CHULA VISTA, Calif. (AP) — There was pumping music, dancing teachers and lots of hugs as one of the first public schools in California opened fully to in-person learning Wednesday, marking a major milestone in the fight to return to normalcy in the nation’s most populated state, though the masked students served as a reminder that the coronavirus pandemic is still far from over.

State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond welcomed students at Enrique S. Camarena Elementary School in Chula Vista, south of San Diego near the Mexican border.

“Bienvenidos! Welcome back to school! That’s it for my speech,” Thurmond said to laughter and applause from students and parents gathered on the school’s playground. “I’m just here to say we’re so proud of you. This is one of the first schools in all of the state of California to be back, and you’re showing everyone in California and in our nation that we learn well, we stay safe and we support our students and families.”

Thurmond tried to calm concerns about the timing of Chula Vista Elementary School District’s return to full-day, in-person instruction amid rising numbers of COVID-19 infections from the more contagious delta variant, including among younger kids, for which a vaccine has not yet been approved.

Thurmond said he was confident that masks, hand-washing and frequent testing of staff and students were enough to allow schools to reopen safely.

With COVID-19 cases soaring nationwide, school districts across the U.S. are navigating a tricky path forward amid mounting pressure to get kids back into classrooms full time this school year despite people’s growing fatigue of mask-wearing, vaccine rules and social distancing requirements.

California was one of the slowest states in the country to reopen its public schools after the pandemic forced millions into online learning for more than a year. When schools did reopen, most districts went to a hybrid model that had students go to class in person only a couple of days a week.

California public schools experienced a sharp decline in enrollment this year in part because many parents put their children in private schools that were offering in-person learning.

Thurmond promised that public schools can come back even better if everyone does their part to keep kids in classrooms.

The California Department of Public Health said all students and staff should wear masks, issuing a stricter order than what the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends. The federal agency has said masks are necessary indoors only for those who have not been vaccinated against COVID-19.

The American Academy of Pediatrics on Monday recommended universal masking in schools, even for those who are vaccinated.

Some parent groups have protested California’s school mask requirement, and at least one has threatened to sue. Some districts say they will not enforce the rule, and the state has not indicated there will be penalties for those who ignore the order.

Thurmond commended the Chula Vista district’s safety measures, including making rapid COVID-19 tests available to every student regularly. He said that is key until a vaccine is made available for children under 12, which could happen this fall.

“Those are precautions that will keep us safe, and that will keep our schools open,” Thurmond told reporters after visiting the school.

The desire to return to learning in person was on full display Wednesday. Of the roughly 1,000 students, some 952 signed up to return, Principal Debra McLaren said.

“It’s exhilarating,” McLaren exclaimed, dancing to Bobby McFerrin’s “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” blasting from speakers as students and their families posed for pictures in front of the school on a sunny morning.

Among them was 6-year-old Ethan, who proudly held a sign that introduced himself to his new school, which he did not have a chance to do in kindergarten because lessons were online.

The sign listed the things he loved, including the Avengers, guava and reading.

Roxana Preciado said being required to wear a mask is a small sacrifice if it allows her daughter to go to school every day.

“If we all follow the rules, we’ll all be OK,” she said.

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SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Gov. Gavin Newsom on Wednesday urged all California schools to reopen, emphasizing that there are no state or health barriers to getting children back into classrooms and ending distance learning.

His frustration was evident: “Money is not an object now. It’s an excuse,” he said. “I want all schools to reopen. I’ve been crystal clear about that.”

Newsom spoke at an elementary school in Santa Rosa that began welcoming students back this week. But his wishes remain an expectation rather than a mandate in California’s decentralized education system, where 1,200 school districts negotiate separately with teachers unions and ultimately govern themselves.

Facing political pressure and a recall effort, Newsom said last week he plans to lift most of California’s coronavirus restrictions June 15 in an effort to reopen the state to business-as-usual. He said he expects schools to join in.

More than a year after the pandemic forced California’s classrooms to close, some of the largest school districts are reopening, including Los Angeles and San Diego. LA Unified’s superintendent has said that communities hardest hit by the pandemic are more reluctant to send their children back to school.

Newsom said that more than 9,000 of California’s 11,000 schools have reopened or have set plans to reopen, but that number is misleading because there is no uniformity in what it means for a school to be open. Some are offering one or two days of in-person instruction, mixed with distance learning on other days.

In San Francisco, where elementary schools began reopening this week, nearly 300 staff members have been given permission to work from home and teach classes via Zoom while students sit in classrooms with laptops and headphones.

Newsom reiterated Wednesday that his push to get the state’s 6.2 million K-12 public school students back in classrooms was a plea, rather than an order.

When asked if he would mandate reopening, Newsom said “mandates are often not looked upon as favorably as you would like to think. That said, we anticipate and expect our kids back safely in in-person instruction this fall, and you’ll be hearing more about that.”

