If private schools can open….

Joanne Jacobs:

Parents and students called for schools to reopen at Thousand Oaks Elementary in Berkeley, where Kamala Harris once attended. Photo: Anda Chu/Bay Area News Group

In ultra-liberal Berkeley, parents protested school closures at an elementary school that was supposed to open this week, reports John Woolfolk in the San Jose Mercury News.

Wednesday was supposed to be the day Jessica Brown’s first-grader, Isaiah, would return to the classroom for the first time since the coronavirus shuttered schools across California last March.

It dawned instead with Isaiah outside a closed Berkeley elementary campus with his mother, sister and dozens of other frustrated parents and kids, scribbling out letters to school officials and even Vice President-elect Kamala Harris, who once attended district schools, urging reopening.

“Enough is enough!” said Brown. “We’ve seen solutions work in other places as well as in private schools. If they can do it, why can’t we?”

In a December survey, 40 percent of parents were ready to return to in-person learning, 20 percent were unsure and 40 percent wanted students to stay online, for now.