Our children's lives, health and safety are not worth the risk when we can wait just a bit longer to send them back to school safely.

Last year, the solution to a much less contagious variant was to close schools and create a distance learning program, district-wide. Teachers refused to go to school without vaccinations under those much less serious conditions.

There is plenty of evidence confirming that the Delta variant is at least 200 times MORE contagious than the original Coronavirus and it’s causing more serious illness among those infected. "The number of US children in the hospital due to Covid-19 doubled between 30 June and 31 July." It's also impacting our unvaccinated Bay Area children already. Even mild or asymptomatic cases in children can evolve into chronic (“long”) Covid. 

So why is it ok to send our unvaccinated elementary school kids back now? It's not. Local doctors at UCSF and Stanford are calling it "immoral" to send our kids back to school without vaccines, and that “opening schools for unvaccinated kids in the midst of a surge” is “a really bad idea.” It is more unsafe now than it was this time last year.

If you really care about our children, implement distance learning for all until vaccines are widely available for elementary school students.

At the very least, for any children who don’t go back in person, please GUARANTEE a return to their original classroom if they are already enrolled in a BUSD elementary school, and help create fluidity and continuity between the remote option, and the classrooms they will return to, once vaccinated.

Alternatively, or in addition, provide families a way to teach their children at home, with BUSD curriculum, and have their assigned teachers grade their work on a weekly basis.

Resources in support of these requests are plentiful. Here's one relevant link to data cited above. 

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/aug/08/america-children-unvaccinated-covid-schools?fbclid=IwAR0uZlug8ojgaanfc-v-hTCSctiQAlRIzl1LLllrnopvOuF3Ymdp7UZ24bo