CA superintendent of public instruction says future of high school sports is unclear

LOS ANGELES - Friday, the NBA announced plans to resume their COVID-interrupted season on July 30 with a Jazz-Pelicans, Lakers-Clippers doubleheader in Orlando, Florida.

That tip-off will take place a week after the MLB is set to launch their truncated 60-game season.

But as professional sport leagues adapt to the new reality of a post-COVID world, will California’s high school athletes also be able to suit up and return to their fields and courts?

According to California’s Superintendent of Public Instruction, Tony Thurmond, that remains to be seen.

“I always say, our top pillars have to be focused on safety first, we can’t open schools unless it’s safe to do so,” Thurmond told FOX 11’s Elex Michaelson during an exclusive interview on The Issue Is. “Contact sports can put kids at risk, and so safety has to be first… what I always tell parents is to stay tuned as we get more information from the California Department of Public Health and from our county health officers about safety related to sports.”

Thurmond added that the situation is being monitored, and given the fact that most schools don’t open until late July or early August, there will be many more updates in the near future.

As it stands now though, according to Stronger Together: A Guidebook for the Safe Reopening of California's Public Schools, released earlier this month by Thurmond’s office, “athletics should be limited to activities that do not involve physical contact with other students or equipment until advised otherwise by state/local public health officials.”

Maintaining that physical distance will also be a tenant of classroom learning, as Stronger Together advises that students remain 6-feet apart, something accomplished through restructured classrooms and/or reduced class sizes. Other guidelines include limited capacity on buses and the usage of face masks, both by students and faculty, whose masks should be clear to allow students to see their expressions.

In many respects, Thurmond said the school guidances are the same precautions that the state is taking when it comes to reopening our communities and businesses.

However, as California crosses 200,000 cases, and test-positive rates have spiked to 9% in Los Angeles County and 23% in Imperial Valley, among others, Thurmond admits there are still a number of challenges that need to be addressed to properly reopen the state’s 10,000 public schools.

For one, even though Thurmond applauded the resilience of teachers and students in moving to distance learning essentially overnight, he expressed concern that the pandemic exposed major divides among the state’s students, with as many as a million unable to gain access to high-speed Internet necessary for effective at-home learning.

“Even before COVID 19 hit us, we were experiencing certain opportunity gaps, some call it the achievement gap, that we know impacted certain groups,” Thurmond said. “Those losses have been exacerbated either by time away from school or from those who didn’t have access to computing devices at home, and those who haven’t had regular contact with their teachers.”

In a wide-ranging interview on The Issue Is, Thurmond also addressed the issues of racial justice and bias within the public school system, especially in the aftermath of a month of protests over the killing of George Floyd.

“We need to think differently about what our students are exposed to,” Thurmond said, noting that the department is responding to student calls for heightened representation with a new ethnic studies curriculum. 

That curriculum coincides with an implicit bias training that the department has been rolling out for all educators across the state.

Thurmond also responded to calls to defund police within the school system, saying students should not be criminalized for student behavior, and that his department is working on recommendations for intervention, de-escalation, and counseling programs that can fill the role currently held by officers.

The Issue Is is California's only statewide political show. Watch FOX 11 Los Angeles Fridays at 10:30PM and Sundays at 9:30AM. For more showtimes and information, go to TheIssueIsShow.com.