COVID-19
Teachers and Union Ask: Does OUSD Have a Tech Plan to Open Schools?

Some Oakland public school teachers and their union, the Oakland Education Association (OEA), are expressing concern that the Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) might not provide adequate technology, technological support, and preparatory time to understand distance learning technology before the school year starts.
“We need time to prepare and we need students to have access to the technology they need,” said OEA’s secretary and special education teacher Bethany Meyer.
OUSD has announced that teachers are scheduled to have three days of professional development from August 5-7, then instruction will start on August 10. The three-day professional development session is the same amount of time Oakland teachers have recently been allotted to prepare for a typical school year. But circumstances have radically changed for the 2020-21 school year.
A recent announcement from Alameda County Supt. of Schools L. Karen Monroe indicates that OUSD could rely entirely on distance learning far longer than initially planned.
“Until Alameda County is off the State Monitoring List for 14 consecutive days, all Alameda County schools may only provide distance learning to their students,” read the statement, which came out on July 24.
A recent surge in COVID-19 cases put Alameda County on the list. OEA released a video on Monday demanding that the district make a return plan specific to Oakland, which has a COVID-19 case rate more than seven times higher than the rest of the county.
One East Oakland zip code, 94603, has a case rate over 14 times higher than the rest of the county. With the risk of COVID-19 spreading so high in Oakland, many teachers anticipate distance learning becoming necessary for the foreseeable future.
“We’re trying to negotiate safe, equitable, well-resourced schools so that when we do return it’s actually safe for kids. We don’t think distance learning is the best way to learn and I’ve never heard any teacher say they like it better than in-person teaching,” said Meyer. “But we have to do what’s safe.”
OEA is asking for a two-week professional development period to adequately prepare for the new technology and increased state guidelines for the instructional minutes required for distance learning.
“Increasing the instructional minutes will be a dramatic improvement for kids. We agree with the district on that,” said Meyer. “But we don’t agree you can just jump into that on the first day without time to plan for it.”
Teachers also want to be sure that students and parents have the technology and technological support from the district to access distance learning. OEA did a study at three schools in East Oakland and three schools in West Oakland that found over 30% of students were not able to consistently access distance learning. When distance learning started last spring, teachers also were put in the role of helping families with the technology, a service they were never trained to provide. They want more aid from the district this year.
“[Providing tech support] can’t fall on teachers because we can’t do it while we’re teaching,” said kindergarten Teacher Sara Shepich.
The Oakland Undivided campaign, which is largely run by two non-profit businesses Tech Exchange and The Oakland Education Fund, has $12.5 million, $10 million of which was donated by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, in funds for technology and technological support but Shepich questions if they have a good plan and the information they need to adequately support OUSD.
“All these outside organizations are involved but they can’t tell us the details of their plan,” said Shepich.
OUSD released a press release on July 22 saying that Oakland Undivided would distribute 25,000 computers in the first two months of school to Oakland students, provide internet hotspots for those who need them, as well as support with the technology. But no firm dates have been announced for when the computers will arrive or when hotspots will be set up. OUSD is asking parents to complete a Tech Check survey they plan to e-mail on August 3, but Shepich points out that that survey will be most accessible to those who already have the technology.
“Some of my families don’t have smartphones. Their phone is just a phone,” said Shepich, who worries that families won’t be able to access e-mail to fill out the survey.
Shepich asked OUSD and Oakland Undivided to set up a telephone hotline that parents could use to inform them about their technology needs and access help, but there have been no plans announced to provide such a service. She also advocated for translation services in Mam, the only language some of her families speak fluently, but has not seen plans for that.
OUSD’s press release said they would provide on paper and in-person ways to fill out the survey, but they did not respond to direct questions about when and where those methods of filling out the survey would be available. The district also did not respond to a direct question asking why they are waiting until August 3 to send out the survey, a week before the first day of school.
Oakland Undivided dollars are set to cover not only OUSD schools but charter schools as well, even though at least 15 charter schools qualified for and already received COVID-19 Paycheck Protection Payment (PPP) funds from the federal government that OUSD schools could not qualify for. The total amount of PPP funds amounted to almost $19 million, according to inthepublicinterest.org.
While OUSD schools need Oakland Undivided funding for computers, hotspots, and training, charter schools like Lighthouse Community, American Indian Middle Schools, and Education for Change could be set to receive some of the funding even though they each have already received millions in emergency COVID funding.
