What faint hopes remained for a resumption of the 2020 CIF spring sports season took a predictable yet nonetheless painful hit Tuesday when California's State Superintendent of Public Instruction wrote a letter recommending a continuation of "distance learning" for the remainder of the 2019-20 academic calendar.
In the letter to California's 58 county superintendents dated Tuesday, March 31, Tony Thurmond wrote:
"Due to the current safety concerns and needs for ongoing social distancing, it appears that our students will not be able to return to school campuses before the end of the school year.
"The need for safety through social distancing warrants that we continue to keep our school campuses closed to students during this pandemic."
Athletic events began to cancel en masse during the second week of March as the threat of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) became more apparent. The California Interscholastic Federation had just completed its third weekend of outdoor track and field when the season was suspended.
"This is in no way to suggest that school is over for the year, but rather we should put all efforts into strengthening our delivery of education through distance learning," Thurmond wrote.
The 10 CIF section commissioners are scheduled to meet Friday via conference call with Executive Director Ron Nocetti. The planned agenda topic was to discuss the fate of the spring sports season. However, when reached for comment regarding Thurmond's letter, Nocetti told the Los Angeles Times:
"If schools do not reopen, it doesn't leave an avenue to compete in spring sports."
The calendar was set for regular season meets and invitationals through the first weekend in May with playoffs through May leading to the 102nd CIF-State Championships scheduled for the weekend of May 29-30 at Clovis Buchanan HS.
According to the report about Thurmond's letter in EdSource.org, the Superintendent stressed that his recommendation was not a directive, and that it was ultimately up to local school districts or health departments to decide whether school campuses should remain open or closed.
Thurmond did not exclude the possibility of school campuses reopening earlier, the EdSource.org article said.
"We would all be happy if we got a signal that it was safe to return to campus," Thurmond said. "But everything I have heard indicates that we still have a lot of work to do around social distancing, and we don't have any signal that that will change any time soon. But if it did change at any time, that would be welcome news."