Why Isn’t Anyone Talking About the Covid Cases in LA’s Schools?

For the past year and a half, the media has reported faithfully on the COVID-19 pandemic as it has torn through our country, changing our lives in unimaginable ways. Yet they have remained strangely silent about the number of COVID infections in our schools.

It is not like this information is hard to find. Every single one of the ten largest school districts created online dashboards last year, where they publicly tracked their COVID cases.

LAUSD Exceeded Expectations

Yet hardly anyone knows that the Los Angeles Unified School District finished its school year with only 360 Covid infections. That is an astonishingly low number, given that the nine other largest school districts all had thousands or even tens of thousands of cases.

Why hasn’t a single article been written about LAUSD’s remarkable achievement?

I tried to call attention to its newsworthiness in the following Letter to the Editor, which The LA Times published on May 26:

“I’m the mother of two students in the Los Angeles Unified School District… I was shocked to learn there was [a] rally held by parents who blamed the school district for “not standing up to union demands.” This quote in particular jumped out at me: “What has happened this year has been a disaster and my eyes were opened up to the fact that that disaster is due to the collusion between UTLA and our LAUSD board.”

I can’t believe anyone would use the word “collusion” to describe COVID-19 safety negotiations that are responsible for the lowest number of infections among the nation’s largest school districts.

According to the online dashboard for New York City’s schools, they’ve had nearly 26,000 coronavirus cases since reopening in September (or more than 2,800 per month). According to Chicago’s dashboard, schools there have had about 1,700 cases since they opened in March. LAUSD has had fewer than 300 cases since reopening in April.

The teachers’ union has helped save lives.”

LAUSD and UTLA’s Safety Plan

Thanks to the unwavering vigilance of the teachers union — United Teachers Los Angeles — LAUSD remained committed to its strict COVID safety protocol throughout the school year, despite fierce opposition.

When the school year ended in June, the difference between the COVID numbers in our country’s ten largest school districts was even more striking than it had been when I wrote my letter in May.

For example, New York City, which reopened its schools in September, ended the school year with 26,178 cases. Miami, which reopened in October, had 10,019. Broward County, Florida, which also reopened in October, had 6,792. Clark County, Nevada, which reopened in March, had 3,028. Chicago, which also reopened in March, had 1,836. Again, LAUSD, which reopened in April, only had 360.

Yet, strangely enough, even LAUSD appears reluctant to call attention to its success.

Instead of splashing this news across their website, LAUSD chose to shut down their COVID dashboard, when the school year ended in June. Their total number of cases (360) is actually an estimate based on information provided by LAUSD Superintendent Austin Beutner, who announced on June 1: “During an average week less than 1/10 of 1%, or between 30 and 40 people, are testing positive for the virus.” In other words, 30 to 40 infections a week for 9 weeks is at most 360, but the real number might actually be lower!

LAUSD is the 2nd Largest District

It is particularly impressive that LAUSD only had 360 COVID cases, considering it is the second largest school district in the country, with 652,648 students and 75,674 educators.

By comparison, Hillsborough County, Florida has 220,611 students, yet it had 23 times as many cases. Obviously, when schools chose to reopen played a huge factor. Hillsborough County reopened theirs in August. But even Clark County, Nevada, which has 307,210 students and reopened just one month earlier than LAUSD, still had 8 times as many cases.

You would think the media would be eager to highlight this impressive accomplishment, but in fact, the opposite is true. Instead, they have focused their attention on the angry parents who have organized protests demanding that LAUSD reopen its schools.

For example, in just one of many similar articles published by the The Daily News, they reported the following:

“More than 100 parents and students rallied outside LAUSD’s headquarters before marching to the teachers union’s office about 2.5 miles away to make their demands known. Dubbed the “Total Recall Rally,” the event was a warning shot to all seven school board members that they could face a recall effort if schools do not fully reopen, one parent organizer said.

“It’s putting them on notice that we’re done,” said organizer Danna Rosenthal. “What they’ve done for the entire year-and-a-half now of giving into the demands of the teachers union is not acceptable. These kids have suffered tremendously.”

The LA Times published so many articles about these anti-union protests that a coalition of teachers and parents, called Reclaim Our Schools, felt compelled to call them out on their biased coverage.

As the The LA Times, itself, reported in an article published in March:

“Reclaim Our Schools L.A., a group aligned with the United Teachers Los Angeles union, released a report analyzing seven months of columns, editorials and news articles, saying [the LA Times] demonstrated bias in its coverage of school reopening issues. The group claims that the paper has relied too heavily on voices from wealthier communities where support for reopening quickly is stronger…

Alicia Baltazar, a Reclaim Our Schools member and parent of a fifth-grader in Wilmington, said during a news conference that she was disturbed seeing “stories about it’s parents against teachers.”

She added: “That simply is not true. Parents like myself and other members of Reclaim Our Schools Los Angeles have been working hand in hand with our teachers to keep our schools closed and to open only when it’s safe to do so.”

Reclaim Our Schools said that after receiving complaints from parents about The Times’ coverage, it examined 105 articles published between June and January and logged the identities of individuals who provided a total of 304 quotes to the newspaper. The review concluded that 58% of the voices “elevated” by The Times came from three categories: professional/higher income individuals, small-business owners or millionaires, even though more than 80% of families in the L.A. district have low enough incomes to qualify for free and reduced-price meals. The report said that fewer than 9% of those quoted were people it identified as working-class or low-income.”

I am convinced that this biased coverage had a negative impact on how everyone reacted to the school closures.

On social media, I saw people go from showering our teachers with praise at the beginning of the shutdown, to berating them with angry vitriol, as the months went by. I had a friend tell me, “I marched with teachers during the strike. Why are they refusing to open schools now? I feel betrayed.” I saw people accuse teachers of being “lazy,” “not wanting to work,” and “ignoring science.”

