 You're tuned in to the COVID-19 community report here on KDRT 95.7 FM in Davis, California. I'm Autumn LeBae Renaud and today is Tuesday, August 18, 2020. We're sharing local news and resources focusing on what's impacting Davis and nearby cities in Yolo County during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our goal with this show is to help provide a narrative for how individuals, organizations, communities, and cultural groups around Yolo County are weathering the pandemic. We believe the more we can share diverse perspectives and solid local information, the better prepared we are to create community that's based on understanding and inclusion. And just to highlight a few upcoming interviews next week, I'll interview Dr. Larissa May, who will serve as Yolo County's interim health officer until a permanent health officer is selected from the recruitment process. And next month I have UC Davis Chancellor Gary May scheduled and in between we'll interview a number of folks who represent a variety of experiences or provide information around the pandemic here in Yolo County. Today we'll speak with Yolo teacher, local teacher Lainey Pickett about her experiences, getting ready for the school year. We'll have that in just a few minutes. I'll share some local COVID-19 news after the interview, but right now I want to highlight just a few shows here on K-Dirt. If you don't know, the radio station is mostly staffed and programmed by community volunteers and they've been working extra hard to keep fresh programming on the air during the pandemic. Here are a few highlights. This week on Davisville, Bill Buchanan interviews Nora Carey of the Palms Playhouse. The longtime live music venue announced last week that with no clear end to the pandemic in sight, it's gone on indefinite hiatus and isn't renewing its lease for the location in downtown Winters that it's called home since moving from Davis in 2002. Bill talks with Nora about the pandemic, the last concert they held on March 7th, running a for-profit business with no profit, the magic of a good performance, some favorite moments since she and Andrew Friday bought the Palms in 2016 and what might come next. Davisville airs Mondays at 5.30 p.m. and DJ Rodriguez is back in the saddle with the blazing mix of rock, folk, and soul that is Silver 9-Volt Heart Thursdays from 5 to 7 and also along with Wayne Hagen, he's helping fill in for Alligator Show the Golden Road over the next month. This journey down the path of Grateful Dead airs Sundays at 4. Nancy Flag has been producing shows from her garden during the pandemic. Tune in to Cowboy Tracks Fridays at 1 for a sampling of Western music and cowboy poetry and Don Shore and Lois Richter offer up the always informative and ever popular Davis Garden show which they've been producing remotely during the pandemic. How is this crazy heatway going to affect your tomatoes and your winter garden plans? Tune in Thursdays at noon to find out. And Allison B and guest host Dima Tamimi have been passing the mic to local activist working on Black Lives Matter on May Rocky Radio which airs just after this show. I see our call coming in so let's go ahead and take that. Hello and welcome to Laney Pickett. Laney teaches history, English, geography, and leadership to seventh, eighth, and ninth graders at Da Vinci Junior High in Davis and she parents, teenagers herself. She's here today to walk us through what the start of this most unusual school year looks like for her. Welcome Laney. Thanks so much for joining us today. Hi, Autumn. Thanks for having me. Let's start with a little context. Tell us about your school and your students and what you enjoy about teaching during normal times. Well, like you said, I teach at Da Vinci Junior High and Da Vinci is a public school in the DJUSD but it's also a project-based learning school so kids who select to go to Da Vinci, it's not anybody's neighborhood school. Right. And so kids choose to come to Da Vinci because we do project-based learning so they build things with their hands, they work on computers, they work in teams and do professional presentations. So that's a little bit about how we do. It's a smaller school, 100 kids per grade level. So a lot of teachers teach a lot of different classes because you know there's only 100 kids per grade level then you're teaching two or three different things. Right. So I honestly can't think of many occupations that have been as fraught with uncertainty as teaching is these days. If you will, can you think back to April and the mad scramble to get remote learning up and running once the pandemic hit? And maybe what was your biggest takeaway from that point in time as looking forward to the future? Well, it was definitely wild. It was wild to be in my classroom with my students and get an email saying like don't tell the kids yet but school is closing today for the foreseeable future. And then to continue teaching was pretty wild. I felt really lucky to be in this school district at that time because so many school districts kind of closed on a Friday and opened remotely on a Monday and the teachers really had no time to rethink their curriculum or prepare for it to be done well online. And I felt very lucky in the DJUSD that I felt like the collaboration was really amazing between the school board and the school district and teachers to kind of give us a little bit of time to really prepare and then we didn't start up until after spring break. So kind of had three weeks to really rebuild our curriculum. So I felt very prepared and comfortable by the time we started teaching again that way. And it wasn't just that you were teaching in a new way. It's that you were really having to get up to speed on a whole bunch of new technology too correct. Yeah that's right absolutely teaching on a screen is a whole different beast and trying to find ways to make sure that the kids are understanding and that they're engaged and that they're paying attention. It's just a whole different world to not be able to really see all their faces to be able to tell if the information is sinking in you know. Right right. So that was the experience this spring and then up until last month the Davis State Unified School District was still uncertain about plans for fall and I think we all understood they were monitoring the situation and waiting for