Learning loss over the summer worsened by pandemic year of online learning savannahnow.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from savannahnow.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
This is a column by Kyle Wingfield, president and CEO of the Georgia Public Policy Foundation, a Libertarian-leaning policy think tank based in Atlanta.
As classes wound down for summer break, I noticed two types of “school’s out!” posts from my friends on social media.
The first type was from people whose children didn’t miss extended periods of time in a classroom. They didn’t settle for remote learning. Their year-end posts looked a lot like those from the end of every school year through 2019 in the age of social media: first day/last day pictures, smiling faces. They are sprinting toward the lazy freedom of summer.
Virtual school is the pits, in this parent’s perspective.
Yet one dad’s mantrap can be another’s paradise.
Local school officials better take heed.
Districts are announcing plans for next school year, and the tone is unmistakable: Leaders are as eager to abandon online learning as high school seniors are to turn the tassels on their graduation caps.
Effingham County Schools Superintendent Yancy Ford said this week, “We do not plan to have a virtual option.” Never mind that 1,305 students 10% of the population are learning from home over an internet connection this year.
Savannah-Chatham Superintendent Ann Levett told the School Board on Wednesday that the virtual option will be available by request only and on a limited basis. Meanwhile, 25,000 of the district’s 37,000 students are currently learning from home five days a week. The parents of the majority of those kids have said their children will return to school buildings in August, but a significant number p
We feel very hopeful, but we also want to make sure that you know all the support is what we re planning for. But if we need to do something different, we ll do that as well, Levett continued.
Levett said returning students will possibly be phased in as school begins. We want to make sure that we are not sending all 36[000] to 37,000 of them in at once, so we will be looking at a phasing process probably just as we ve done in previous years in the district, so that students and staff have an opportunity to get acclimated.
Discussion ensued among the board in answering parents questions about when will they know for sure that school will start in-person on Aug. 4.
This column is by Opinion Editor Adam Van Brimmer.
Savannah’s public school parents begged, pleaded and haggled to get district officials to reopen schoolhouses on a limited basis this academic year.
Based on the current in-person attendance numbers, they might consider lobbying another influential group of stakeholders regarding a full return in the fall.
Each other.
Less than a third of public school students 12,000 out of 37,000 returned once campuses reopened Feb. 22 following the holiday COVID-19 surge. When teachers can count the number of students in their classroom on their fingers, concerns about social distancing and wait lists fade faster than a disinterested student’s test recall.