Going back to school thoughts?

[Kestrel]

Anything less that a full-time school day for the elementary school is going to cause enough job problems to bankrupt half the families we know. We are a low income school - last I checked, something like 67% free/reduced lunch. Asking those families to have a parent stay home - or asking their employer to work with some kind of rotating schedule - or asking low-income families to pay for childcare - is too great a burden.
I don't know what our local school is going to do. I know one of the things discussed was one week classroom, next week virtual. That would suck. A huge number (something like 30%) of our students have no internet access and/or device. (The school's solution was to have parents bring their kids to school, and sit in the parking lot in their cars to use the school's wifi.) There is talk of getting one device per child, and having the kids bring them back and forth to school each day, as young as 2nd grade. That's scary - I've seen the inside of DS's backpack! and what school papers look like when they come out!
Mask use here is less than 50%, and less than that wear them correctly. If we can't get adults to do it right, can we expect kids to do it right?

Unfortunately, there is not a good solution. It's going to be pick a bad choice and see how it goes. Honestly, I think different school districts will try different things, and the guinea pig students are going to get sick at different rates. Then hopefully schools will adopt whatever works best. (I don't think there will ever be an effective vaccine, as best a semi-effective one like the flu vaccine. And many, many families will opt out.)

[bisous]

I wouldn’t want live-streaming in lower grades! What makes sense jn person doesn’t translate online for 7yos.

[melrose7]

DD1 is set to go July 1 for extended school year. We will see how that goes while they continue to figure out fall. She is at a special needs school where 150 kids are residential and only 50 are day students like DD. The residential kids have stayed there the whole time the school has been shutdown. They are keeping the day students away from the residents when they go back on July 1.
She needs to be at school. This year has been horrible so praying the summer school is a smooth transition.

[PZMommy]

Pz

Wouldn’t the streaming be done on a laptop with the record feature? The teacher could carry it to circle time, and keep it focused on the front of the room when up there.

I wish more districts did team teaching. If a district has 10 first grades, the teachers should share responsibility for recording or live streaming.

Our middle school’s 6th grade math teacher recorded all her lessons one year. What a great resource for when a kid is absent.


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Most of my instruction is done in small groups. My kids are grouped and move through centers throughout the day. The group at “my center” gets different instruction based on their needs, and the centers set up throughout the room and geared towards the different levels as well. I do this for language arts and math. I guess the kids at home would just get each of my table groups??

As for who decides who teaches at home vs in schools, over half the teachers in my district fall into a risk category, so I guess those would be the ones to teach at home. The problem is a lot of teachers that do not have risk factors are still not willing to go back either. If the district can’t guarantee the teacher’s safety, most don’t want to go back. We can’t trust our district to have soap and paper towels, so how on earth can we trust them to have enough PPE for us when the budgets are being cut. My district is most likely not going back in the fall, unless the government gives us a bail out as the district can’t afford any of the safety measures and are afraid of lawsuits.

There is not going to be a one size fits all method that works. Smaller districts may be able to follow guidelines better. Larger districts are going to have a harder time.

[carolinacool]

Anything less that a full-time school day for the elementary school is going to cause enough job problems to bankrupt half the families we know. We are a low income school - last I checked, something like 67% free/reduced lunch. Asking those families to have a parent stay home - or asking their employer to work with some kind of rotating schedule - or asking low-income families to pay for childcare - is too great a burden.

It's still a big ask for families of more middle-class means. A few weeks back there were a bunch of headlines about WFH being "the way of the future" for white-color office workers, but that's not really the case. I have a friend who works in marketing for a small health-care advocacy company and she is supposed to go back into the office next month. And my company: we have a few offices in the U.S. and some scattered around the world. In April, the talk was no one was going back anytime soon -- maybe not until deep into the fall. And now I'm hearing that some offices abroad and a couple in the U.S. are reopening in the next couple of weeks. They say that no one has to go back unless they want to, but who knows what the word will be in three months.

There is talk that my country/district will institute some sort of virtual learning academy for parents who don't fell safe sending their kids back. There's definitely support for it on my FB mom groups, but to Kindra's point, it's a very vocal minority. A lot of those women are more affluent and seem to be SAHPs, which is not representative of the district as a whole.

