By Thomas Ultican 8/13/2021
It is not possible for schools in most states to open safely. Well respected Dr Jorge A Caballero wrote in the Guardian, “school reopening plans that hinge on universal mask mandates and frequent testing are doomed to fail.” At this perilous time, there is also a political movement demanding that schools be fully opened. Because the delta variant is so much more transmissible, only mandated vaccination and masking will make it possible for schools to safely operate.
This weekend the President of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), Randi Weingarten, accepted reality and in a Meet the Press interview called for mandatory vaccination of teachers. The leadership at the National Education Association (NEA) also reversed their opposition on Thursday (8/12/2021) and joined with AFT’s call for vaccine mandates.
The Governor of California, Gavin Newsom, mandated (8/11/2021) that all public school employees in California be vaccinated. Schools have until October 15 to come into compliance. However, this is not enough. Students also must be vaccinated as soon as they are of eligible and until this pandemic is conquered, masking is required of everyone.
As Dr Caballero further explained,
“It is biologically impossible to test our children to safety. A new study showed that persons infected with the Delta variant had produced around 1,000 times more copies of the virus by the time they tested positive, as compared to persons infected with the original (novel coronavirus-2019) strain. The study traced 167 infections to a single index case. A separate study traced a total of 47 cases (including 21 secondary cases) to a single person. Simply put: the Delta variant makes each of its hosts into a walking super-spreader event before the person even realizes they’ve been infected.”
“On a population-adjusted basis, the weekly average of US children admitted to hospitals with Covid-19 is rising faster than any other age group.”
Open Schools Now
It seems the campaign to ignore safety issues associated with the novel corona virus originated in May 2020. The former president and his secretary of education began calling for schools to be open for full time face to face instruction.
A recent analysis of a San Diego County school board election revealed that the leaders of two county open schools groups were very active Republican operatives. However, OpenSchoolsCA which bills itself as an umbrella organization for the California open school movements seems less connected to the Republican Party but very connected to the public school privatization agenda.
Founder of OpenSchoolsCA Megan Bacigalupi earned a JD from the University Of California Hastings School Of Law in 2007. She soon after went to work for Michael Bloomberg’s New York City administration where she served in various positions including a year in the Department of Education. The Bloomberg administration ended in 2014 and so did her work for the city.
A New York Times article announced Megan’s 2010 marriage to John Bacigalupi who worked in the financial industry selling real estate investment trusts. In 2016, John accepted a position as Senior Vice President at Cantor Capital in the bay area and the two west coast transplants came home.
In the graphic above, the LittleSis map shows that The Oakland Public Education Fund is little more than a pass-through channel financing organizations dedicated to privatizing public schools. Megan serves on the Advisory Board for the fund.
Evidently, OpenSchoolsCA is receiving big funding from unknown sources. They were first organized in December 2020 when they hired well-known public relations expert Pat Reilly. Her PR resume’ goes back to the National Governors Association in 1989 and includes being San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown’s press secretary in 1995. This March, Megan Bacigalupi resigned from her position as a program manager at the Canadian technology non-profit C100 to be the full time Executive Director of OpenSchoolsCA.
The OpenSchoolsCA about page list of advisors includes David Castillo who at one time was the California Charter Schools Association’s Alameda County director and has spent more than 20-years working to advance charter schools.
The former Oakland Unified School District Trustee, Jumoke Hinton-Hodge, is also listed as an advisor. The billionaire founded and funded organization dedicated to privatizing Oakland Schools, GO Public Schools, spent more than $167,000 over 2012 and 2016 for her elections. She also received max contributions from Michael Bloomberg, Laurene Jobs Powell, Stacy Schusterman, Greg Penner and Arthur Rock among other extremely wealthy enemies of public education.
Megan Bacigalupi insisted to LA Times reporter, Howard Blume, that privatization was not what it is about, but OpenSchoolsCA recent Oakland rally made it look otherwise. Ken Epstein reported,
“Witnessing the Lake Merritt rally and the mayor’s participation in it were Davey D Cook, hip-hop activist and KPFA radio host; and local artist, activist and educator Kev Choice.
“Kev Choice, speaking on the radio show, said, “I was taken aback by the demographics of the rally” and particularly upset by two prominent placards he saw at the rally: ‘End Oakland Teacher Supremacy’ and ‘Teacher Union Delay Kills Kids.’
