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Starting April 26, the Mountain View-Los Altos Union High School District will reopen schools for four days a week of in-person instruction, the closest students and teachers will have gotten to pre-pandemic learning since more than a year ago.
Superintendent Nellie Meyer announced the district’s new reopening plan at Monday’s school board meeting. Students who want to go back to school will be able to for half days starting on April 19. They will be in classrooms with teachers — with simultaneous streaming provided for students who choose to stay at home — and rotate through their normal class schedules. Wednesday will remain an asynchronous learning day.
The district will use the week of April 19 to adjust and ramp up to four full days a week, Meyer said. Schools will stay open four days a week until the end of the school year.
“We are progressing very swiftly at this point toward as normal a schedule as possible,” she told the board on Monday.
The teachers and classified unions have agreed to this reopening schedule but specifics around safety procedures and other details are still being worked out, Meyer said. She anticipates bringing an updated memorandum of understanding to the school board for approval soon. Once that’s in place, the district will announce further details to students and families.
MVLA schools will adhere to a new 3-feet spacing requirement recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and adopted by the California Department of Public Health over the weekend. The change from 6-feet distance is notable, Meyer said, and “will allow for broader opportunity to bring students back.”
Families have until March 31 to decide between the in-person learning option or remaining fully remote. The district also plans to seek feedback from student and staff leaders, through a community survey and a new parent task force that will meet regularly.
Union negotiations are ongoing, staff said Monday, and the district is preparing for how to address teachers who won’t be able to return in person due to health concerns and an anticipated increase in staff absences. The more than 20 teachers who have provided doctor’s notes excusing them from working in person will teach remotely, and an adult supervisor will be in the classrooms with students in person.
And though there were concerns in the community that MVLA would fail to meet the deadline to reopen schools under California’s new bill, AB 86, thus sacrificing state funds, Meyer clarified that for grades 6-12, school districts only have to provide in-person learning for one grade level by March 31. The district’s current on-campus stable learning groups fulfill that requirement, she said.
MVLA is slated to receive about $4.6 million in reopening incentives from the state: a $1.5 million grant for in-person instruction and a $3.1 million grant for expanded learning opportunities (which include extended instructional time, community learning hubs, support for credit-deficient students and staff training, among other areas). The first grant is based on the start date of in-person instruction, so won’t come in until May at the earliest, and the second requires the district to approve by June a plan for how the funds will be spent, according to MVLA spokesperson Ursula Kroemer Leimbach.
The district plans to return to a regular, five-days-a-week school schedule when the new school year starts in August, though students who need it will continue to have access to an online independent study program.
“Certainly if we have any setbacks via the public health guidelines we of course will follow those, but the commitment from our teachers and our administrators and our classified staff and our central office staff has been unanimous,” Meyer said. “We know what we can deliver with students in person is best.”
