With the beginning of the school year just around the corner, members of the Eugene School District 4J community spent hours voicing their concerns at the district’s Sept. 1 school board meeting, the last one before in-person classes start next week.
Wednesday night’s school board meeting was held at the Education Center and streamed online for attendees tuning in from home. School board members anticipated several questions and requests regarding reopening plans and invited Dr. Serena Black and Dr. Bob Pelz to provide their professional suggestions.
Multiple parents who publicly commented during the meeting expressed their frustrations about the district’s lack of communication with 4J families. Requests for more restrictive masking requirements and properly coordinated outdoor meal times were also made.
According to the district, the first day of classes for all grades is on Friday, Sept. 10. Their website states that the students will be attending classes on-site full-time, five days a week. Although the district is eager to have students back, parents are anxious about the implications of their children going back to school in-person and full-time, especially as COVID-19 cases continue to rise in Lane County.
Lindsey Frye was the first parent to speak at the school board meeting. As the parent of a Churchill High School football player in his senior year as well as a fifth grader, she has been invested in conversations regarding masks and in-person instruction since the pandemic started.
“I saw the information regarding Thurston a few weeks ago with the five positive COVID cases on the football team and just today, Bethel announced positive cases and a delay in their sports seasons. How many schools and sports teams will the district allow to be needlessly exposed?” she asked. Frye continued with “I’m advocating, asking you to require that vaccination proof be shown, to be transported to and from games, and require 4J athletic teams wear masks while actively participating in sports, not just on the sidelines.”
Frye went on to emphasize that although she is concerned about how COVID-19 will affect her son’s opportunities to play football and attend college, she is more concerned about making sure her son and his teammates are still alive at the end of the school year.
The last virtual public commenter of the night was Skyla Chavez, an incoming second grader who is “really excited” to see all her friends again. Chavez offered three solutions to the school board members: having meals outside, starting a mask drive so high quality masks are accessible to all students, and providing an incentive for students to get tested for COVID-19 so exposures to the virus within the classroom decrease. After sharing her suggestions, Chavez ended with “thank you for listening to my ideas, thank you for keeping my friends safe, thank you for keeping my school safe.” School board member Martina Shabram was brought to tears by the second grader’s words.
As of Friday, Sept. 3, the Oregon Health Authority reported 2,379 new COVID-19 cases and 24 new deaths. Additionally, Oregon has 1,172 hospitalized patients with COVID-19, with 309 of those patients receiving care in the intensive care unit. Out of the new reported cases, 205 of them are from Lane County. COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations are continuing to increase throughout the state, which is worrisome to families with school-aged children. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has not approved any of the available COVID-19 vaccines to be used on children under the age of 12, which means all students in sixth grade and below will be in the classroom unvaccinated.
In response to the issues raised by public commenters, Black and Pelz offered their insight on how relevant concerns were. In regards to how the CDC’s suggested spacing will be enforced in the classroom, which was a recurring topic throughout the meeting, Pelz said “if you had half as many students or twice as big a class you could do six feet but that’s just not going to happen in most classes. I think you do the best you can, if you can do three feet, you do that, and I think there are going to be times when that’s not going to be feasible…the more spacing you can do the better, but a lot of that you don’t have control over.”
In addition to Pelz’s advice, Black followed with “as long as we’re doing the best we can with masking and spacing as much as possible, and hand hygiene and good ventilation, that will be sort of the best we can do and we’ll have to rely on those measures.”
Jarl Berg, a 4J parent who is also married to a teacher in the district, he understands why people are eager to send their kids back to school, but also thinks that the decision to start school in-person and full-time is being made too early. “Asynchronous learning, just like what we did last year, I think would be the most logical at this time. There’s so much we don’t know…but there’s so much that we do know, and we do know that COVID is transmissible. Kids are going to get it and they are going to bring it home.” On the topic of enforcing masks at school, Berg stated “you’re asking kids to be more adult than so many adults right now.”
The CDC has reported that all 36 counties in Oregon are experiencing high rates of community transmission. In a private Facebook group titled “Eugene 4J Families for a Safe Return to School,” 4J families and community members have circulated petitions related to reopening plans. One petition calls for schools in the district to hold meals outside and another petition aims to have the school year delayed until transmission rates decrease.
