobs (contact tracing on top of their regular duties); more distance learning options without the threat of losing school placement; an assurance from the Board that there will be no teacher consolidations this year, because losing a teacher and combining classes is not a restorative restart; air conditioning in our classrooms, where we are wearing masks for 6 hours a day. We need the Board to address these concerns now, because they are problems that students, families, and teachers are facing today.
I think it is beyond necessary to implement a real covid testing plan that proactively includes all of the school sites. It the main obstacle to rolling a program is the lack of trained medical staff to carry out the tests, and the assumption is that only trained medical staff can properly carry out the tests, then why is the district bothering to give out tests so that people themselves can test themselves? What is the district doing with the $300 million in covid relief funds?