The situation has some parents worried, particularly because they faced difficulties accessing distance learning last spring.
Crystal Beltran, who’s daughter attended kindergarten last year at Global Family Elementary school, said sometimes she faced difficulties accessing distance learning. When that happened she called her daughter’s teacher but she said “there was really nothing much she could do.”
Beltran said she received no help from the district with technology support at that time.
“I think there needs to be more support for the kids,” said Beltran, “because as it is, it’s hard for them to learn online.”
BayCityNews
All COVID Vaccinations to be Bivalent Vaccine to ‘Simplify’ Recommendations, FDA Says
The COVID-19 vaccine targeting the original strain of the virus as well as two substrains of the omicron variant will now be used for all vaccinations in the U.S., federal regulators said Tuesday. The bivalent vaccine has, until Tuesday’s changes to the emergency use authorizations for the Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines, only been approved for use as a booster vaccine.

By Eli Walsh
Bay City News
The COVID-19 vaccine targeting the original strain of the virus as well as two substrains of the omicron variant will now be used for all vaccinations in the U.S., federal regulators said Tuesday.
The bivalent vaccine has, until Tuesday’s changes to the emergency use authorizations for the Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines, only been approved for use as a booster vaccine.
With Tuesday’s changes, U.S. Food and Drug Administration officials said they intend to simplify the recommended COVID vaccine schedules for most people.
Previously, the original COVID vaccine was approved as the first two doses for everyone ages 6 months and up, while the bivalent vaccine was used as a booster or as the third dose of a three-vaccine series for younger children.
As of Tuesday, the original COVID vaccine is no longer approved for use in the U.S. Unvaccinated people will only need to receive one dose of the bivalent vaccine to be considered vaccinated.
“At this stage of the pandemic, data support simplifying the use of the authorized mRNA bivalent COVID-19 vaccines and the agency believes that this approach will help encourage future vaccination,” said Dr. Peter Marks, the director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research.
Marks noted that nearly every U.S. resident age 5 and up now has COVID antibodies either from previous infection or from vaccination.
The FDA also approved a new booster dose for adults ages 65 and up, provided it has been at least four months since their previous vaccine dose, and those who have weakened immune systems if it has been at least two months since their last vaccine dose.
Most other U.S. residents who have received the bivalent booster are not currently eligible for another vaccine dose, but FDA officials intend to consider the necessity of further booster shots later this year.
COVID vaccines are available at primary care providers, retail pharmacies and some facilities operated by local health departments.
Copyright © 2023 Bay City News, Inc. All rights reserved. Republication, rebroadcast or redistribution without the express written consent of Bay City News, Inc. is prohibited. Bay City News is a 24/7 news service covering the greater Bay Area.
Community
Food Insecurity, Hunger Expected to Soar After Cuts to Extra SNAP Benefits
Food security advocates, policymakers, and others had been warning of the dire consequences to those most in need if Congress chose to halt the extra allotments of SNAP benefits. Still, the Republican-led House let the COVID-era supplemental payments wind down at the end of February.

By Barrington M. Salmon
NNPA Newswire
Food security advocates, policymakers, and others had been warning of the dire consequences to those most in need if Congress chose to halt the extra allotments of SNAP benefits. Still, the Republican-led House let the COVID-era supplemental payments wind down at the end of February.
Those closest to the problem say the consequences are already evident in the days since the extra allotments ended. The issues of hunger and food insecurity are being pushed to the forefront of the nation’s myriad challenges. The abrupt benefit cuts are estimated to affect more than 30 million people in 35 states.
On the frontlines, activists fighting the twin scourges of hunger and homelessness, like Anne Miskey, Kymone T. Freeman and Daniel del Pielago, contend that this and other crises were avoidable. Still, Congress, other elected officials, and society at large lack the political will or the compassion to eliminate what is essentially a man-made problem.
“Yet, although the SNAP extra allotments, stimulus funds and other assistance from the federal government helped stave off hunger and homelessness during the COVID crisis,” Kymone T. Freeman said, “the politicians have inexplicably allowed a critical lifeline to expire.”
Freeman said politicians are more concerned about staying in office and catering to the donor class and the wealthy instead of focusing on and delivering programs, projects and policies to working and middle-class Americans, particularly African Americans.
