California Schools Will Look Very Different When They Reopen

Staggered school start times. Class sizes cut in half. Social distancing in the hallways and cafeteria.

These are a few of the possible scenarios for California schools that Gov. Gavin Newsom laid out as part of a roadmap for reopening the state amid the coronavirus.

The timeline for reopening schools remains unclear, as it does for reopening California society at large. But Newsom said this week that when the state’s 6 million students do return, things will look dramatically different.

“We need to get our kids back to school,” Newsom said. “And we need to do it in a safe way.”

The outline he presented for what it will take to lift coronavirus restrictions in the nation’s most populous state asked more questions than it answered. He sought to temper the expectations of a restless, isolated public.

For schools, the biggest challenge officials will face is how to continue physical distancing among children and adults to ensure that “kids aren’t going to school, getting infected and then infecting grandma and grandpa,” Newsom said.

That could mean requiring schools to stagger schedules, with some students arriving in the morning and the rest in the afternoon. In the coming weeks and months, officials along with educators and unions will be discussing that idea and other possibilities for keeping campuses safe, he said.