“Joining the mayor in calling for the district to reopen were former school board member Jumoke Hinton-Hodge and current school board member Cliff Thompson.”
In November, Cliff Thompson won Oakland’s District-7 seat with 30.4% of the vote (4,735 total votes). He was supported by CCSA PAC, GO PAC, Power2Families and Committee for California. There were four seats up in that election. He was the only billionaire supported candidate elected when the teachers union and a local community group split on whom to support.
OpenSchoolsCA is Not Right for this Crisis
A new Business insider piece says, “Average daily hospitalizations of children with COVID have reached an all-time high of 239.”
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported on August 9, “Ten metro Atlanta school districts reported 1,015 cases of the coronavirus in the first days of the new year.”
Lamar County Mississippi put two of its high schools back in virtual mode. On August 9, Superintendent Steven Hampton revealed, “Last week we had 114 positive students with 26 positive faculty members, our employees. We had to quarantine 608 students due to close contact, also 41 employees quarantined. We had 16 outbreaks across our district.”
The Washington Post’s Valerie Strauss described how 200 doctors in Kansas had to fight a superintendent to get a mask mandate imposed. She also explained how state law is stopping Kansas from re-employing virtual learning.
This is a nationwide crisis that is just starting. We need to take off our rose colored glasses and deal with reality. Making students and teachers safety a priority should not be controversial. Today’s circumstances make forcing large numbers of students into small rooms dangerous.
Until we can vaccinate all students and school staff, prudence says conduct on-line school. Even with the delta variant younger children appear not to be quite as susceptible, it might be safe to bring them into schools if everyone is masked and ventilation is up to par. Until we get all students over 12 and all staff vaccinated, we must use common sense which means stop face to face school.
This genuinely stopped me cold. You wrote this on **August 13, 2021** — not August 2020 — and concluded that “prudence says conduct on-line school” and that “common sense” meant we should “stop face to face school” until students over 12 and staff were vaccinated.
The problem is that by August 2021 this was not the position of the major public-health and pediatric authorities. It ran directly against the direction their guidance had taken.
The CDC’s July 9 guidance opened with: **“Students benefit from in-person learning, and safely returning to in-person instruction in the fall 2021 is a priority.”** It specifically said that if three feet of distancing could not be maintained, schools should layer other precautions rather than prevent full reopening.
More remarkably, **on the exact day you published this post**, August 13, the CDC said that schools could reopen safely with precautions, noted the loss of services, anxiety and loneliness caused by closures, and again said that returning children to in-person instruction that fall was a priority. Delta was surging; the CDC knew that. Its response was vaccination, universal masking and other layered mitigation — **not closing schools again.**
The American Academy of Pediatrics had taken the same position weeks earlier. On July 18 it **strongly advocated in-person learning** for 2021–22, while recommending masking and vaccination. AAP explicitly cited the damage from remote schooling: educational losses, increased inequity and worsening mental-health problems among children and adolescents.
And here in California, CDPH’s August 2 guidance could hardly have been clearer. Its “foundational principle” was that **all students must have access to safe and full in-person instruction**. The entire purpose of vaccination, universal masking, testing and targeted quarantine was to keep students in school even as variants changed the course of the pandemic.
There is an additional problem with your proposed standard. You wrote that online schooling should continue “until we can vaccinate all students and school staff.” But children under 12 were **not even eligible for vaccination in August 2021**. FDA did not authorize Pfizer for children 5–11 until October 29. In practice, therefore, the standard you proposed would have made ordinary in-person elementary schooling impossible for an indefinite period.
That makes the political framing elsewhere in this post particularly difficult to understand. You characterize the open-schools movement as a campaign to “ignore safety issues,” and then spend considerable space discussing Trump, Republicans, charter advocates, billionaires and privatization. But by August 2021, **opening schools with aggressive mitigation was also the position of the CDC, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the California Department of Public Health.**
Reasonable people could certainly disagree about precisely what precautions Delta required. What is very hard to defend is treating the basic demand for in-person schooling in August 2021 as evidence that people did not care about public health.
By then, the mainstream public-health position had already incorporated something this post largely leaves out: **keeping children in school was itself a public-health objective**, because learning, mental health, social development, nutrition, disability services and the other things children receive at school matter too.
Looking back at this now, I think that distinction deserves acknowledgment.