Albany High Students Will Return to Campus After A Year of Online Learning

By Maya Caparaz, Mariam Gohar, Julie Hansen, Emma Loenicker, and Brett Wong

Albany High School is amongst the many schools in the East Bay that are slowly beginning to bring students back to campus.

“Although not all students are returning to campus, all of us in the AUSD community have taken a major step forward,” Superintendent Frank Wells and school board president Sara Hinkley said in a March 24 statement.

After more than a year of online school, Alameda County has met requirements for reopening schools set by the California Department of Public Health and the Alameda County Office of Education. Under the current plan, AHS will paritally reopen on April 19, the beginning of the fourth quarter.

At the February 9 board meeting, AHS principal Darren McNally proposed the hybrid model, involving two hour-long academy periods per week.

“[The academy period is] meant to be this time to address these core needs that we’ve talked about: the social-emotional learning and the intervention,” Mr. McNally said at the board meeting.

With a unanimous vote, the school board approved the plan with a start date of March 29. Two weeks later, the student body was informed of the schedule changes via email.

Parents and children demonstrate on Solano Avenue on March 12 at a rally organized by Open Schools CA, advocating for a full-day reopening of AUSD schools. Photo by Maya Caparaz.

However, as a group of community members associated with Open Schools CA coalition advocated for “five full days”, the board quickly reconsidered the approved schedule.

“Our current plans were carefully planned but are now outdated,” Superintendent Wells said at the March 9 board meeting.

At the request of the school board, the district proposed a new plan for AHS which would entail two full days of in-person instruction with three asynchronous instruction days for students returning to the school building. Meanwhile, remote students would learn through simulcast, meaning they would interact with their teacher over Zoom as teachers instructed the in-person group simultaneously.

A majority of AHS students did not support the newest plan for reasons including health concerns, increased asynchronous time, and the perceived inequities of simulcasting. The student body raised their concerns at a forum held by student school board representatives Audrey Mallah and Léo Corzo-Clark on March 15.

“In this new plan, we will only have one 85 minute period of instruction per class per week,” sophomore Anika Venezia wrote in the chat at the student forum. “We will have to teach ourselves asynchronously for three days a week. These changes are by far more detrimental to our education than the original hybrid plan of 120 minutes of Zoom instruction per class per week.”

More than 800 students also expressed their feelings through a survey created by Mallah and Corzo-Clark. When asked “How comfortable would you be coming to campus for each of your classes, moving in between classes with different groups of students?,” 55.5 percent of surveyed students responded with clear reservation and concern.

Around 11 p.m. on March 16, after waiting for hours on the Board of Education webinar, several AHS students made public comments voicing their major concerns.

“I think it's important to listen to the students because we’re in the age [group] where we can make many of our own decisions” junior Jamie Loiseaux said.

Teachers and some parents echoed the students' concerns, while other parents worried that the academy plan was not enough to support those suffering from isolation and lack of in-person instruction.

When the time came to vote, the majority of the board voted to keep the previous hybrid plan and push back the start of the academy periods to April 19, the start of the fourth quarter. The Board made it clear that the school will have to report back with data on the students' wellbeing once the plan is in motion.