enterprise THE DAVIS
SUNDAY, APRIL 11, 2021
In-person learning nears with excitement, heavy lift from teachers BY EDWARD BOOTH Enterprise staff writer The Davis school district will launch a five-day in-person learning model on Monday that will remain in place for the remainder of the school year. Excitement for the return is in the air for students, teachers and parents, though school will not
yet be what it was before the pandemic. About 30% of district students will still be learning from a distance, and those who return will need to adapt to COVID-19 safety precautions, such as masking, social distancing and hand washing. Air filters will run constantly in classrooms to purify and cycle the air, COVID-19 testing will occur
each week and students will need to stay home if they have any symptoms of the illness. Students may also be forced back into distance learning for 10 days if any cases show up in their classroom. But students will be able to see their classmates again, become familiar with their school campuses — some for the first time — and gain a feel for sitting at a
desk and listening to a teacher while surrounded by classmates. The district plans to reopen entirely in the fall, and is working to build a distance learning academy for any students who would prefer it. The excitement is palpable. Davis City Council member Will Arnold said at a city and school district 2x2 meeting Wednesday
that his kids are incredibly excited to go back to school, and he’s excited for them to return. He even played an April Fool’s Day prank, he said, by telling them schools had opened up on April 1. “I told them, ‘get in the car, school’s open today, they just texted us all!’ ” Arnold said. “I’d
SEE LEARNING, PAGE A5
Sacramento City Council OKs Aggie Square deal BY CALEB HAMPTON
Masked Davis Waldorf Students take a lesson outdoors as the private school adapted to COVID health restrictions.
Enterprise staff writer
DANIEL NG/COURTESY PHOTO
Lived experience Waldorf school has lessons for pandemic learning BY JEFF HUDSON Enterprise correspondent When the coronavirus pandemic struck in March 2020, educational institutions of all kinds had to scramble to adapt to a new set of health-related safety measures and precautions. There were urgent meetings at public and private schools in Davis, as staff members read over the instructions from the county public health officer and figured out ways to make them
work in their school’s setting. The Davis Waldorf School was in a better position than most to quickly adapt to this new (and unprecedented) challenge, which was unlike anything that schools had previously faced in modern times, like the brief school closures due to outbreaks of the swine flu, whooping cough, or the measles. Davis Waldorf — a K-8 school with a total enrollment of nearly 200 students — has an average class size that is smaller
than the typical average class size at a public school. And the leafy, shade-dappled Waldorf campus has several outdoor spaces that were already used periodically during the school year as open-air classrooms. In addition, Waldorf parents tend to be active and involved as volunteers. And a small, K-8 school with a tad under 200 students can respond to a public health emergency in a more nimble manner than a public-school district with 8,500 students,
multiple campuses, high school students, etc. As a result, Davis Waldorf students were back on the school campus after a comparatively brief interval of weeks doing on-line “distance learning.” And consequently, teachers at Davis Waldorf have logged multiple months of experience with a daily school routine that involves wearing face masks, social distancing, and the other measures that schools are typically now obligated to adopt for safety’s sake.
The Sacramento City Council voted 7-2 Tuesday evening to approve a Community Benefits Partnership Agreement tied to the Aggie Square project, a $1.1 billion campus and innovation hub slated to break ground in Sacramento in late 2021. The 1.2 million square-foot UC Davis extension will host research and academic activities, continuing education and job training, and business startups, especially those working in the fields of life science, technology and healthy communities, and bring substantial economic investment to Sacramento. The community benefits agreement, which was announced two weeks ago by UC Davis and the City of Sacramento, includes money for local housing and infrastructure and a guarantee that local residents are prioritized for jobs that come out of the project. “Aggie Square is the single biggest high-wage jobs and housing opportunity we have had in this city in decades,” Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg said last month. City officials estimate the project could bring
SEE WALDORF, PAGE A6
SEE SACRAMENTO, PAGE A4
Davis sees slight uptick Database tracks demographics of prosecutions B L K in coronavirus cases Y AUREN
EENE
Enterprise staff writer
BY ANNE TERNUS-BELLAMY Enterprise staff writer Levels of coronavirus detected in the city’s sewage system have held steady over the last week though positive tests for COVID-19 have ticked up in Davis recently. The city has seen a larger percentage growth in new cases over the last four weeks than Woodland, West Sacramento and Winters, though not by much — between March 12 and April 9, cases grew by about 4 percent in Davis, compared to 3 percent in Woodland and West Sacramento and 1.5 percent in Winters. Unincorporated areas of the county also saw
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a 4-percent increase in cases over the last four weeks. All told, 83 new cases were reported in Davis residents over the last month. And while that is significantly less than the enormous surge of cases during the winter, there is an upward curve of cases in the city, compared to the county as a whole where cases remain relatively flat. Meanwhile, the wastewater monitoring that Healthy Davis Together conducted over the last week in Davis showed levels of coronavirus found in samples of sewage taken at multiple locations in the
SEE UPTICK, PAGE A4
INDEX
Yolo County District Attorney Jeff Reisig believes it’s time for the community to have a purposeful conversation about criminal justice reform. What’s been missing, he says, is the prosecutorial data that facilitates those talks. “It just lacks meaningful transparency,” Reisig said of the void. “It erodes the trust between the community and the government, and it’s because the accountability is missing. It’s been a key failure in the system.” The recent unveiling of an online database, accessible to the public, could change that. Last week, Reisig’s office teamed with Yolo County’s Multi-Cultural Community Council and Measures for Justice, a New York-based nonprofit and nonpartisan research organization, to launch Commons
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— a first-of-its-kind data transparency dashboard that tracks the county’s criminal caseload, from arrest to resolution. Check it out here: www.measures forjustice.org/commons/yoloda. “It has what people want,” Amy Bach, Measures for Justice CEO, said at an online launch event Tuesday. Chief among them: the ability for the public to stream accurate data and examine whether people of varying backgrounds received consistent treatment in court. And because it’s collected, validated and posted by a neutral third party, the portal offers the assurance that the numbers aren’t “cooked,” Bach says. “We have to be able to sit down in our humanity and have a conversation that’s based on fact,” Tessa Smith, chairwoman of the MCCC, said during Tuesday’s launch event. Commons, she added, provides a pathway “to have a dialogue that can
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stay on the rails.” Through Commons, users can explore the types of cases referred to the DA’s Office, how many resulted in misdemeanor or felony charges being filed, and the demographics of those arrested, such as their race, age and gender. From there, the portal also shows whether cases got dismissed, resolved with plea bargains or resulted in trial convictions or acquittals, as well as how long it took them to work their way through the system. “The data is an entryway to a story, and the stories haven’t been heard because the data was not assessed,” added Reginald Dwayne Betts, a Yale-educated attorney and poet who experienced incarceration in his youth. Betts said he sees Commons aiding not just prosecutors but also
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