Hello to our petitioners and community members! After only six days, our petition has made an incredible amount of progress! Our number of signatures has skyrocketed to 840 and we are so excited to announce that our team members have been privileged to provide a number of interviews through Zoom to various community news outlets. We are also pleased to announce that our public comment presenting this petition to the Board of Education was only some minutes ago read at the Board's meeting.

We wanted to be the first to provide you a complete text of this public comment, especially as we are prepared for significant backlash from groups which have already devoted a significant amount of energy to fallacious, ad hominem attacks on the members of this group.

Below please find the only official text of the public comment made by Nicolas Prescott and the Compassionate Reopening Team on October 27th, and note that some groups may willfully misrepresent the content herein without sanction or approval from Nicolas Prescott and the Compassionate Reopening Team. Thank you for your support!

Full text of public comment made at the Board of Education's meeting of October 27th

Esteemed Board Members,

My name is Nicolas Prescott and I am a senior at San Ramon Valley High School. Today I bring in front of you a petition named “Compassionate Reopening for the SRVUSD”, which, with almost 900 signatures, has now become the rallying point for a growing group that is concerned about the reopening planned for this January. Our petitioners respectfully request the board consider not only the learning outcomes but also the safety of every member of the extended SRVUSD community. Our research on the matter of school reopening has brought up three main concerns for our community: that family choice is insufficient protection for the community at large, that teacher choice is not adequately flexible, and that learner outcomes across the board may be worse during hybrid learning.

Before continuing with these concerns, I would like to say I can completely empathize with those who feel emotional, intellectual, financial, and other losses in the continuation of online learning. My team members and I know the feeling—as high school seniors, we stand to lose much in promoting a reconsideration of reopening policy. However, we believe that no amount of loss of senior year’s fun, school’s conveniences, or learning opportunities entitle us to endanger our community.

This brings me to our first concern. In a recent Brown University study commonly cited by proponents of rushed reopening, it was found that school reopenings caused an average confirmed case rate of 0.24% among staff and 0.13% among students over a two-week period. For those willing to look no further, this seems reassuring. However, taken in the context of our district’s student and staff population, this would amount to 52.4 school-related cases for a two-week period. But it doesn’t stop there: COVID-19’s R0 Factor (the number of new cases caused by a single case) ranges from 1.5 to 3.5 (based on current CDC data). As such, in the best scenario, school-related cases could subsequently cause an added 78.6 community infections. In the worst, they could subsequently cause an added 183.4 community infections. In either case, the R0 Factor applies to all new cases as well—meaning there is serious potential for exponential spread of the COVID-19 virus in our community. With both anecdotal and statistical evidence, it is clear our students and their families will have contact with people outside their households—further extending case bleeding risk. Even if student choice is provided, this doesn’t adequately protect the community from the hazard of families that choose to attend school but not stay at home.

Our second concern involves the matter of teacher choice. While our group is not at all involved with the ongoing District-Union discussions, our petitioners share a concern for the strictures on teacher choice that reopening will require—clearly, to have students on campus, the district will need most teachers’ attendance as well. We worry that district procedures will not properly factor in teacher preferences and their health statuses and those of their families and that they will subject their choice to heavy HR review in the service of this reopening. We wholeheartedly disagree with any reopening that inadequately accounts for teacher choice.

Finally, our petitioners share a concern for the learner outcomes of a hybrid system. Experts from the UK and Germany reveal that hybrid learning may be worse than online learning due to split teacher attention—and many district teachers would agree. We the petitioners also worry that without the ability to gather in small groups, conduct group tactile education, et cetera, hybrid learning leaves the teacher without the tools that supposedly make in-person learning better. Online, the ever-improving learning infrastructure provides all these amenities and more. Sources such as a Harvard University study also claim hybrid systems are worse for viral bleeding into communities because they give students some on-days to become infected at school, and then off-days on which they are more likely to have out-of-household contact than if they had been fully online.

If hybrid learning seems all but set to be worse for learner outcomes and all the more risky for COVID-19 infections, we fail to see any net benefit. While the January reopening date can be made more safe, such as by setting approved mask types, extensive education for students and staff on hygienic practices, frequent sanitizations, testing for students and staff, rotating air filtration, and increased ventilation, there are also many unknowns. We still do not know how the flu season combined with COVID-19 will affect our health infrastructure. We do not know how effective staff can be in enforcing such extensive safety protocols; and, with a new record of infections set just this Friday, the 23rd of October, it seems impossible to qualify how hazardous the reopening may be and set a threshold for the safety of all community members.

For these reasons, we the petitioners request that the reopening date and adjacent safety policies be seriously considered in the context of our area’s health reality. It is in this same context that we ask families to consider their decision when forms go out this November.

Thank you very much.

Yours sincerely,

Nicolas Prescott and the Compassionate Reopening Team