guidance from the state. But now that we know school here starts August 26 with remote instruction. What has your process of getting ready been like? Yeah the summer was a lot of trying to prepare for both options because we thought it was pretty likely that we'd have a hybrid option. So those teachers were thinking like how could I be in my classroom with half of the class and have the other class maybe on the screen from home and be teaching them all at the same time. So we were trying to really creatively envision how we could best do some kind of a hybrid model. And so when we do get to that stage and re-entry to the schools I think a lot of teachers will be kind of ready for it because that's what we were sort of preparing for the first half of the summer. Interesting. And then once we found out you know the sort of taken out of the school district hands when Gavin Newsom and the State Department of Education basically said you know our district among many others needed to do remote only for safety reasons. I think most teachers were really relieved because trying to think about managing all the things you normally manage in a classroom plus managing all the health and safety of every person in the room was just terrifying. I mean if a kid gets sick in my class if one of my kids gets sick should I have done something differently to prevent that? Did I do enough to protect the other kids that were in the room with them? I felt very stressed about trying to figure out how to do that while delivering all the curriculum and managing the normal you know 12, 13, 14 year old behaviors and activities. That's a lot of pressure and I did see a lot of you know conversation online among teachers and and everyone expressed similar feelings. They and they were worried about getting sick themselves too because how can you teach if you're if you're sick obviously. Well can you Lainey can you walk us through what a day of remote teaching might look like for you this fall? Will you be on campus and teaching from there? We've been actually again really lucky in this district because we're allowed to as teachers teach from you know wherever we want within reason and so a lot of teachers I think will be in their classrooms just because it gives you that space away from home to be able to be sure it's quiet, be sure the internet works properly, maybe move around your classroom, maybe give students a sense of normalcy by seeing the classroom setting instead of your bookshelf behind you or whatever and but I so I think I'll do some of those. I think a couple days a week I'll have some kind of routine where I teach from my classroom a couple days a week and then a couple days a week I'll teach from home and this new schedule has us teaching for the first quarter about three hours a day so we'll teach second period, fourth period and sixth period and so for me that's three different subject matters so a little bit of switching gear in between from legit great English to leadership to some of great history but it's very doable I think it's just it's just a lot of adjusting. Yeah yeah for for the kids for the teachers for for everyone I'm sure so what will what will things like testing and and homework be like in this environment and also I'm thinking about as you know I had a my son attended DaVinci high school and so I know the emphasis that DaVinci places on presentations to groups and things like that so so how will all that kind of stuff be handled? I mean DaVinci plans to proceed as usual with all of the collaboration that we've always done we do have Zoom which allows for breakout rooms so all the teachers are kind of in Zoom right now as groups taking turns getting the host and putting each other into breakout rooms and trying to figure out how we're going to monitor that properly and and what the experience is like for the students and so we will still be you know doing things as normal I'd say the homework I think teachers are mindful of how much homework they're giving we're still trying to very closely follow the district homework policy which like for my class for example is 20 minutes not more than 20 minutes a night and so with the kids only having three classes at a time since we've gone to this quarter structure they should theoretically have less homework than they would have had before because it's only the homework policy is the same that they have three classes instead of seven so I think it'll be a little bit better and I think most of us are trying to find ways to structure most of the work getting done during the class period during the hour that they have with me in that given day I do not intend because most homework would also be done on a screen and they're already spending three hours a day on a screen in class and so I think a lot of us are mindful of that and trying to figure out ways to you know give some quiet work time during the class hour so that they can accomplish things and submit them and not have a lot of homework well I think that's a recognition too of of the fact that things are not normal I think a lot of people are still kind of trying to pretend that that things are normal and we're we're not in the middle of this unusual situation but you mentioned zoom and I know the district has has a played you know worked with other platforms too that flat interface you know of us staring at people as two-dimensional representations is actually very wearing on on our brain so it's great to hear that you know teachers of of course are aware of that and you you have to you know you experience that for yourself too I'm sure the fatigue of teaching this way takes a toll it's definitely some of it is just adjusting to the new thing makes me like makes it a lot more exhausting because I'm constantly thinking about three things at the same time you know am I pushing the right buttons to make the things happen right can I tell if all of the kids are like which kids are kind of fading away and not really engaged and how am I going to get them back and are you know who needs academic support and so it's like all the things you normally have to think about are still there but now there's these extra technology layers on top of that of things that you have to think about so it is exhausting but I think the breakout rooms will really help because it's the large group setting is hard too so if the