Texas is like this but worse. No guidance, but constantly changing mandates from the state (from different factions within the state) upon which our funding hinges.
Yet, some parents are saying they will have a difficult time with remote learning. They interviewed a woman who has 5 children with one computer. She also takes care of her 51 year old sister. There aren’t good options for her household. Hopefully, the schools will be handing out more equipment to the students and that the system will work better than she’s anticipating. Her plea was that she wouldn’t know how to answer the questions her children asked, but the school is required to give remote lessons live for 3-4 hours a day with some office hour time online.
While this is all happening, there are more studies, some showing that some children might have longer term psychiatric problems after their recovery from Covid-19.
Locally, we’re grateful that our district has gone to remote learning–but they’re requiring all staff to be in the building. Our children can be in the building with us, but must be in our classrooms 100% of the time, except when we’re escorting them to the bathroom or into or out of the building.
They claim that this is going to lead to better education.
Uh, no.
Here’s an excerpt from a statement I wrote today and plan to put out via our union local tomorrow:
We’ll see where it goes. I’m a little worried about keeping my own two children in the same small room for hours every day, a room adjacent to the staff bathroom and without access to outside air. If it were vital, that would be one thing; but when the reasons for it are so weak, it’s kind of infuriating.
Another thing to point out is that if they start to make exceptions for high risk individuals, they run into huge issues of equity and fairness that they can avoid by giving teachers discretion.
Some school districts here are even requiring teachers to be on campus for PD. It’s insane.
Yeah–when I asked to speak to beginning teachers about our union, it turned out they were holding the meeting in-person on my school’s campus. It was pretty messed up.
That is mind-boggling. Like, what is even the point?
This is another example of how teachers are treated as professionals when convenient (we know the job can’t be done in 40 hours, you aren’t an hourly worker) and as hourly workers when convenient (if your butt isn’t in the building, you aren’t at work, we won’t pay you, you can’tbe trusted to do an honest day’s work at home).
I don’t understand all these schools are that closing as soon as someone (student or teacher) shows up infected.
Were the school officials who approved opening the school not expecting that this would occur? I mean, I can understand opening the school with the plan that things would be shut down when some critical number of cases is reached. But I don’t understand opening a school and then shutting these down with a single case.
Quite a few are not, but the person reporting or summarizing the story is saying they did because they assume they would. Standard procedure, near as i can tell, is to send home close contacts (which isn’t automatically even kids in the same class. Just kids within 6 ft for 15 min or more, potentially only if unmasked) and sanitize the space.
Photos went viral yesterday of a school with packed hallways, no social distancing, and very few masks in sight. So, how did the school respond? By suspending the kids who took the pictures, and threatening to suspend students who criticize the school.
How do the parents of those kids not raise a huge complaint? If my kids were suspended for that stupid crap, I’d be all over the news (as much as I could).
I imagine they were instrumental in called the media. They aren’t the story, so they won’t be mentioned. But there is no reason to assume that means they aren’t supporting it. Most teens would need parental help to get a story like this out into the world.