“This sounds like more austerity to me. The fact that they are cutting anything now is obscene and immoral. All it means is more hardship for the poor,” said Freeman, a social justice activist, playwright, and co-founder of WEACT Radio in Washington, DC. “This will increase crime, poverty, distress and misery. The cuts are contributing to hunger. Thirty percent of the children in Washington, DC, live in poverty. A budget is a moral document, and this is where their morality lies.”
Miskey, executive director of Union Station Homeless Services in Los Angeles, California, agreed.
“Much of the inflation and high prices we’re seeing is because of corporate greed. We’re expecting homelessness to skyrocket,” Miskey said. “During COVID, we rented all these hotels and shelters. We managed pretty well during COVID as local, state, and federal money poured in. But with the funding money gone, we’re trying to figure things out. The cost of living, rent, and evictions are going up. The cost of living is driving people into homelessness. Things are going to get pretty bad because of the cost of living.”
Miskey contends that separating food insecurity from gentrification, low wages, displacement, and homelessness is impossible. “COVID-19 has laid bare the structural, institutional, economic, and racial inequities that separate African Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans from their white counterparts,” she said. Marginalized communities have been hit particularly hard by many challenges, many not naturally occurring.
“Healthcare workers, people of color, and immigrants are making horrible wages,” Miskey said. “They cannot afford afterschool care for kids, don’t have money for affordable housing, and struggle to make ends meet. This is a war against the poor. They tell people that they did this to themselves. Millions of people have no opportunity or are intentionally excluded from opportunities. Racism is the #1 factor for excluding people.”
The SNAP emergency allotments were designed to alleviate food insecurity and stimulate the US economy throughout the COVID pandemic public health emergency. According to DC Hunger Solutions, the cuts to SNAP benefits will affect more than 90,000 people in the District of Columbia. On average, when this “hunger cliff” hits, each SNAP participant will lose over $90 a month, DC Hunger Solutions officials explained on the website.
“As a result, average SNAP benefits will fall to a meager $6 a person a day. The “hunger cliff” will hit all age groups and all parts of the District of Columbia. The steepest cliff will be for many older adults who only qualify for the minimum SNAP benefit — dropping from $281 a month to $30,” staff said.
The “hunger cliff” — a perfect storm of a striking reduction of benefits in the face of high inflation and climbing grocery costs — will exacerbate food insecurity and hardship in the District of Columbia and elsewhere. The District will lose more than $14 million in benefits monthly. Emergency food providers can’t fill this gap. Even before the cuts, food banks, pantries, and soup kitchens have reported high demand for assistance, DC Hunger Solutions said.
All over America, Miskey said, people are vulnerable, have health problems, are aging, have been homeless for a long time, including seniors.
“It doesn’t take much: a single income, losing a spouse, an increase in the cost of housing. People are precariously housed. People have to put themselves in danger sometimes,” said Miskey. “People are stealing to survive. People need help, but needing help is seen as something weak or bad. Of course, the Republican Party sells the lottery mentality. People figure they’re going to be up there one day and dream that they’re going to get there.”
Daniel del Pielago agrees with Miskey that Republicans and others who support their ideas and agenda are committed to former President Donald Trump’s promise to dismantle the administrative state.
Del Pielago, organizing director of Empower DC, said these cuts and Republican plans to disembowel the social safety net — including Medicare and social security — is a deliberate policy choice aimed directly at the working class, low-income households, and the poor in this country.
“It’s part of this onslaught of safety net services being cut. I just heard from the city that they’re cutting the Emergency Rental Program 6½ months earlier than expected. And rents in May will go up 8.9% here in the District,” del Pielago said. “DC is super expensive, there are no livable wages for a certain population segment and there’s a sustained attack on low-income people. What we’re seeing in terms of the onslaught is the Trump effect coming into play. We have a bunch of people making these decisions which don’t benefit low-income residents and Black people. They were attempting, and now they’re having success.”
Miskey said as she views the challenges and devastation food insecurity has wrought on poor, near-poor, low-income, and middle-class Americans, she feels anger and frustration because most of this is and was avoidable.
“I think our systems have massively failed people,” she said. “I shouldn’t say that. I don’t think our system has failed. I think our system was set up to fail. They are set up to keep up the status quo, ensuring that those people of privilege and wealth maintain their privilege and wealth.”
Meanwhile, everyone else is blamed for their supposed character defects or failures because supposedly all the opportunities are out there if you grab them, Miskey explained.
