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BRATTLEBORO â The staff and board of Community House extend best wishes upon the retirement of Clinical Director Leigh Pumilia. Pumilia stepped down on May 1, after decades of serving the community through her work with the organization.
In her 28-year tenure as clinical director of Community House, Pumilia worked with countless children and families from all over the state of Vermont. She has helped shepherd the program through expansion and change including the start of the Community Schoolhouse day school, the move to the current campus in the former Winston Prouty buildings on Oak and High streets, and several renovation projects.
Times covered the topic last fall.
Figures from state organizations support these survey numbers. The Vermont Department of Education reported last summer that homeschooling enrollment had increased by 75 percent over the previous year. The Texas Homeschool Coalition reported a
400 percent increase in families withdrawing from state public schools through the coalition’s website to homeschool in August 2020 compared to August 2019.
Such figures demonstrate that parental dissatisfaction with extended periods of virtual learning, along with school districts’ inability to maintain contact with thousands of students in a virtual environment, are resulting in school-attendance changes. In New Mexico, school officials reported that 12,000 students enrolled in the last school year were unaccounted for this fall. In neighboring Arizona, some 50,000 students “vanished” from Arizona’s public district and charter schools, according to a review of preliminary enrollment data by
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In fall 2020, parents found new ways to help their children learn amid uncertain school-district plans for school re-openings. The defining feature of the new education landscape emerging from the pandemic is that many families are no longer waiting for school-district solutions, and are giving themselves permission to choose how and where their children learn when assigned schools are closed, including finding or creating new learning opportunities.
Research on the economic impact of school closures underscores just how important it is to continue student learning. A
Barron’s
report estimates that school closures could result in $700 billion in lost revenue.REF Eric Hanushek and Ludger Woessmann estimate that K–12 students should anticipate a lifetime loss of 3 percent of their incomes due to the pandemic-induced school closures.REF
Sovereign Valley Farm, Chile
Are you ready for this week’s absurdity? Here’s our Friday roll-up of the most ridiculous stories from around the world that are threats to your liberty, risks to your prosperity… and on occasion, inspiring poetic justice.
90 year old nursing home resident chooses assisted suicide over another lockdown
A Canadian woman, Nancy Russel, was as healthy as a 90 year old could be.
But she chose to die rather than go through another lockdown at her nursing home, and the isolation which comes with it.
Canada does not require a terminal illness in order to qualify for medically assisted suicide. But still, the first time Nancy applied she was denied. But the second time she asked to die, “more concrete medical health issues” had developed, and she was approved.