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School Is in Session
School started in our bigger district yesterday — it starts in the smaller district next week. Parents and kids are thrilled. Our county deputies and police officers welcomed kids to the local schools.
If you recall my earlier conversation, several political entities tried to stop schools from opening but the governor and attorney general came down on the side of local school boards making their own decisions. I hope things only get better from here. As of yesterday, we have no documented active cases of COVID in our county.
Published in General
Looks great. You know there will be cases of ‘vid. I hope that your local school districts don’t immediately shut everything down when that happens.
How exciting! I hope the enthusiasm is contagious across the country. And that the virus is not!
I love the picture. It says so much. The Big Guys are there and the Little Gal walks calmly.
It was a bit depressing to see a picture of my nephew headed to kindergarten in a medical mask. But his eyes were smiling.
My older niece tried to begin school online. She was able to connect with the first class Zoom meeting via her tablet. But she somehow couldn’t log in for the second class and never overcame those technical difficulties. I assume a thousand other parents and teachers encountered similar problems. I’m told a local radio host remarked that she was exhausted before even beginning her work day because of schooling difficulties.
I helped a computer-illiterate college instructor prepare for online classes. It’s an administrative mess, with all the usual technological struggles of computers to boot.
So much would benefit if we could all agree on the basic facts regarding COVID-19, the risks, and the remedies. But we are making decisions based on wildly different understandings of the problems and conditions to overcome.
Drove by the local elementary school yesterday. Sign out front announces a “drive-by meet and greet”.
#depressing
There is an opportunity here in this election season to reverse the hollowing out of the educational process. Locals must take back control of this process and restore the family.
It is amazing how quickly some people incorporated WuFlu hysteria into their personal identity. Climate change, systemic racism, transgender ‘rights’, and now mask-wearing and the eternal shutdown. I think they include the same people who thought that we should tie yellow ribbons around trees to get back our embassy people held hostage in Iran (instead of bombing the bastards) and who still have Hillary! bumper stickers on a Prius.
Like with climate change, a sensibility is somehow conflated with “science”. The polar bear is nearly extinct, sea level is rising 5 feet a year and COVID will kill millions if we open the schools and stop reporting mask scofflaws.
In-person schooling should put your district kids at an advantage over other districts. Fight for it.
Here is something I’ve been trying to figure out, if anyone has the numbers that will confirm or deny, I’d like to hear.
Media touts whatever number makes President Trump look bad, I think, like the last one I heard was a new national daily record for the number of deaths due to Covid-19. It seems like the Covid-19 cases are now dispersed across the United States more so than at any earlier point in time. For example, early in the pandemic the numbers were very high in New York and other northeastern states. Is it surprising to have a new national record number with the cases more distributed nationwide when the earlier record was due to a high number of cases in a small geographical area? Does my question make any sense?
It’s awful going back the second week of August though. Especially in Texas, I’m sure.
I saw some detailed numbers yesterday but can’t remember the source. State by state and county by county numbers still vary by huge amounts. NY state still is almost an outlier in the huge death rate there. Case count is almost irrelevant as so many are asymptomatic and still only a relatively small cohort have been tested.
I’m on the board in the small district. We are already committed to open next week. Lots of uncertainty as no one is sure how many parents will opt for remote learning. Survey results were about 30 percent but we won’t know until the first day.
Good for you no active cases.
I’d love to know how common it is for counties to have zero cases.
That is some serious isolation.
It’s all pretty strange. We have had two deaths and all other cases are considered recovered (143). But no hospitalizations. We have to use the numbers the state health department gives us. Current county population is 47,000.
Our district goes back Monday. The district has spent the past three days giving every student a tablet or chromebook, just in case remote learning has to come back, but the plan now is for K-12 in-class learning. Students and parents do have the option to do remote learning, but the district said it’s not going to be the bogus efforts during the spring, and students staying home will have to use their portable devices to watch the classes in real-time, and will have to take the same tests that students in the classrooms take (you can do extracurricular sports/band/academics and remote learn under Texas rules, but as one of the teachers said, that doesn’t mean you can sleep in until 2 p.m. and then go to practice at 3:30).
I’ll be interested to see what the numbers turn out to be next week on in-person students vs. those families who opt for remote learning.
What a sweet photo. I’m glad things started well for you.
I’m getting ready to go back. There’s a post in all of this- we’ll be in-person, but the demands are ridiculous on both faculty and students alike. I’m curious about what other teachers and parents will make of it. Good luck:)
Day 2 of back to school in my wife’s North Texas district. The district internet crashed. They are doing first 3 weeks remote and then face to face.
Not sure why it happened but I would think they should have anticipated that.
Our school is on track to start next week. Elementary five days a week, secondary four days with Fridays online. As a bus driver I’m looking forward to getting back to work. I hope there is no panic when the inevitable cases show up.
