PALO ALTO — Instead of going home after dropping off her daughter at El Carmelo School on Wednesday morning, Delmey Walker stuck around to help test students for COVID-19 and keep them from getting too rowdy in the library.
Walker, a mother of two students in the Palo Alto Unified School District, was among hundreds of parents who have answered the call to join a unique new program — “1 Palo Alto” — that district administrators hope will prevent schools from shutting their doors again as the omicron variant continues to raise fears that spring 2022 might be a lot like 2020.
To shore up staffing at all schools as droves of teachers and support personnel call in sick, Superintendent Don Austin this past weekend sent out a plea through the district’s website for community volunteers to pitch in. Within the first 20 minutes, 51 parents had signed up. By Monday morning the number had climbed to 350, and a day later it more than doubled to 756.
“We expected a solid response,” Austin said. “But I didn’t expect this.”
Like other school districts across the Bay Area, Palo Alto Unified has found itself trying to stave off a highly contagious variant that has crept into classrooms as ruthlessly as in workplaces, businesses and family circles. The surge in COVID cases has prompted Gov. Gavin Newsom and state leaders to scramble this week to help schools solve crippling teacher and support staff shortages.
In Oakland, a dozen schools closed after more than 500 teachers staged a sickout Friday, calling attention to what they said were unsafe classroom conditions amid the surge.
Although there isn’t a concerted effort among Palo Alto Unified’s teachers and their union to do the same, the virus’ toll has been similar. In a Friday email, the district said 382 COVID cases were reported among students and staff, with 144 discovered through on-campus tests. On a normal day, about 50 teachers would be absent across the district, and now there are more than 70.
And the problem has only gotten worse as the district struggles to find enough substitute teachers, a challenge also faced by other Bay Area schools. On Monday alone, the district needed 19 substitute teachers it didn’t have.
That’s why Walker decided to volunteer, she said on a crisp Tuesday morning in the administrative offices at the school. She doesn’t want her kids to return to distance learning again and will do everything in her power to keep physical classrooms open.
The stay-at-home mom said she had to step up and become a teacher to her two kids when the pandemic shut down schools across the country in 2020. For over a year, Walker was mother and educator all in one, but she could see her kids losing out on the social and emotional learning experiences that can only be found at school.
“It was hard bouncing between them and making sure they were happy and fulfilled and feel somewhat normal,” she said. “It would be depressing to go back to at-home learning. I think we all have PTSD from that.”
El Carmelo School Principal Aleyda Cruz said there are about 70 parents like Walker who have signed up to help out during the school year. To qualify, volunteers must be parents of students currently enrolled in Palo Alto schools and test negative for COVID-19. There’s also an opportunity for high school students to volunteer for service hours, and the district is encouraging carpools to help make up for transportation gaps due to bus driver shortages.
At El Carmelo, Cruz said volunteers will mainly be working to support students during library time, at lunch and in art classes.
“Our school has always had a very strong parent presence, so during the pandemic, we just had to shift and find other ways they could help us,” Cruz said. “This school year we got volunteers for those three main areas, things that are considered essential in our school. Since the omicron started, we wanted to find other ways to keep schools open. This initiative is the next step to keeping us open, and parents are supporting that effort.”
The desire to keep schools open is something Superintendent Austin can understand. Watching the news get more dire as COVID cases ramped up over the past week, Austin took the weekend to come up with the “1 Palo Alto” program after meeting with teachers and principals to make it a reality.
“Parents have always been partners with schools, but for the past two years we’ve been conditioned to say parents can’t be on campus because they’re somehow unsafe during their time at school,” Austin said. “As a result of that, schools across the country — including us — have not gone first to the group we always go to: the parents. It’s their time to lend a hand.”
School officials say parents won’t be taking the place of teachers, and so far there aren’t any concerns from teachers’ unions.
Tara MacCannell, the mother of a first- and fifth-grader at El Carmelo, was helping out with COVID-19 testing at the school Wednesday. The pandemic had given the former staff member at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Santa Clara County Health Department a unique experience with her family as she tried her best to work full-time while helping her kids get through distance learning.
When her kids finally got back to school “they were joyous,” she said. To be set back by another school closure would be devastating.
“There was this unspoken undercurrent of loss of social interaction and mental health issues that we were starting to see in our children,” MacCannell said. “The ability for us to come back to school in a safe way was a real benefit to us. Volunteering for me at this point is an acceptable risk that I need to take to keep my kids in school.”
