Credit: (Edwin J. Torres/ Governor’s Office: CC BY-NC 2.0)
File photo: Sept. 25, 2020 at Red Bank Middle School
With everything else going on, New Jersey’s public schools are also about to enter a most-unusual budget season for the next school year, with a range of questions looming, both familiar and not.
A fundamental question facing them like never before, of course, is what will schooling even look like whenever New Jersey comes out of the pandemic.
But as local districts draft their budgets for 2021-2022, more familiar questions are arising over what share the state will bear of both existing costs and extraordinary ones.
With pandemic-related disruptions now in their 10th month without an end date in sight, state lawmakers last weeks endorsed two packages of bills addressing the mental health on students both in K-12 schools and college.
Assembly Majority Leader Louis Greenwald, D-Camden said there’s never been a greater need for this type of legislation, as a bad problem has been made worse by school closures and remote learning.
“While we are still learning about the ways in which the virus can affect our body, its impact on mental health is pushing us into another crisis, the mental health crisis, and it’s hitting our children the hardest,” Greenwald said.
Secrets, lies and ‘COVID shaming:’ How parents are misleading N.J. schools about sick kids
Updated Dec 19, 2020;
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The school year didn’t start well in Chatham.
A group of Chatham High School students allegedly attended a party Labor Day weekend, and at least a dozen of them tested positive for COVID-19. That shut down classes at the high school just two days into the new school year.
It also lead to “shaming” of the infected students and their parents on social media and in emails to school officials calling for the students to be punished for forcing the high school to go all-remote for 14 days, school officials said.
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