kids can go with just three other kids and have a more in-depth conversation it's at least a different kind of zoom experience than being there with 37 kids just listening passively to information and teachers are finding so many different technologies so the kids can you know all come sticky notes about what they're thinking about and read each other sticky notes or all take a poll real quick and then we can show the results so they can all see you know there are some advantages yeah like when when I'm having a classroom discussion I can't call on every hand there's no way I have 37 kids in my classes but in the chat I can say everybody put your best you know thought about whatever we're talking about right now in the chat and they can all do it at the same time and I can sort of scan all those and they can see each other so there are actually cool ways for every voice to be heard in a way that there weren't in the classroom right so some some silver linings yeah we're kind of harness for the best of those things yeah I mentioned expectations around normality so one other question I had is are students still required to take standardized testing this year um I am not entirely sure obviously it was waived for last year and I don't know exactly what's happening this year but I think that it's very likely that it's not happening again because there's no way to supervise the sanctity of tests you know the the security features that we have to monitor as testing proctors in the classroom and so I would say unless we were back in the classroom by testing time which is March or April um that that would be the only reasonable way to do it so I think it's a very low likelihood that it's going to be able to happen and and to clarify because of where the county stands with its number of reported cases um you know our schools can't reopen some elementary schools were told they could reopen with a waiver if certain conditions were met but those conditions cannot be met at at this time so really it's it's for fall quarter it's online only and I guess there's ongoing evaluation of when people might be able to access the school sites again right you know there's like a cured plan that the district has come up with with lots of input from teachers that worked on these you know these sort of strategy teams throughout the summer and so there is like a five or six cured plan and of how we go from totally uh distance to totally in person with some different hybrid you know stages in between and the thing that I know right now is we have to have fewer than 55 cases in the county within 14 days to be able to consider reopening that's the first kind of hurdle we have to get over and so until we get over that I don't you know we can't and I like to think I'm pretty sure we wouldn't go back in the middle of a quarter you know the kids need a stability and a predictability and the teachers have already created their curriculum to to be given in a certain format so I'm pretty sure will we to go back it would need to happen at a quarter or a semester break you know it wouldn't it wouldn't be like okay Monday everybody go back to school you know we'll get fair warning and yeah that makes that makes sense you know um my kids were fortunate to have many wonderful teachers in the school district and I know that teaching is about so much more than just the conveyance of information and and testing kids what are what are some of your concerns about what potentially gets left behind you know you can't have eyes on on all these kids in a way that you normally do um I think just the socialization between the students is the thing that I want to facilitate the most I think it's really developmentally important for these seventh eighth and ninth graders that I teach to be able to chat with each other and somehow friends where they're able to do that through social media or maybe they have social distance gatherings with a friend or two outside or something but some don't necessarily have the either the relationships developed already with people their own age or the ability to figure out how to navigate that at a distance how to instigate those friendships and so I think a lot of my interest is just trying to find ways to have kids be able to have discussions with other kids that might lead to them chatting outside of school and you know developing friendships like they usually do in junior high yeah yeah they're so social at that age too do you know what the district's plan for kids with special needs or you know who have IEPs in place or are there special accommodations with remote learning for those I know our special education teachers and the district have been working like crazy to figure out the best supports for that and we will still have para educators like we've had in the past and there's been a lot of thinking this summer about how to best like instead of assigning a para educator to a specific classroom where the kid where kids with IEPs would have different para educators in every class they're trying to find ways to maybe assign a certain para to a certain student so they always have that adult with them to help them with things you know they're trying to like restructure things now that we're in this different format to try to provide more support my understanding is that when we do reintegrate back to a hybrid model students with all kinds of of special needs or different learning styles or you know other factors that make them ideal for extra support will be the first ones to return to campus and so we can as soon as possible start providing that support I know teachers have done training this summer on ways to engage every kid with every learning style and set of abilities and struggles into your virtual classroom so I like to think we'll be a lot better at it in the fall than we were in the spring and teachers tried really hard and did our best but I know that is certainly yeah yeah well as well as being a teacher during this interesting time you have a couple of teens in your household so how do you how do you teach and also help them manage how they're being taught remotely I feel so lucky to have teenagers right now who are relatively capable of managing things themselves if I think about how this happened when my kids were younger and I was trying to teach and help a second-year-old a second-grader navigate