Parent Club organizers asked the school board candidates to answer some follow-up questions that they didn't have time to answer live in their Oct. 5th event.

Those follow-up questions are here. Answers were recorded in a Google Form spreadsheet (which is a bit hard to scroll and read) here.

Question 1 illuminates the issues of group thinking, increased oversight, and increased transparency on the school board.

I copied and pasted candidate answers to Question 1 from the above spreadsheet, see below:

Q1: Are you pleased with how decisions were made this past summer regarding school modality? What would you have wanted to see done differently?

"I think our district has faced some incredible challenges this year and their hybrid approach to addressing learning modalities was made with the intention of meeting all of our students needs during a pandemic. I can't say what I would have done differently but I do think that as we reopen our schools, we need to be mindful of all learning differences and how we can best support our students." -- Hillary Cooper

"This summer was challenging for everyone. The Board worked to make decisions with the best information we had, realizing that whatever we decided might be superseded by new direction from our state and local authorities. All of the school districts in the state were really left to plan on their own. Given what we know now, I think it would have been helpful to spend more time at the beginning of the summer focused on our distance learning plan and the plans on how to pivot to hybrid learning. " -- Cory Smegal

"Everyone, including the Board of Education, was faced with difficult and quickly changing circumstances. I would have liked to have seen more communication with parents to allow families to plan as much as possible. It was a chaotic time, and more information would have been helpful. " -- Jason Kelley

"I think we should be thoughtful when criticizing the role of the school board over the past summer. During this pandemic, parents, the teachers union and school board have had to handle a firehose of scientific information. Nobody saw this coming. Many more parents took time away from their families to attend school board meetings than ever before. At one point the Superintendent said he no longer had time to answer questions due to the incredible volume of emails. Many parents complained about a lack of transparency.

Another external factor to consider is that the State of California guaranteed teacher salaries without guaranteeing a sufficient number of online instruction minutes leading “crisis learning” in the Spring. State officials later added the requirement of more instructional minutes in mid-July but at the same time took away autonomy from local school boards, allowing them to be more restrictive but not less restrictive than public health department guidance.

I would have wanted to see a few things done differently:

• Not declaring the school board had expertise that trumped local health officials and instead declaring, at the outset, that Epidemiologists are the right expertise to follow for school closures and reopening criteria during an epidemic; I have an article that details this at https://harititan.com/article/epidemiologists-should-lead-way.
• From March through July, the school board received a lot of conflicting guidance and on multiple occasions sided with voices for being more restrictive than county and state guidance required. I was consistently arguing for the board to not be more restrictive and to act in tandem with the county in order to truly flatten the County of Alameda hospitalization curve.
• The scientific debate was hidden in union negotiations that carried on for over 6 months. Some information leaked out that helped shed some light on what was going on, see https://harititan.com/article/board-wavers-applying-waiver. I would have preferred to see open debate on classroom safety between union reps, Epidemiologists and school board members in a safety summit, see sample primer https://harititan.com/Safety_Summit_Primer.pdf "

-- Hari Titan

"This summer, educators and district officials worked deliberately to map out plans for making sure students received high-quality education amid the limitations of the pandemic. However, I would suggest more intentional communications with families. Parents that I’ve talked to say the district communicated with them a lot more in the spring than they did this summer. The district can do more to make sure parents are informed. Now that we’re moving toward getting students back into classrooms, I’d like to see the district over-communicate what they’re doing to prepare and offer some supports to parents so they can talk with young children and prepare them for the new rules and procedures they will need to follow when they go back. " -- Veronica Thigpen