DS will be attending school, even if DH and I are still working from home in late August. Distance learning proved to be a challenge for him and he needs to be evaluated for his IEP as soon as the school doors open. Our state released some school guidelines a couple of weeks ago. The section on masks said they were highly, highly encouraged, especially for middle and high school students, but were not a requirement for students. But again, things can change.

[Kindra178]

Most of my instruction is done in small groups. My kids are grouped and move through centers throughout the day. The group at “my center” gets different instruction based on their needs, and the centers set up throughout the room and geared towards the different levels as well. I do this for language arts and math. I guess the kids at home would just get each of my table groups??

As for who decides who teaches at home vs in schools, over half the teachers in my district fall into a risk category, so I guess those would be the ones to teach at home. The problem is a lot of teachers that do not have risk factors are still not willing to go back either. If the district can’t guarantee the teacher’s safety, most don’t want to go back. We can’t trust our district to have soap and paper towels, so how on earth can we trust them to have enough PPE for us when the budgets are being cut. My district is most likely not going back in the fall, unless the government gives us a bail out as the district can’t afford any of the safety measures and are afraid of lawsuits.

There is not going to be a one size fits all method that works. Smaller districts may be able to follow guidelines better. Larger districts are going to have a harder time.

What do the children do who are full time gymnasts or skaters (or whatever?). My friend’s daughter has been enrolled in part time in person and part time online school for years. In Florida!


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[PZMommy]

What do the children do who are full time gymnasts or skaters (or whatever?). My friend’s daughter has been enrolled in part time in person and part time online school for years. In Florida!


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A lot of those are special online schools which cater to those kinds of students. Not your general public school. I know my district has special programs for kids in the entertainment business, too sick to attend school, etc, but those are special programs for a select number of students. Not something that can be done for 600,000 students. I had a student awhile back who was in a movie, and she had a set teacher who consulted with me and I provided some work, but then the set teacher was the one who taught her the material and all the work was turned in when she returned to class. Same thing with kids too sick for school. They are reassigned to a special home/hospital school. The teacher assigned to them consults with the classroom teacher, but the home/hospital teacher is the one that visits the student for a few hours a week and provides the instruction.

[mommy111]

There are educational options that don’t involve putting kids and their families at risk. I say this with older kids but high schoolers can totally be expected to wear masks. There is no one size fits all solution that will work across all grades so we need to think innovatively here

[essnce629]

Live stream classrooms so worried parents can keep their kids home if necessary (vocal minority in my opinion) and sick kids can really stay home.

The problem with live streaming class rooms, is teachers don’t stand in one spot. They would need to have someone there with a camera to follow the teacher around. Then there is the privacy issue of students in the class, and the lack of equipment to actually film and the bandwidth to live stream all day.

I think there will end up being two sets of teachers. One for in person and one for online instruction.

This can be solved with already existing tech. My best friend's DD is starting high school in the fall at a private catholic high school (our alma mater). The school already announced their fall plans weeks ago. They are going to a hybrid program to reduce class sizes. The "A" group of students will attend in person 3 days a week while the "B" group of students are learning live remotely at home. The following week they'll switch places. The school invested in technology that includes a sensor that all the teachers wear and a camera system in the classroom that uses the sensor to follow and record the teacher as they move. This should keep only the teacher on camera and prevent the need of having 2 sets of teachers.

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[PZMommy]

This can be solved with already existing tech. My best friend's DD is starting high school in the fall at a private catholic high school (our alma mater). The school already announced their fall plans weeks ago. They are going to a hybrid program to reduce class sizes. The "A" group of students will attend in person 3 days a week while the "B" group of students are learning live remotely at home. The following week they'll switch places. The school invested in technology that includes a sensor that all the teachers wear and a camera system in the classroom that uses the sensor to follow and record the teacher as they move. This should keep only the teacher on camera and prevent the need of having 2 sets of teachers.

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Unfortunately this will cost a lot of money that most public school districts can’t afford with all of the budget cuts!

Also the hybrid model does nothing to reduce risks to teachers and staff. They are still being exposed to all of the students. If I’m going to be exposed to all of the students anyways, might as well have them all come on the same day.