their online school I mean I feel for those teachers I really do and any parents who are working from home and managing this definitely from me like our house is pretty small so it's just sort of managing the physical spaces and then the stress comes up for everybody at the same time when all the presentations are happening and all you know and so we're all sort of on the same schedule of starting to get pretty grumpy towards the end of a quarter or grading period and so there's kind of some of that of knowing when we all need to go to our separate corners and just manage our own stuff and so yeah it's been it's been okay because of the age and you know ability of my kids to navigate but also DaVinci students and DaVinci already had a we already used like a learning management system that was familiar for DaVinci kids so when they went from the classroom to home it actually wasn't as different maybe as it was for kids of other ages into another school I can see that yeah yeah well thanks for keeping that real there it is it is gotta be extra it has to be extra challenging for teachers um probably last question here what do you want your students and their parents to know or hope that they they take away from this experience I guess I just want to say please please please talk to your teachers we can do anything within our power to help students to feel integrated into the classroom and parents to know what's going on in the classrooms and to support their kids as long as we know you know and what a teacher hates most is to find out like after a month or two that a kid has been feeling upset in your class has been having trouble understanding what they're supposed to be doing has been stressed about your class and you didn't know it that like feels so bad for a teacher so I just want to say I think there's this idea especially for junior high and high school that like teachers teach 165 kids and they don't have time to deal with individual student or parent emails or something no we really really really want to hear from every student and parent especially right now about any suggestions you have whatever is not working for you or your kid is not working for somebody else and their kid you know so we really need that feedback because we just want to keep getting better at what we're doing and and we can't do that in a vacuum you know great advice I know how busy you are getting ready for the start of the school year and I just really want to thank you for making time to share your perspective today it's something that a lot of people have asked me for please talk to teachers we need to know what they're experiencing we want to hear what they're thinking so thank you very much Leany. It's a great community to be a teacher in I have seen several things that have really upset me and hurt my feelings on social media or even on the news about teachers are just lazy and don't want to go back to school or teachers are essential workers they need to get back in the classroom and put their health on the line just like grocery store workers do or in this community I feel like I'm a little bit protected and shielded from a lot of that mentality and I just want to say everybody everywhere please support your teachers please say kind things it doesn't help anybody to to make them feel stressed out and upset and and you know our profession is in a really weird place right now and the more we can expect teachers to act like professionals the more we're gonna you know be able to be the professionals that everybody wants us to be so right well we wish you the all the best this quarter and and again just really thanks for sharing your perspective with us take good care thank you so much Autumn take care of yourself all right bye bye okay that was local teacher Leany Pickett if you joined late she teaches seventh eighth and ninth grades at DaVinci junior high in Davis we've got a few minutes left and I am going to go ahead and read some local COVID news I reported last week that the state had acknowledged a backlog of over 300,000 COVID-19 test results that had never been processed and this is partially but not entirely responsible for the surge in case numbers here in Yolo County as of this morning the county reports 2,076 cases another 30 were added yesterday and nearly 100 cases added over the weekend the bulk of the county's cases are outside the city of Davis in fact Woodland and West Sacramento combined account for more than 72 percent of Yolo County cases and in my conversation with West Sacramento city council member Martha Guerrero last week she acknowledged that the high Latino populations in both communities and the number of essential workers working in the farm fields and stuff and then gathering in their large families was responsible for much of that Davis accounts for 11 percent of the county's total cases and I was just handed information about free COVID-19 testing there's there's testing out in asparto there's testing in various places around the county here in Davis there's testing this Thursday August 13th at the Davis senior center which is I believe it's 700 a street in Davis and between 3 and 7 p.m this is free and it's put on by Yolo County public health and Yolo County dot org remains your site for all county related public health info and for general questions about COVID-19 the county offers a COVID-19 response operations center line the number there is 833-965-6268 and in news from UC Davis the university is enrolling participants in a COVID-19 vaccine trial UC Davis health announced last week it will participate in a global study of an investigational vaccine against the virus the study which involves roughly 30 000 participants at 120 sites around the world is led by Pfizer the American pharmaceutical giant in partnership with the german company bio and tech and ucd said it plans to enroll as many as 200 participants for a clinical trial there's lots more information on that and including how to enroll and what you might get uh participants will be paid and all of that and you can get that information at studypages.com forward slash UC Davis and I think that is all we have time for this week there's so much local news it's kind of mind-boggling but we do what we can so thanks for tuning in from the KDRT studio i'm autum lab a renault and this has been the COVID-19 community report