I think if the media had done a better job of highlighting the rising number of COVID cases in schools that reopened, like, for example, in New York City and Hillsborough County, people might have understood that the closures were actually vitally important. And if they had interviewed more teachers and given them the opportunity to explain how their workload increased during virtual learning, people might have understood that they were not being “lazy” by staying home— they just wanted to help keep everyone safe.

Occasionally, the media would observe that schools that reopened were forced to close again, either entirely or within certain classrooms, because of COVID outbreaks. But because the information provided was so limited, people were often left with the impression that this didn’t have much of an impact. I actually had one parent tell me, “So the schools open and close a few times! What’s the big deal? Even a little bit of school is better than nothing.” What they failed to realize, and the media failed to tell them, is that each closure represented not just a COVID infection, but also potentially a serious illness or even death.

Thanks to New York City’s dashboard, I know that 91 school employees died of COVID, and they had 17,896 classroom closures (including all of its high schools from November to late March). I don’t see how anyone could look at those numbers and say they aren’t a big deal.

I shudder to imagine how many COVID cases we would have had if our schools had been open in January, when Los Angeles became one of the deadliest hotspots in the world.

As NBC reported back then:

“Los Angeles became the first county in the nation to record 1 million confirmed coronavirus cases since the start of the pandemic. According to county public health officials, roughly 1,003,923 people in L.A. have been infected with the virus and more than 13,000 people have died.”

LAUSD is Majority BIPOC/Poor

I think it is also really important to acknowledge that COVID has disproportionately impacted our BIPOC communities, as well as the working-class and people living in poverty. According to the CDC, Black and Latinx people are three times as likely to be hospitalized and twice as likely to die from COVID. According to The LA Times, in April of 2020, Los Angeles’ “working-class neighborhoods [had death rates] four times higher than the countywide rate.”

So it is extremely relevant that nearly 90% of LAUSD’s students are BIPOC and over 70% qualify for free or reduced lunches.

As my friend Emiliana Dore astutely observed, “UTLA and LAUSD didn’t just arbitrarily choose to wait to open the schools to frustrate parents. They listened to the parent survey they sent out, as well as to the numerous national studies showing that BIPOC families were more reluctant to return to school than white families. I know the last school year was really hard for many families, but with 90% BIPOC students — including many students in the communities that were hit the hardest by COVID— I believe that LAUSD had a moral imperative to put the safety of their students, families and educators first.”

Interestingly, the media has reported extensively on the negative impact of school closures on students of color, but rarely on the elevated risk of teachers dying from COVID, considering they are also mostly BIPOC (and sometimes the parents of those very same children).

According to the California Department of Education, LAUSD’s teachers are 63% BIPOC. And if you include all of LAUSD’s school employees, I am sure that number is much higher.

Most notably, the president of UTLA is a Black Latina named Cecily Myart-Cruz. According to The LA Times, “Myart-Cruz [is] a district parent and single mother who identifies as biracial, black and Latina [and] has 25 years of teaching experience in elementary and middle schools.” I recall that, not too long ago, people were admonishing everyone to “listen to Black women.” Yet as soon as Myart-Cruz started saying things they didn’t like — they chose not to listen.

Fortunately, Superintendent Beutner and the LAUSD School Board were willing to listen and negotiate. Together with UTLA, they came up with a robust 50-page “COVID-19 Containment, Response and Control Plan” that included upgrading the district’s HVAC systems, making COVID tests mandatory prior to reopening schools, and making regular, bi-weekly COVID tests mandatory once schools reopened, among many other safety measures.

Yet criticism of how LAUSD handled reopening schools continues to dominate the news.

I’m not sure at this point which group of critics concerns me most: the ones who ignore the battles teachers confronted this past year, or the ones who continue to attack them.

In the first camp, are people like my friend, who told me, “We shouldn’t give UTLA too much credit for COVID numbers being low, since our schools didn’t open until after teachers got their vaccines.” The fact that she is unaware that UTLA had to fight for that, is a serious problem. It is not an accident that LAUSD is the only one of the ten largest school districts that was willing to wait until teachers had the chance to get vaccinated.

This was a hard won victory.

In the other camp, we have the actively hostile parents who are suing LAUSD for imposing “too many constraints” on reopening schools, threatening to recall School Board members, and staging angry protests — all of which the media has covered in painstaking detail. Even when only 60 parents (who are mostly white) show up to protest, in a district that has over 600,000 students (who are mostly BIPOC), the media continues to give them airtime.

I must admit that The LA Times has responded well to Reclaim Our Schools’ criticisms, by interviewing more BIPOC and working-class parents in their articles. It’s definitely a step in the right direction. But what about the other parent-led groups in Los Angeles, like the grassroots organization Eastside padres contra la privatizacion? Or the enormously popular Facebook groups Public Schools Families (which has 1,400 members) and Parents Supporting Teachers (which has over 25,000)? Why aren’t their voices being amplified?

If the media would actually listen to the majority opinion in this city, they would understand that we are overwhelmingly pro-teacher and pro-union.

According to Superintendent Beutner’s “State of the Schools Address” on June 15, “72% [of families] said Los Angeles Unified’s response to COVID has been good or excellent and 80% said [teachers] were doing a fantastic job communicating with students and their families.”

LAUSD and UTLA Saved Lives

It is time for the media to do its job. They need to spread the word about LAUSD’s impressively low COVID numbers, and how this was accomplished thanks in large part to UTLA’s advocacy. The lack of coverage here is outrageous, negligent, and quite frankly, dangerous.

LAUSD and UTLA helped save lives. It’s up to the media to make sure everyone knows.