MUSD road toward school reopening remains a long one

Menifee Union School District board members and administrators gathered Tuesday in a meeting open only online to the public.

By Doug Spoon, Editor

Menifee Union School District will begin in-person assessments immediately and will soon begin in-person, small group instruction for Special Education students, an administrator reported to the MUSD governing board Tuesday.

Moving closer to in-person instruction for the general student population will be a much slower process, however.

Citing guidance announced Sept. 4 by the California Department of Public Health, MUSD interim superintendent Gary Rutherford said the district will begin plans to provide in-person services to students with special needs. The guidance defines “supervised care environment”, including “where some educational services are being offered to a subgroup of students as identified by a local educational agency on a school campus.”

That environment will allow in-person services in groups of no more than 14 students and two adults, following health guidelines. To prepare for this, parents of special needs students will be contacted to set up in-person assessments and begin the process for home services, per provisions of the students’ individualized education program (IEP), according to Rutherford’s presentation.

As far as the rest of the students in MUSD are concerned, Rutherford indicated it will be weeks, perhaps months, before the district can add the option of hybrid learning and began the transition to in-person instruction for the entire student population. School reopenings still will be determined by the state’s placement of counties in one of four levels during the COVID-19 pandemic – and Riverside County remains in the highest risk category.

According to revised state guidelines announced a week ago, counties at the highest risk level – the purple, or “widespread” level – must remain at that level for three weeks before being approved to move to the red level (fewer than 7 new daily cases per 100,000 residents). Schools in counties moving to the red level are eligible to return to some form of in-person instruction.

“The decreasing number of incidents [in Riverside County] would suggest that within a couple weeks, we could be moving into the red zone,” Rutherford told MUSD board members. He said that wouldn’t signal an immediate transition to hybrid learning (two days a week in class, three days at home), however.

“The earliest we could move to the red level would be early October,” Rutherford said. “Even then, there would be several weeks’ gap before movement to the hybrid option.

“It would take time to determine which students choose to move to hybrid and which would choose to stay in full-time distance learning. Then we would have to reorganize classes. As many as 25 or 26 teachers may need to be reassigned. It’s not as easy as just going from purple to red.”

Rutherford added that another aspect of the process would be continued discussions with the Menifee Teachers Association to reach an agreement on the safe return of teachers to the classroom.

Board members were united in stating that they share the frustration of students and parents, but that they are bound to the state guidelines for reopening. The only chance for reopening sooner would be to receive a waiver from the state, and the schools approved for waivers so far are private schools, which for the most part have smaller student populations.

“We’re not like the private schools; our funds come from the state,” said board member Kenyon Jenkins. It’s not our choice and it’s not the county’s. You can do what I did and write to the state to say, ‘Let’s get something done.’ But our hands are tied."

“We’re all in this together. Despite what some have said, I am a firm believe that this is not the new norm. I ask the public that you keep the comments coming. This is not something any of us wanted, and we want to keep hearing from you.”