Reopen California Schools, a parents group formed in June, said Newsom should order schools to reopen as other states have, rather than continuing to cajole schools and unions.

“Newsom cannot continue to pretend his words alone will make a difference. He must mandate all K-12 schools offer real, substantial, full-time, in-person learning now,” the group said in a statement.

Assemblyman Marc Levine, a Democrat who appeared alongside Newsom Wednesday, said there is not consensus in the Democratic-controlled Legislature to force schools to reopen. He said he applauds Newsom’s efforts to coax fuller in-school learning.

Newsom’s urging stands in contrast to the approach several other states have taken to order schools to reopen — including the Democratic-led states of Oregon and Washington — in part because of the outsized political power of California’s teachers unions.

The governor made his frustration clear at having given schools and teachers what they said they needed to reopen. He prioritized educators for vaccinations, and at this point shots have been offered to every educator who wanted one, officials say.

Earlier in the pandemic, money was a huge problem as schools faced enormous expenses to overhaul ventilation systems, reconfigure classrooms and purchase protective gear for teachers and staff.

Newsom signed a $6.6 billion package earlier this year to fund safety measures for in-person instruction and expand learning opportunities. In addition, California schools are getting $15.3 billion in federal aid from the Biden administration.

Newsom pleaded with districts and teachers to “reimagine the school year” for the sake of children.

“Use this money to extend learning opportunities, extend the school day, extend the school year. Who says you have to end on June 1 or June 15?” he said.

Even as Newsom called on schools to reopen full time, he acknowledged that there is fear, particularly in the Latino community, which was among the hardest hit by the virus in California. He said instruction online and hybrid models will have to remain an option.

In Los Angeles, the second-largest school district in the nation, recent parent surveys have shown that more than half do not plan to send their children back this spring. About 80% of LA Unified’s 600,000 K-12 students are Latino and many live in low-income neighborhoods that suffered during the height of the pandemic.

Newsom said the consequences of waiting are particularly profound in diverse communities. “And if they need more, let me know what more you need,” he said.

California now has some of the lowest COVID-19 infection rates in the country and a much better understanding than a year ago of how effective masking is in containing the spread of the virus and evidence that children are not key transmitters.

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Facing criticism that President Joe Biden has not acted aggressively enough on reopening schools, the White House on Thursday said it’s aiming for a full reopening but will defer to science experts on how to achieve it in the middle of a pandemic.

The White House drew criticism this week when it said schools would be considered opened if they teach in-person at least one day a week. Asked about it Thursday, press secretary Jen Psaki said Biden hopes to get students in the classroom five days a week as soon as it’s safe.

Psaki did not detail a timeline for that milestone, however, saying the administration will act on new school guidance that’s expected to be released Friday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“I can assure any parent listening that his objective, his commitment, is to ensuring schools are open five days a week,” Psaki said at a press briefing. “That’s what he wants to achieve, and we are going to lead with science and the advice they are giving us.”

The task of helping schools reopen will fall to the CDC, Psaki said, and to Biden’s pick for education secretary, Miguel Cardona, whose nomination was approved Thursday by the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee.

The panel voted 17-5 in favor of Cardona, who is expected to be approved by the full Senate. He won support from the committee’s ranking Republican, Sen. Richard Burr of North Carolina, who said Cardona has the “background, qualifications and temperament” to become secretary.

“He’s stressed the need for students to get back in school, and that’s now finally a bipartisan mission,” Burr said.

Biden has made schools a priority as he works to bolster a battered economy, but critics say he has scaled back on his goals amid growing challenges.

His initial pledge in December was to reopen “the majority of our schools” in his first 100 days in office. He later specified that the goal applied only to elementary and middle schools. And this week, the White House said schools would be considered open as long as they teach in-person once a week.

Republicans say Biden is backpedaling on his pledge and caving to teachers unions that have opposed reopening until their demands are met. Biden’s critics say schools are safe to open now, citing CDC findings that, with the right precautions, it’s generally safe to hold classes in-person.

Asked why parents should be satisfied with just one day of in-person teaching per week, Psaki appeared to back away from her previous stance. “They shouldn’t be. I wouldn’t be, as a parent,” she said.

She did not change the administration’s goal but said the president “will not rest until every school is open five days a week.” Psaki added that Biden’s primary role is to deliver funding to schools to help them reopen.

Biden’s $1.9 trillion pandemic relief plan includes $130 billion to help schools upgrade buildings, buy protective equipment and take other steps to reopen. House Democrats advanced that portion of the package this week using a special process enabling them to pass the bill down party lines.

One obstacle to any school opening goal is that there’s little data to measure progress. The Biden administration said it will start collecting data from 7,000 schools showing whether they are operating online, in-person or in a combination. The Trump administration declined to gather that information.

“The data, and the lack of data or effective data, is actually part of the problem,” Psaki said.