My grandkids in north Texas are going to do the online Edgenuity program offered by their district. My daughter is a worry-wart and left-thinking, so decided that she wasn’t going to let her kids be guinea pigs in the in-person attempts at school because she couldn’t believe anything that came from the White House or Fox News. She has a friend who taught with the program in California and said it was pretty easy so I encouraged her to come up with supplemental fun enhancements to do with the kids instead of parking them in front of the TV (which Grandma saw way too much of when I visited…). Grandma will also be on the lookout for anything I can send them to help with critical thinking, problem solving, and the like (all suggestions welcome!).
In Colorado, this is the huge advantage of state-chartered public schools. They have an in-house school board, typically populated by parents with literal skin in the game. They do not report to an impersonal district board one-level up, but are supervised by the DoE, charter school division, at the state level. This leaves state-chartered schools a lot of freedom, at least until their periodic performance review comes around. It’s as close as we can get to subsidiarity in the public school system.
One thing I don’t want to see “return to normal” is public education. Liberty lovers will miss a crucial opportunity if things don’t change pretty radically. And we have to destroy the lefty indoctrination project or the republic is over. Last chance.
Why do local public schools have federal oversight? I think that is probably about funding. So federal oversight is bought in a process that resembles bribery. This is exactly how Democrat politicians (and many Republicans as well) get and hold office by delivering federal funding for state and local functions. The state politician is effectively bribed to deliver those goods.
If my view of this is wrong or seriously skewed, please someone here give me the data supporting the correct view so I can get this out of my head.
Definitely agree, WC! I wish dear daughter would just decide to go all-in and homeschool but she admits she’s too lazy to do so. We homeschooled her (much younger) brother because we lived in a state that was more amenable to homeschooling when he was of school age. She used to say she wished she’d been homeschooled, but now can’t do that for her kids.
I don’t have actual numbers to cite, but, if I’m correct, the portion of federal funds going to school districts is actually pretty small. A huge portion of Colorado’s state budget goes to education (via property taxes) and lawmakers are always asking for more. State lawmakers are only too happy to comply with federal mandates on education to receive even minimal federal funds because that’s their basic MO. It’s just what they do. Make rules. Follow rules. Fund rules. (unless you’re the feds and you just print the money)
Ben Shapiro has a video in which he counters the “systemic racism” narrative, but he gets part of the education funding piece wrong.
In Colorado, and I suspect in a lot of states, property taxes are pooled and “redistributed” based on a per pupil basis. If you live in a lousy neighborhood and revenues from property taxes are therefore low in your area, it should have no effect on the funding your neighborhood school receives. Several years ago (when I was more involved and aware), the per pupil funding schools received was about $6k/student, with special needs students receiving $10k and upwards to $15k. Charters tend to receive the minimum since they don’t typically have the services for special needs students; and they pay their non-unionized teachers less than regular ed teachers, but more than private school teachers make. They tend to run lean, but they also have more flexibility in applying for and receiving grants than regular ed schools, since regular public schools always fall under the “pooling” mandate, even for grants.
My concern with education is content and local control. People with interests closest to the students (i.e., parents) should be in charge. The state-chartering system works pretty well because the state only gets involved if the school is failing (the Caesar Chavez charter school which was denied its charter renewal in our area; my kids’ school and other classical ed charters are still going strong). Vouchers might help, but I’d even prefer in-house school boards over vouchers if I was making policy.
There’s some great subscription boxes like kiwibox and mel’s chemistry that send the recipient a project and the tools and materials to do it.
I keep trying to sell grandparents on them because they’d be great fun and learning tools for parents and kids.
I posted this a while back: I just checked our budget for 20-21 and federal and state $$ combined are 25.8 percent of our total budget. The federal portion is actually 1.3 percent. The local remainder is all from property taxes.
Thanks. Is all the centralized curriculum then really controlled by the NEA and collateral organizations including the Department of Education when run by Democrats?
No. Even the much despised Common Core was a somewhat loose set of guidelines. Districts with weak staff bought prepackaged curricula from vendors and that’s where the awful stuff comes from. In our case (Texas) the state education agency writes the standards that define what students must learn by grade level (and by class for high school). The state testing is based on what is in the state standards. The feds have some input in that they approve state testing schemes as meeting their requirement to report student progress. It seems like we (Texas) had to argue with them a few years back about whether some of our testing was adequate, but I don’t remember the details.
Now, I take issue with a lot of things but at least it’s created and monitored on the state level.
The US daily deaths are currently less than half of the peak in April. The case numbers did peak about 4 times higher, which is a large function of testing increasing by more than a factor of 10 of what it was in April.
Congratulations. In KY our governor successfully bullied many local school districts into reversing their decisions to offer in-person instruction before September 28.