The California state superintendent of public instruction held up the Napa Valley Unified School District as a successful model for reopening schools amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
In one of his recurring webinars on reopening, Tony Thurmond asked Napa’s education leaders to help teach other districts what to do.
The district has had in-person classes since last fall.
It takes everything people may expect: new ventilation systems, moving out tables and desks, and being firm on mask rules.
But there is another important component, said Dr. Rosanna Mucetti, the district’s superintendent.
“Communicating with your community about the fact that you’re opening the schools and it’s actually safe, and that you’re maintaining safety and health of students and staff is critical,” she told KCBS Radio. “So, we have full transparency from the first week that we opened, of posting all of our COVID cases for students.”
Mucetti said they post the case numbers for all students, both in-class and online, and something very interesting came out of that data.
“For the majority of the time we were open, we had more cases of COVID amongst our virtual students than we did of our in-person students,” she noted. “And to give you a sense, right now we have 40% of our 17,000 kids who are in-person.”
That’s because, she said, the steps they’ve taken in class are working.
“We have to say overwhelmingly, from the 5-year-old and 4-year-old [transitional kindergarteners], to the 18-year-old seniors – the students who are coming in-person are so grateful to be back,” the superintendent noted. “They are respectful.”
Mucetti said that if the rules are clear and visible, and site administrators are holding their whole team accountable, students will follow suit.
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