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I am not the first one to say this, and it is less prophetic than just observably true: Donald Trump is consistently putting his calculus of how he can win reelection over any commitment to protect the nation’s public health. The president clearly has no coherent strategy for addressing the COVID-19 pandemic, despite the recent surge across the country, and it’s clear that the health and lives of the people of the United States matter much less to him than his own political fortunes.

This shameful and alarming truth clarifies the stakes of this chaotic time. Trump’s latest political ploy is demanding the opening of all schools in the fall, threatening to withhold supplementary funding from those that refuse. Just as he turned mask-wearing into a political litmus test, he’s using our children’s futures as a political tactic to try to put the pandemic behind us, get the economy going again, and help him win reelection.

In the meantime, families are anxious to hear whether, when and how schools will reopen; how to keep our kids, their teachers and ourselves safe; and how in the world they can keep caring for and homeschooling their children while working full time. They can’t. And it’s because of a failure of leadership.

Trump and Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos have decided to weigh in as strongly as they can in favor of reopening schools across the country for full-time, in-person learning, despite the fact that cases of COVID-19 have been surging across the South.

The American Academy of Pediatrics, just weeks after issuing a statement much touted by President Trump in support of as much in-person learning as possible this fall, has reversed course, acknowledging that the decisions on whether to reopen schools must be guided by the health and scientific data on the spread of the virus in any given community.

Decisions on how to provide education and child care in the context of a global pandemic that has already killed more than 150,000 people in the United States are terribly complex and emotionally fraught. It has been apparent for some time that there are no easy answers or quick fixes, and the widespread failure in the United States to lower the spread of the virus to levels that many European and Asian countries have now achieved only makes these personal decisions more wrenching.

A provocative July 2 New York Times article, “In the COVID-19 Economy, You Can Have a Kid or a Job. You Can’t Have Both,” laid out the dilemmas faced by parents under distance learning or hybrid plans extremely well. These are the conversations I am hearing in my own community and around the country, including with our own staff at Sojourners — many of whom have young children and are feeling the “crush” and “untenable” pressures of work and family life under COVID-19.

Of course, the many tangible and intangible costs of keeping schools fully or partially closed is only part of the equation. Because of the way our society is stratified by class and permeated by racist structures in almost every way, the fact that working people of color are among the most likely to need to be able to send their children to school in order to put food on the table collides viciously with the reality that working people of color are among the most likely to have health, living or family conditions that put them and their loved ones at greater risk of severe illness or death if they contract COVID-19.

Forcing working people generally, and disproportionately people of color, to choose between their lives and their livelihoods has been a feature of this pandemic since its earliest days and is perhaps the pandemic’s most morally monstrous aspect — all the more so because other countries have shown that it is possible to simply pay most workers to stay home and businesses to stay closed until the virus is much more under control, as has happened in much of Europe. This strategy would also have been both more equitable and more effective in stopping the spread of the virus in the United States — but it wasn’t done effectively here.

As it has done with so many other facets of our society, COVID-19 is revealing all the inequities in our education systems in new and stark ways that expose the injustices that were already there.

To give just one foundational example, the fact that public schools in the United States are so dependent on property taxes for their funding makes the whole enterprise fundamentally unequal right from the get-go, as schools in wealthier areas invariably have bigger budgets to educate their children than those in poorer areas.

Absent significant federal aid to every school district in the country, that inequity will be felt as some districts, with more or fewer resources, move toward reopening with school districts’ ability or lack thereof to modify their classrooms and other facilities to make them safer for students to attend school without accelerating the spread of the virus.

Again, it is simply unconscionable that the classrooms where students, teachers and families are at the highest risk of contracting COVID-19 will be disproportionately the same classrooms where demand is highest for in-person learning and where there will be the least funding for effective safeguards against the spread of the virus.

But Trump and DeVos don’t appear to care about any of this. Again, recent reporting and even the most casual familiarity with the way the president appears to come to his decisions strongly suggests he believes pushing for schools to reopen could help his reelection chances by appealing to parents seeking some level of return to normal and reviving the battered economy by getting parents back into the workforce.

The fact is that the nation’s chronically underpaid public school teachers and the families of the nation’s lowest-income children are the ones whose lives are most at risk if schools reopen too soon or without adequate safeguards for either public health or necessary education.

The wealthy win again — as always in America — as they have the ability to afford child care and are much more able to provide their children with the highest-quality remote education as long as necessary. And that is the reversal of biblical values and priorities, in which the most vulnerable are to be among the first, not the last.

It is time for Congress to step up with the resources necessary for every school district to open in the safest ways possible. And it’s time for the churches to step up and provide the space and the volunteers to care for and help educate children whose parents will need to go back to work. And it’s time for Donald Trump to step down or away from the mess he has created and allow federal leadership to finally occur in the midst of what has become both a health and moral crisis.

The Rev. Jim Wallis is president of Sojourners. His new book “Christ in Crisis: Why We Need to Reclaim Jesus” is available now. Follow Jim on Twitter @JimWallis.

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