“The fact is, our system creates massive barriers for opportunity and doesn’t allow huge chunks of our communities to actually access those things. That’s the shame of our system, the shame of our government. As I said before, we’re a system where we have a war on the poor, not a war on poverty.”
Matthew Desmond, a Princeton University sociologist and the director of the university’s Eviction Lab, said America has a poverty problem, and poverty and food insecurity are deeply intertwined.
“Poverty is measured at different income levels, but it is experienced as an exhausting piling on of problems. Poverty is chronic pain, on top of tooth rot, on top of debt collector harassment, on top of the nauseating fear of eviction,” said Desmond. “It is the suffocation of your talents and your dreams. It is death that comes early and often. From 2001 to 2014, the richest women in America gained almost three years of life while the poorest gained just 15 days. Far from a line, poverty is a tight knot of humiliations and agonies, and its persistence in American life should shame us.”
Desmond said housing assistance and food stamp programs are “effective and essential, protecting millions of families from hunger and homelessness each year,” he said in a March 16 column in the New York Times. “But the United States devotes far fewer resources to these programs, as a share of its gross domestic product, than other rich democracies, which places America in a disgraced class of its own on the world stage.”
That disgrace is illustrated in the stats showing that 33% of Americans live in households making less than $55,000, he said.
“Many are not officially counted among the poor, but there is plenty of economic hardship above the poverty line,” Desmond said. “And plenty far below it as well. According to the Supplemental Poverty Measure, which accounts for government aid and living expenses, more than one in 25 people 65 or older lived in deep poverty in 2021, meaning that they’d have to, at minimum, double their incomes just to reach the poverty line.”
He said Americans must commit to becoming poverty abolitionists to break this cycle.
“Like abolitionist movements against slavery or mass incarceration, abolitionism views poverty not as a routine or inevitable social ill but as an abomination that can no longer be tolerated,” he said. “And poverty abolitionism shares with other abolitionist movements the conviction that profiting from another’s pain corrupts us all. Ending poverty in America will require both short- and long-term solutions: strategies that stem the bleeding now, alongside more enduring interventions that target the disease and don’t just treat the symptoms.”
This includes appropriately addressing the housing crisis, which forces most poor renting families to devote at least 50% of their income to rent and utilities; immediately expanding housing vouchers to reduce the rent burden; pushing for “more transformative solutions” like scaling up the country’s public housing infrastructure; building out community land banks; and providing on-ramps to homeownership for low-income families.
BayCityNews
FDA Updates Approval of Pfizer Booster Vaccine for Children Under 5
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration updated its approval Tuesday of the Pfizer-BioNTech booster vaccine, making it available to some children under age 5. Before this update, children under 5 were not eligible for COVID-19 booster shots. Instead, they received three doses of the regular vaccine.

By Eli Walsh
Bay City News
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration updated its approval Tuesday of the Pfizer-BioNTech booster vaccine, making it available to some children under age 5.
Before this update, children under 5 were not eligible for COVID-19 booster shots. Instead, they received three doses of the regular vaccine.
As of December 2022, children age 4 and younger who have not been vaccinated receive the omicron variant-specific booster vaccine as the third dose in their primary vaccine series, following two doses of the original Pfizer vaccine.
However, children in that age range who completed their initial vaccination series before December 2022 only received three doses of the original Pfizer vaccine, and are less protected against more infectious variants of the virus as a result.
FDA officials updated the vaccine’s emergency use authorization Tuesday to allow those children who only received the original Pfizer COVID vaccine to receive one dose of the bivalent booster if it has been at least two months since they completed their initial series.
Other children under age 5 are not eligible for the booster, although everyone age 5 and up is eligible for a booster.
“Currently available data show that vaccination remains the best defense against severe disease, hospitalization and death caused by COVID-19 across all age groups, and we encourage all eligible individuals to make sure that their vaccinations are up to date with a bivalent COVID-19 vaccine,” said Dr. Peter Marks, the director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research.
Clinical data has found that both the original Pfizer vaccine and the booster vaccine that targets the omicron subvariants BA.4 and BA.5 are safe for everyone aged 6 months and up and effective at preventing the worst outcomes of COVID infection, including serious illness and death.
COVID vaccines are available at primary care providers, retail pharmacies and some facilities operated by local health departments.
Copyright © 2023 Bay City News, Inc. All rights reserved. Republication, rebroadcast or redistribution without the express written consent of Bay City News, Inc. is prohibited. Bay City News is a 24/7 news service covering the greater Bay Area.
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