 A majority of California's K-12 schools have been closed for in-person instruction for an entire year. The federal government has given California schools about $8 billion to retrofit buildings for better ventilation, to stock up on masks and sanitation gear, to create rapid COVID testing procedures, and to reconfigure classrooms to maintain more distance between students. Even California Governor Gavin Newsom, who has overseen one of the strictest lockdowns in the nation, says it's time for schools to reopen for in-person instruction. Now. If everybody has to be vaccinated, we might as well just tell people the truth. There will be no in-person instruction in the state of California. Just tell them the truth. The state government has also earmarked an additional $2 billion for school districts willing to reopen K-2 classrooms by the end of March. But it's still not enough to appease California's teachers unions, many of which continue to oppose in-person instruction despite a growing scientific consensus that it can be done safely. If you condition funding on the reopening of schools, that money will only go to white and wealthier schools that do not have the transmission rates that low-income Black and Brown communities do. California's resistance to reopening is part of a national movement backed by organized labor to keep American schoolchildren at home until all teachers, staff, and in the opinion of some people, even students, are offered the chance to be fully vaccinated. But California might not reach that benchmark for several months given current supplies and the pace of vaccination. It's a requirement that many scientists say is far too stringent and that continuing to keep schools closed poses a bigger risk to children. As difficult as the decision was to close school classrooms, reopening is even harder. We cannot and will not compromise on health and safety. Austin Butner, who declined our interview request, is Los Angeles' top education official. He said schools won't reopen until all of the district's faculty and staff are offered vaccines. And even then, the union doesn't want to reopen until community spread is much lower than it is now. Los Angeles County recently made all 85,000 LAUSD employees eligible for vaccination, but because of supply shortages, it isn't clear whether the health department can reach that benchmark before the school year is over. Anthony Fauci and the CDC agree that 100% vaccination isn't a prerequisite for school reopening. That really is rather impractical to make that a sine qua non of opening the schools. Normalness, you don't have a conflict between parents and teachers of this magnitude. In fact, I can't really think of a time before. Ernesto Falcone's kids are aged three and five. He's a member of Open Schools, California, a coalition of parents pushing for schools to reopen in person without delay. The damage the kids is enormous. They don't have a powerful political constituency with millions of dollars at their hands in Sacramento. They have us. They have parents. The California Teachers Association, which didn't respond to our interview request, has been running ads with a safety first message. COVID's still a threat. And on reopening schools, we know what happens when we don't put safety first. For the most part, transmission is not occurring in schools. Brown University economist Emily Oster created a national database that tracks the spread of the disease in schools. There are many, many districts, including districts in dense urban areas, serving a lot of students of color that have been open since September without teacher vaccinations and have been operating safely. I think the teachers should be prioritized for vaccines. This is a group we should be vaccinating. I think partly because it's so important to get kids back to school, but I think to sort of say that somehow it's only possible to operate schools safely. Once teachers have been vaccinated, I just don't think the data supports that. The teachers' union is misleading the public about what the evidence actually says. This headline, which appears in its TV ad, did appear in the San Diego Union Tribune, but the end was cut out. The cases were merely associated with K-12 schools, and there's no evidence that they were contracted in classrooms. And the article goes on to explain that although 237 students district-wide tested positive, that's out of 500,000 students, which means the positivity rate of 0.05%. And this headline did appear in the Sacramento Bee, but in total, 33 students tested positive for COVID during the outbreak in a district of 11,500, which is a positivity rate of 0.2%. Another claim the union and district school representatives often make is that reopening schools without vaccines puts racial and ethnic minorities disproportionately at risk. This access for our school staff and the families we serve is a matter of equity. There's a vast difference in participation by white, relatively affluent communities, compared with the Black and Latino families served by our schools and many of our employees. Oster says that ignores another issue of equity. Those communities are being disproportionately harmed by school closures also. Kids who live in richer districts are getting a much different schooling environment than many kids who live in worse-off districts, and COVID has only made that worse. The difference is in the quality of the remote education in the spring, the difference is in the reopening rates in the fall, the difference is in the quality of remote education in the fall. All of these things have contributed to sort of highlight these very bad inequities that we already had. And Falcón says he's offended by talk of equity given that most private schools have had in-person instruction, including the governor's children. All the private schools are open in this area. All the public schools for the for the wealthy are open now. And it's the middle class and poor that don't have their constitutional right to free education. It is being denied to a whole class of people. Their pain is being ignored by people who are just afraid. I'm a first-generation American. My parents are immigrants. They grew up poor in South America. If it wasn't for education and access to education for them, they would not be professionals and have not not live a comfortable life where they are today. Falcón, who's a public advocacy attorney and longtime proponent of public education, says he's been shocked by the efforts of teachers unions to obfuscate the evidence on school reopening. He was also outraged by comments made by the board members of one Bay Area school district in which they suggested that parents wanted in-person schooling so they didn't have to watch after their own kids and could stay home smoking weed. They want to pick on us because they want their babysitters back, right? Right. The board members didn't realize that the meeting had started broadcasting and they ended up resigning. My faith in the public education system is shaken pretty badly from this. You know, I actually started my own union where I work. I know exactly what collective bargaining is for. To use that power to keep the school's clothes longer than the health and science authorities say is safe and right is really an abuse of collective bargaining. Recent polls suggest that a majority of Americans are also skeptical about school reopenings but Oster predicts that public opinion will shift as more schools reopen and Americans see for themselves that it's not particularly dangerous. I think the thing we need to recognize is the first moments of going back or going to be the most nerve-wracking and definitely it was like the first day I dropped my kid, you know, after we had been off for the spring. That was that first week was like, it was weird. It was weird. It was scary, you know, and it felt kind of like, what are we doing? And then, you know, you kind of get used to it. For me, that's a big argument for opening is that you're sort of saying, you don't want to open in the context of not knowing what it's like. Despite the $6.6 billion earmarked for reopening, many unions, including United Teachers Los Angeles, continue to oppose reopening until all teachers who want the vaccine have received it. But the state's agreement doesn't require local districts to negotiate with the unions on reopening. The teachers unions are not understanding the extent they are losing more and more parents who are going to private school right now, who are not going to look back. And when different politicians will say, hey, we need to boost private schooling instead of public schooling, they're going to have more people supporting that idea of it less. And I was not one of those people. But if my kid's going to be denied and screwed by the way the system works, what am I supposed to do?