As COVID Cases Drop and Teachers Get Vaccinated, Black Parents and Community Leaders Protest Ongoing School Closures

Coach Lamar Freeman of LA Rampage says all the parents of the kids he coaches want them back in school now.

As COVID case rates fall dramatically and teachers start getting vaccinated en masse, parents and community members in some of L.A.’s most disenfranchised Black communities are growing increasingly frustrated with LAUSD’s failure to reach agreement with its teachers union to reopen schools. 

“It’s ridiculous how they’re keeping these schools closed,” said Lydia Friend, founder of the organization Women of Watts, which is planning a March 13 rally to reopen schools, the one-year anniversary of L.A. school closures. “Our babies need to be in school, and I got a whole bunch of mamas saying the same thing.” 

That sentiment was echoed by Lamar Freeman, coach of LA Rampage, part of Snoop Youth Football League in Watts, Compton and South L.A. “Mostly all of my parents want their kids to get back to school ASAP,” he said. “They’re mostly from single-parent homes. No one is supervising them to make sure they’re doing Zoom classes. Their grades are slipping. Straight A students are getting Cs and Ds.” 

Both Friend and Freeman said many of the kids in their community are depressed, not only from isolation but also from the lack of structure that school and sports brought to their lives and from worrying that athletic college scholarship prospects are slipping away. 

“For a lot of kids, this is the only way to get to college,” Freeman said. “Them being out of school, there’s no sports. That avenue is taken away. Their social life, period, that’s taken away from the kids. They’re waking up in their room by themselves everyday.”

The L.A. Health Department gave the green light to reopen all elementary schools two weeks ago, and LAUSD is also allowed to serve 25% of the highest-need kids at all grade levels on campus. Nevertheless, as LAUSD prepares to reopen campuses March 4 for voluntary special education services and childcare, as well as some athletic conditioning, LAUSD still has no deal with UTLA to have teachers return to classrooms this school year.

“We are not there yet folks,” UTLA President Cecily Myart-Cruz said Friday on Facebook live. Instead, UTLA is encouraging its members to support a “refusal to return” unless all teachers have access to full vaccination and case numbers fall even more and other safety conditions are met. 

But with the Centers for Disease Control releasing guidance from multiple studies showing that schools can safely reopen with far higher case rates than UTLA is insisting upon, parents and community leaders are increasingly pushing back. Friend especially takes issue with UTLA’s claim that it’s protecting Black kids and the Black community by keeping schools closed.

“That’s not true,” Friend said. “Where I live, school was a safe haven for the kids. You’re making our kids stay home for what? Safety? Half of them are out on the street playing outside anyway. If we keep going, we’re messing their minds up. You know how many kids have suicidal thoughts?”

While some parents don’t yet feel safe sending their kids back to campus, or they worry about the disruption that a new hybrid schedule would cause, others are demanding their kids be given the option to return. 

Joy Smith wants her two kids back in school, and she believes it’s safe to reopen elementary schools now.

“The people who want their children to go, let them go,” said Joy Smith, a nurse with a child in kindergarten and one in third grade at Coliseum Elementary in the Crenshaw district of L.A. She’s paying $240 a week to put her kids in a center for supervised distance learning.

Both kids are struggling with technical and academic issues, as well as physical eye strain. “The teacher said my daughter is at risk of not passing the third grade,” she said. 

Smith, who has been working in a hospital throughout the pandemic, says it’s safe to reopen elementary schools with COVID case rates down and precautions in place. “They have these pods everywhere. It’s obvious it can work. If any teacher is going to the supermarket or shopping for clothes, or going to a restaurant, why are they doing that if they’re so scared to go to school in a controlled environment with masks and distancing and testing? That’s less risk.”

Parents of kids with special needs have also been vocal, voicing anger over the voluntary nature of the in-person services being offered starting next week, especially after learning at the LAUSD board meeting last Tuesday that special education service providers such as occupational and speech therapists have had access to COVID-19 vaccines in the medical tier since January, but that no one at LAUSD was tracking that.

“This is insane,” Speak UP parent Carla Suarez-Capdet told the board Tuesday. “It will be an entire year since most special needs kids in LAUSD received these in-person services from the district. It’s unconscionable.”

Board Member Nick Melvoin (BD4) asked LAUSD to begin tracking which of these providers had received vaccinations and to require them to return to campus. “Our highest-need students need the in-person learning they can provide,” he tweeted. “We should be able to agree that our vaccinated teachers can safely return.”

While there’s still no reopening deal between LAUSD and UTLA, there is potential light at the end of the tunnel with educators getting access to vaccinations starting March 1, and with case rates falling to 12/100,000, very close to exiting the restrictive purple tier. The conditions that UTLA is demanding may be met in time to meet LAUSD Superintendent Austin Beutner’s goal of reopening schools by April 9.  

In the meantime, LAUSD is reaching out to families with special needs, homeless and foster youth to invite them back to campus for childcare and services, if not classroom instruction. Some LAUSD preschools will also reopen five days a week. 

LAUSD will also be surveying families in the next couple of weeks, asking them to choose between continuing with remote-only instruction or to return to campus for hybrid learning. Families will also be asked to select their preference for an am/pm schedule five days a week or alternating full days on campus. LAUSD is also starting to tout all of its state-of-the-art safety protocols, including a new Daily Pass app, which tracks weekly COVID test results and symptoms for students returning to campus. 

The board on Tuesday also unanimously passed the first resolution from new Board Member Tanya Ortiz Franklin (BD7), who represents Watts, to move LAUSD toward a more compassionate mastery-based grading system over the next few years. Mastery-based grading allows students multiple chances to demonstrate what they have learned and does not grade students based on their behavior. Ortiz Franklin called it a part of the call for racial justice in education. 

However, Freeman emphasized that the best way to help the kids he works with in Watts is to get them back in school. “School is really needed,” he said. “I never knew it was that important until it was taken away.”