After coronavirus closed classrooms for a year, Petaluma schools welcome students back

When Jessica Iniguez dropped her three children off at school Monday, she said the weirdest part was not getting the chance to give her youngest child a hug.

Instead of walking Emily Albinana to her kindergarten classroom, Iniguez watched as her 6-year-old daughter donned a mask, negotiated a squirt of hand sanitizer and paused to have her temperature taken before disappearing inside La Tercera Elementary School in east Petaluma.

“It’s a little nerve-wracking because we’re a new family, and so it’s weird not being able to bring my daughter…bring her to the door and hug her,” Iniguez said. “I was a little worried. But it seemed like it went OK…It’s so weird.”

As most parents navigated the school drop-off in a winding snake of vehicles along Albin Way, others, like Iniguez, watched anxiously as their little ones bounded into the elementary school campus, one of dozens of grade schools across the city that welcomed students for the first time since suspending in-person learning at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Monday’s return to the classroom for most Petaluma elementary school students marked the end of an unprecedented year of remote learning that has tested educators, strained home environments and led to measurable losses in student achievement.

In the preceding months, calls from parents for a return to the classroom had reached a crescendo, crashing down on school board meetings and flooding the inboxes of education officials countywide, an effort supplemented by rogue signs and billboards urging a quicker reopening of schools.

Amid the melee, school administrators and union leaders scrambled to get school staff vaccinated ahead of the anticipated return to classrooms of some 40,000 students countywide, including thousands in Petaluma on Monday.

“It’s really a testament to the hard work of this team, just pulling it all together, continuing to plan, following the ever-changing guidance,” Old Adobe Superintendent Sonjhia Lowery said Monday as she personally welcomed students and families back to campus at La Tercera.

Lowery, who has helmed Old Adobe, the five-school, east-Petaluma district since last summer, guided children along separate sidewalks and waved to parents, her eyes creased with a telltale smile underneath her mask.

“It’s just pure elation,” Lowery said in a phone interview last week. “I’m so excited to finally be able to have a group of students on campus, actually in class with teachers providing instruction.”

Most students, including those at Old Adobe schools, are now in a hybrid schedule, splitting time four days per week between home and school.

Getting to this moment, Lowery acknowledged, has been her greatest challenge as an educator. Amid the throes of the coronavirus pandemic that has killed more than 300 countywide, sickened nearly 30,000 and led to staggering unemployment while upending civic life, Lowery has near-universal company.

The reopening in Petaluma, the county’s second-largest city, comes six weeks after the county’s first public schools, in the Sonoma Valley, opened for in-person instruction. It comes after thousands of Santa Rosa students returned, as well. Pressure in Petaluma has mounted, and parents continue to advocate for a greater reopening as the county’s caseload recedes.

“This is backed by so many experts, yet our county and our school system seems to want to hold back,” said parent Sumaya Mughannam, pushing for a five-day, fulltime school week in an email to top Petaluma City Schools officials last week. “This is completely unacceptable at this point for our students to only have a hybrid option.”

School administrators, though, say they’ve been subject to a rapidly shifting local COVID-19 landscape amid ever-evolving guidance from state and federal health officials, making it difficult to pivot quickly.

Even seemingly positive news – like the Centers for Disease Control reducing the amount of space needed between students in classrooms – threatened to upend plans for reopening, and Lowery said school officials didn’t want to “delay opening one more day.”

At the intersection of science, politics and pandemic, schools have navigated a complicated landscape in their efforts to resume classroom instruction.

“That layered on top of people being fearful – because this is about health and safety – can muddy the waters,” Lowery said. “All we have to continue to do is come to the table and have dialogue – and really see and hear one another.”

Joanna Paun, who has been at the center of a barrage of criticism as Petaluma City Schools Board of Education president, said she has no safety concerns when it comes to kids going back to school.

For Paun, it’s a question of serving all students – those without good internet connectivity, those with learning disabilities, those struggling in the remote environment or with issues at home.

“Just being back in class with kids, and just re-learning how to be a student – it’s going to be a big deal for these kids,” Paun said.

Although the return to classrooms has been largely hailed as a positive for students socially, emotionally, mentally and academically, county health officials have also urged caution in the face of a pandemic that seems intent on sticking around, with multiple dangerous variants spreading rapidly worldwide.

At Old Adobe, district officials have coupled hand sanitization and pre-class temperature readings with at-home COVID-19 screenings and bolstered communication efforts focused on what Lowery called the “three Ws”: wear a mask, wash your hands and watch your distance.

The district also hired a COVID-19 specialist, who has instituted protocols for contact tracing, should the return to in-person learning trigger an outbreak.

Parents at La Tercera Elementary School said they were happy with the safety measures in place, as well as district communication.

Sarah Camper, who works fulltime for Petaluma Bounty while also pursuing her MBA as a fulltime masters student, said the school has gone “above and beyond” in answering all of the questions she had before sending her son, 9-year-old Calvin Rummens, back to school to finish up the fourth grade.

Stephanie O’Brien saw her two kids off to school at La Tercera on Monday too, and she praised the district’s communication efforts, calling the pandemic a “learning process for everybody.”

O’Brien, who has cared for her husband at home while navigating remote learning with second-grader Bryn O’Brien, 7, and a transitional kindergartener, Liam O’Brien, 5, said both kids had been looking forward to getting back to school.

“As soon as I told them there was a possibility of coming back, they were like, ‘tomorrow?’” O’Brien said, laughing.

Both O’Brien and Camper said they were most concerned about their kids getting back into a social environment.

Iniguez, who lost her job as a teacher at Petaluma’s Gan Israel Preschool when the school shut down at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, said her hopes for in-person learning centered on academics.

When kids Calvin Albinana, 7, Jace Albinana, 11, and Emily, 6, struggled to keep up in a remote learning environment at Loma Vista Immersion Academy, a Spanish language immersion school, Iniguez jumped back into teaching – this time homeschooling her three children.

“But then when I heard that the schools were going back, I was like, ‘I need to get them into a school,’” she said. “I just needed them to get in.”

Paun and Lowery both said students will benefit on all fronts, and Lowery said she was eager for kids and teachers to reestablish in-person relationships – the kind that can be life-altering for kids.

“They’re going to feel that love and care from their teachers,” Lowery said. “Maybe the teacher can’t hug them yet, but I do believe they’ll feel that energy.”

Tyler Silvy is editor of the Petaluma Argus-Courier. Reach him at tyler.silvy@arguscourier.com, 707-776-8458, or @tylersilvy on Twitter.